For a long time, culture was viewed at best as an economic driver, and more narrowly as a generator of tourism. Successful culture-led development strategies around the world have since shown that its impact can be far more structural. Over the longer term, culture can help build the capabilities, networks and opportunities that support the social and economic development of not only communities but even entire countries.
Companies have accordingly begun to invest more deliberately in culture and the arts as part of an approach to corporate sustainability no longer confined to environmental performance but increasingly concerned with the positive, rather than extractive, impact a business can generate across society. Culture and creativity have emerged as strategic levers within corporate sustainability agendas, capable of advancing sustainable development, strengthening identity, enabling innovation and fostering deeper relationships with stakeholders and local communities. Artistic and cultural assets, once considered peripheral to a company’s core activities and often little more than an expression of a founder’s personal passion, are increasingly recognized as resources that contribute to sustainable value across several interconnected dimensions, from identity and social impact to innovation capacity and reputational resilience.
The key challenge is measurement. How can a company account for the value of something whose most important effects have long been considered intangible? More specifically, how can investment in arts and culture be translated into indicators that feed into ESG strategies, impact measurement and broader corporate reporting? Deloitte, in step with several other firms, has recently developed frameworks that make cultural impact more legible through measurable indicators, offering companies a way not only to justify existing investments in arts and culture but potentially to expand them. Cultural institutions themselves, particularly where they depend on a mix of public and private support, face growing demands for accountability and could put these frameworks to good use in making their case: measuring impact across different dimensions, in a form that can be communicated, is essential not only to justify the use of resources but also to attract funding and demonstrate broader, longer-term value creation.
The first step is to identify what should be measured along with the relevant benchmarks. As Donella Meadows put it, “Indicators arise from values (we measure what we care about), and they create values (we care about what we measure).” How to do that with culture and the arts hasn’t always been clear.
UNESCO’s general framework to measure the impact of culture
One of the most important general frameworks for measuring culture’s contribution to society is UNESCO’s Thematic Indicators for Culture in the 2030 Agenda, or Culture|2030 Indicators, designed to measure and monitor culture’s contribution to the national and local implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda. The methodology assesses culture not only as a sector of activity but also through the cross-cutting contributions it makes in different SDGs and policy areas, offering a shared conceptual and methodological model that can support strategic and operational decision-making both within cultural organizations and within organizations that invest in culture.
UNESCO’s framework comprises 22 indicators across four thematic dimensions: Environment & Resilience (culture’s relationship to heritage, sustainable settlements, public space, infrastructure, climate adaptation and resilience); Prosperity & Livelihoods (culture’s contribution to GDP, employment, cultural businesses, household expenditure, trade, public finance and cultural governance); Knowledge & Skills (education for sustainable development, cultural knowledge, multilingual education, cultural and artistic education and cultural training); and Inclusion & Participation (social cohesion, artistic freedom, access to culture, cultural participation and participatory processes).
What is particularly significant about this framework is that the 22 indicators cut across four interconnected areas, allowing cultural impact to be assessed in economic, social, educational and environmental terms simultaneously.
Measuring the impact of cultural assets on sustainable development
Applying a similar logic to the corporate sphere, Deloitte developed a broader sustainability framework built on a multi-stakeholder concept of value rather than on shareholder return alone. Its “Sustainable Value Map” distinguishes shareholder value from employee, customer, social and environmental value, encouraging companies to assess how they create—or erode—value for each of these constituencies. Within this approach, culture can be positioned not as philanthropy or marketing expenditure, as it has often been treated in corporate settings, but as something contributing to public and social value, employee engagement, community relationships and long-term resilience.
Earlier this year, Deloitte’s European Art Assets Observatory published a report examining how companies manage and evaluate their cultural assets, how they measure the broader impact of their cultural engagement and how those assets can be transformed into meaningful experiences and narratives for stakeholders.
The report’s centerpiece is a framework developed by the Observatory to measure that impact and to understand how Corporate Cultural & Art Assets, or CCAAs, can contribute to companies’ ESG objectives. Its broader ambition is to encourage organizations to rethink artistic heritage not as a static collection but as a potentially dynamic infrastructure for innovation, engagement and social impact.
