Survey: St. Cloud Is Area Arts Hub
By Adam Hammer aehammer@stcloudtimes.com

The St. Cloud arts community is a step closer to understanding how area residents participate in, and feel about, the arts.

The St. Cloud Arts Commission released its cultural census survey results Wednesday at a public meeting at Pioneer Place on Fifth. The data was collected from 975 respondents in an online survey.

Survey highlights pointed to a demand for more active engagement and social context in the arts, a diversity of cultural tastes and a transition to providing and collecting arts information electronically. “We’re moving programming control out of the hands of programmers and into the hands of the audience,” said Marc Goldring, a consultant with Wolf Brown, who presented the results.

It also appears that St. Cloud is not in direct competition with Twin Cities art events. “Whether they were high-frequency attenders or low-frequency attenders, they get their entertainment locally,” said Jennifer Penzkover, St. Cloud Arts Commission coordinator. The results were analyzed for higher-frequency attendees, moderate-frequency attendees and lower-frequency attendees. While higher-frequency attendees go to events in the Twin Cities more often than the other two groups, two-thirds of them do not use Twin Cities arts opportunities often.

“The message here is that while the most avid arts fans go to the Twin Cities, by and large, people attend regional arts events,” Goldring said. St. Cloud is a regional arts hub, Goldring said. Of the survey respondents, 56 percent were St. Cloud residents while 44 percent were residents of the surrounding area.

Although the results are not representative of the general population, since it was a participatory online survey, comparisons can be made within the data set, Goldring said.  Higher-frequency attendees tended to be older, have higher-education degrees and were less likely to have children at home.  Lower-frequency attendees tended to be more likely to use informal and nontraditional events. But 83 percent of higher-frequency attendees are most likely to attend theaters and concert halls.

The cultural census survey is a component of the larger Community Cultural Plan the arts commission is conducting with the help of the McKnight Foundation. This summer, Goldring and the St. Cloud Arts Commission will be doing comparative analysis with communities similar to St. Cloud. Based on the results, it hopes to have a plan drafted by September and unveiled in October.  “We look at it as a road map,” Penzkover said of the cultural plan. The survey results will soon be posted at www.ci.stcloud.mn.us/Arts/index.html soon, Penzkover said.