Economic Impact Toolkit for Archives and Museums

Background – Study Aim Two staged approach: Emphasis To research economic impact approaches with the aim of identifying the most useable approaches for archives, libraries and museums. To develop impact toolkits based on the approaches identified, to help archives, libraries and museums to assess their own impact and to enable the aggregation of these impacts at a UK level. Emphasis To maximise user-friendliness whilst minimising compromises in terms or robustness

Background Findings Archives and museums lend themselves to a similar approach given their tendency to drawn in significant visitor numbers from beyond the local area

Impact Approach The impact of museums and archives using this toolkit is based on capturing expenditure related impacts from: The procurement of goods and services by the organisation (and the location of these purchases); Employee related expenditure (and the location of these employees); and Visitor related expenditure (where the visitor is not local and the museum/archive was a driver in their visit to the area);

Example Toolkit The toolkit is colour coded – yellow cells are for participants to enter data, green cells automatically generate the impact calculations. The toolkit includes calculations within it to capture: the “Multiplier Effect” - the subsequent economic activity generated from initial expenditure within a target (in this case local) area; “Displacement” where organisations take market share (ie visitors or public sector investment) from other organisations within the local area; and “Leakage” expenditure incurred outside of the target area and therefore leaking out of the local economy.

1. Organisational and Procurement Details Location details enable the toolkit to pick up local and regional benchmark impact indicators. Procurement split locally (local authority) and non-locally to account for leakage of spend

2. Employee Expenditure Expenditure by location, salary banding and Full Time Equivalent employee numbers.

3. Visitor Related Expenditure Visitor related information reported from our survey of the sector was cited as the biggest challenge to capture The toolkit provides “benchmark” information for those museums/archives without the specific detail to enable them to generate an estimate “Tiered” elements are offered for those organisations with some visitor related information. The higher the tier, the more organisation-specific information and less standard benchmark information used.

3. Visitor Related Expenditure

4. Overall Impact Data Summarises organisational impact expressed as expenditure, employment and gross value added (GVA), all indicators account for multiplier effects and leakage.

Questions? Further Information: Contact: http://almauk.org/working-together/our_activity/economic-impacts/ Contact: Oliver Allies (ERS) - oallies@ers.org.uk