Benchmarking your organization against your peers can be illuminating. While other research delves deeply into what patrons of one institution believe and do, peer benchmarking provides a comparison to other similar organizations. This added context can help an organization understand where it stands, how to interpret findings from their audience research, and provide ideas for how to improve.

While research among an organization’s patrons can be extremely helpful in guiding next steps, sometimes organizations wonder “how does this compare to my peers?” “how do I know if this is a good result or a great result?” While we know the answers generally based on our research among cultural and educational organizations overall, peer benchmarking can provide specifics difficult to get elsewhere.

You can undertake benchmarking at any time. Often organizations do it prior to setting goals (to see where they stand compare to their peers) and then again after significant improvements and activities in order to track any change.

Typically we look at two types of benchmarking. In the first case where peers are working together, peers provide similar information to us (held confidentially) and we analyze and show where each organization stands on a variety of measures (member renewal rate, average ticket price, etc.). In the second case, where the study is commissioned just by one of the organizations, we conduct research among an audience that would be representative to all of the peers, e.g. graduates of top business schools or cultural consumers.