Community Database: “Many a little make a mickle”

As the 6^th largest city in the United States today, the Phoenix metropolitan area has more than 130 arts and cultural organizations for Phoenix residents and visitors. The range and diversity of organizations and activities is reflective of a rich arts and cultural environment; it includes a symphony orchestra, opera and ballet companies, producing and presenting theater and dance organizations, performing arts centers, art and history museums, botanical garden, and festivals. However, not all of them are big organizations supported by large amounts of funding annually; rather most of them have relatively small annual budget to run their organizations.

As you can see, our 28 art and cultural organizations out of 49 member organizations also run their organizations on less than $500k annually–which is close to 57% of Community Database participants. On the other hand, only 19% of participating organizations have more than 6 million dollars per year.

Note: number of organizations is in the parentheses.

So, what do you think? Do you think relatively small budget organization barely contribute to the Community Database as compared to the big organizations? Below graph shows an interesting result, indicating how important small budget organizations are.

Of course, nine relatively largest budget size organizations cover 64% of households in the Community Database. However, in this graph, the point we have to focus on is not the largest budget size organizations but smallest budget size organizations. Even though their annual budget size is less than $500k, they can cover almost 29% of the households in the Community Database. Their annual budget is only 1/12 of the largest budget size. Yet even though, audiences explained by each organization may be slight, with accumulation from the numbers of organizations, almost 200,000 households are covered by small budget size organizations.

It is easy to overlook the influence of small organizations. However, like an old saying, ‘many a little make a mickle’, if small budget organizations stand together to understand their audiences, they will make a huge contribution to analyzing the whole database. Therefore, small budget size organizations are really important compositions of the Community Database.