Culture Midland

INDICATORS AND PERFORMANCE MEASURES

Comments/ feedback from Julie-Line Puckering October 28 2015

Indicator / Feedback from September 28 2015 / Response from October 28 2015
Expenditure on arts and culture by Municipality (1-7) / Need to review Midland budget and pull out ALL funds for ALL cultural activities. / Simply put, the Midland budget for 2015 does not break down the individual costs for all cultural activities. The larger cultural activities (i.e. Canada Day celebration, Winterfest etc.) have been made clear. However, a further break down of the budget was needed to view all funds.
It is suggested that future budgets include this break down for transparency and understanding.
Expenditure on arts and culture grants (3) / Define whether this is a one-time funding for one-time events, not ongoing support of cultural organizations and events. / By adhering to the previous definition, the Town of Midland does not provide any grants.
The Town provides ongoing support yearly for the cultural events and festivals.
Cultural Resource Database / As of September 2015, the Town of Midland has fulfilled the indicator of a cultural database.
Number of workers in cultural industries (12) of cultural occupations (14) / The data sources provided in the September 28 document are updated every 5 years, and may not be adequate for the Midland Culture Report Card. It is also made unclear why this is an important statistic to include.
Number of cultural Facilities and spaces
(15, 17, 18, 19-23) / Subjective. Would need clarification. For example, is Edgehill park included? Need to define, refine cultural resources. Also need to mention street closure festivals as many take place downtown. / After researching with the Planning Department, a document titled “Baseline Cultural Mapping Findings” has been discovered. This document outlines all cultural facilities, including parks, heritage properties, municipally owned properties and so on. Would recommend this as a reference document until reviewed.
Number of cultural events held including celebrations and festivals, when they are held (24) and where they are held. (26) / Huge job to collect all events. Suggest just using permits as source for tracking. / Department of Culture and Tourism collects a list yearly of the events, celebrations and festivities that happen in the Town of Midland. Private sector and non-for-profit sector events are more difficult to track. Recommend that the Culture Steering Committee provide a contact for each event in the future.
Funds leveraged by municipal investment in arts and culture. (28) / Concerned that some of organizations are not required to provide financial statements so hard to track, for example Askennonia, Pipes and Drums etc. / After requesting that the Culture budget be broken down further, it became easy to be able to track funds leveraged for many organizations. This is another example of how a break down in the culture budget increased the understanding of the Town’s commitment.
Integration into municipal planning and decision making (29, 68) / Arts and Culture have been recognized in the Downtown Master Plan. Natural culture (i.e. parks) will also be reviewed in the Official Plan Review.
However there are no by-laws related to culture. There is an interdepartmental mechanism, recognized as the Midland Culture Steering Committee.
Number of visitors (39) and visitor spending. (40) / This information has proven to be difficult to obtain. After contacting Gary Molnar, the amount of visitor and their spending remains in Simcoe County numbers i.e. we cannot pin point Midland exactly, as Midland is a small community.
Number of visits to cultural facilities and spaces (43, 48, 49) / Concern about tracking/ including NSSRC/ sports. Could be skewed. Need to separate sport team activities vs specialized one-time sport cultural events. Latter might be appropriate. Are records kept of other events being held at NSSRC and if they are cultural in nature? / MCC – no way to track visitors, but sold an estimated 10 000 tickets in 2015.
NSSRC – track drop-in and recreational sports, about 189 partake in a variety of activities weekly for the 2014/15 season.
Library – As of October 2015, 12 512 member are currently signed up with a library card that are living in Midland. 900 families from Tiny Township are signed up. Ontario Library Association says that in 2015, membership has gone up 6%. Source – Bill Molesworth
Museum – In the month of September 2015, there have been: 309 adult, 189 senior and 60 youth visits to the Huronia Museum. Source – Comparative Monthly Attendance 2012-2015
Attendance at cultural events, festivals and celebrations. (45) / Many of the number received will be estimated. For major events that occur downtown, there is no way to receive an accurate number.
It is recommended that an impartial person do an estimated calculation to assume the number of people in attendance to large events. It is important that this person be impartial, as a member of the committee may estimate a higher/ lower number.
It is also recommended that there is a member that is the main communicator between event organizers, in order to make numbers easier to track.
In the case of the Buttertart Festival, there were an estimated 20,000+ in attendance in 2015.
Accessibility of arts, culture and heritage offerings (50) / A local survey will be used to track this indicator. However, there is no survey currently. A draft will need to be created and reviewed in 2016.
Culture Department (65), Culture Plan (66) Annual Reporting (67) Cultural Roundtable (72) / Yes to all listed. The first Cultural Roundtable will be on November 24, 2015 at the Midland Culture Awards.
Social Media / Currently receiving data from Twitter Analytics and Facebook review in order to track number of interactions (i.e. followers, likes, shares etc.) These built in apps have proven to be efficient in tracking information.