You probably know or have lived this scenario - you need to develop a Destination Management Plan or a Visitor Strategy and you need data to understand what's been happening or to know where your destination has come from. If you work in destination management, data is the one area that we all know we need to do better and be better at collecting, tracking, analysing it and reporting on it. When we don’t measure, reflect and act, it’s difficult to tell a comprehensive story to inform stakeholders and build true advocacy and partnerships with them.

The nexus of workforce development, the visitor economy, economic development, and community development is a powerful one. They aren’t isolated efforts but interconnected pillars that support thriving communities and robust economies. And, if we really want to support thriving communities and economies, we need to stop working in silos. But why does Australia and the organisations and budgets that support these sectors still work in silos? Why aren’t we working all hands together?

The 2024-25 Federal Budget has been handed down, and it’s drawing mixed reaction and debate about the market-shaping approach of the Future Made in Australia Act. Sparrowly Group’s Federico Moreno unpacks these perspectives and as well as the implications of the Act in the context of a highly competitive global economy racing towards net zero.

The arts, culture and creative industries sector in NSW has the largest creative workforce in Australia. The creative industries are an important part of the economy, accounting for a fifth of services exports and 10% of the state’s workforce and with great potential to grow. Australia is facing a big issue with our creative trade – for every dollar we make by selling creative stuff, we end up spending eight dollars on importing similar things. This deficit shows the potential growth that the arts, culture, and creative industries could have to bring in a lot more money and boost our economy as well as the profile of the sector. To support this growth opportunity, the 'Creative Communities Policy was introduced by the NSW Government late last year to maximise the opportunity this sector presents and enhance the cultural and creative sectors. Sparrowly Group’s Justine Sinclair provides a practical framework for realising the opportunities of this policy.

Discussions of whether or not one type of impact analysis - economic, social, or environmental - deserve precedence over the other are ill-founded and miss the fact that all three are necessary to inform good decision making and each other.

That said, economic analysis carries obvious advantages, being a robust way to weigh the impacts between different physical, financial, and subjective intangible effects for individual people, and then weight the balance of those effects between people. That dollars are only a convenient, but arbitrary, yardstick of relative preferences and therefore well-being is aside to the actual aims of economic analysis. Albeit one often poorly explained by economists, and therefore, commonly misunderstood by non-economists through no fault of their own.

Sparowly Group’s Senior Economist, Sam Miller provides a explainer to help demystify misperceptions.

Social science delves into the complex and intricate realm of human behaviour, society, and culture. But it can be overlooked by many or avoided as being something that is hard to understand, boring or something left to the experts. Yet, without realising it, we are using it, or discussing it in some shape or form in our everyday lives.

The formalisation of data and algorithms has recently been the purview of computer science. And of course, the application of data and algorithms, in particular from the tech sector, has become essential to how we solve problems in our daily lives. We use data and algorithms to help us decide what movie to watch, or how to get directions in an unfamiliar city. But are there limits to the problems we can solve and decisions we can make by simply throwing an algorithm at a bunch of data? Sparrowly Group’s Ben Lever explores this.

Program evaluation is a crucial component of many government interventions, initially designed as pilot programs. Evaluating the successes and failures of a pilot enables highly informed decisions to be made about the program, whether it continues and scales up or not. What do you need to consider to ensure program evaluation is truly objective? Sparrowly Group’s Federico Moreno explains.

Your business accountant is a critical partner in running a successful business. Sparrowly Group invited Select Accounting to share insights into what makes a good accountant.