The framework was developed by a multidisciplinary team from Deloitte Private, the University of Pavia, ARTE Generali and Banca Generali. “It draws on international sustainability and social impact standards, including UNESCO’s Culture|2030 Indicators, while accounting for each organization’s heritage and strategic priorities,” Roberta Ghilardi, a senior manager at Deloitte Italia, told Observer. “It enables the selection of relevant indicators tailored to the characteristics of each company, its corporate collection and the organization’s objectives.”
The report defines CCAAs as the tangible and intangible cultural resources a company owns, commissions, manages or activates for strategic purposes. These can include corporate art collections, commissioned artworks, exhibitions and cultural programs, artistic installations, corporate museums, archives and heritage spaces, digital cultural projects, artist residencies and collaborations.
In terms of impact, the study examines interconnected dimensions that broadly correspond to the three ESG pillars. The environmental dimension considers both the capacity of cultural initiatives to raise awareness of environmental issues and the sustainability of their own management, from eco-responsible exhibition practices to energy efficiency. The social dimension looks at inclusion, heritage preservation, community relationships and employee well-being. The governance dimension assesses how CCAAs are integrated into corporate structures through policies, responsibilities, procedures and reporting, enabling transparent management of cultural assets and alignment with broader strategic objectives.
The central challenge remains the difficulty of reducing these largely intangible effects to quantifiable measures. As in UNESCO’s framework and other methodologies of cultural assessment, the solution is a multi-criteria system that combines quantitative and qualitative dimensions and weights them within a structured evaluation. This approach brings together economic value (investment levels, asset valuation and related revenues) with social, environmental, reputational and organizational value, treating them as interconnected outcomes of an integrated cultural strategy.
“The value of corporate art assets extends beyond financial performance to encompass governance, environmental and social impacts,” Ghilardi noted. “A multidimensional approach enables organizations to assess and communicate how art collections and cultural heritage generate value across these dimensions, capturing strategic contributions that financial metrics alone cannot measure.”
The key, again, is to take a cross-cutting view of these assets: not merely as instruments of economic return or social giveback but as expressions of corporate purpose that integrate identity, values and transformative impact. The framework therefore crosses two axes—preservation versus transformation and economic versus socio-environmental orientation—to generate six possible strategic models for managing CCAAs. From these, indicators are derived to assess impact within individual areas while also allowing for a broader, integrated evaluation.
The four principal areas are economic and corporate impact, covering strategic alignment, asset enhancement, human capital, organizational innovation and external partnerships; socio-cultural impact, including cultural participation, accessibility, inclusion, support for creative ecosystems, reputation and employee well-being; environmental impact, assessing the contribution of cultural activities to ecological objectives through practices such as eco-design, sustainable exhibitions and logistics; and digital impact, measuring the maturity, accessibility and sustainability of the technologies used to activate and enhance cultural assets.
Within each area, the framework distinguishes between Key Activity Indicators (KAIs), which assess the quality of governance and management—whether appropriate policies, processes, transparency standards and organizational structures are in place—and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which measure the concrete results those activities produce. Indicators can be quantitative, qualitative or mixed, combining numerical data with evaluative elements.
The framework becomes far clearer when one sees the actual table, with numbers assigned, than when it is described in the abstract. It is currently widely available only in Italian, but Observer obtained an English version of the main table, reproduced below, outlining the framework.
Crucially, the framework is flexible rather than prescriptive. Each organization is expected to select the indicators most relevant to its assets, objectives and context. Some are designated fundamental indicators, representing the minimum conditions for responsible and comparable management, while others are transformative indicators, meant to capture the use of culture as an active driver of innovation and change within the company or its wider community. Organizations can thus adapt measurement to their own level of maturity and ambition.
The importance of a framework of measurement
Today, 80 percent of the market value of S&P 500 companies derives from intangible assets, according to Ocean Tomo’s Intangible Asset Market Value Study. Symbolic infrastructure is becoming increasingly relevant as companies seek to differentiate themselves not only through what they sell but through the values they represent. In this context, investment in CCAAs can become part of a broader reputational infrastructure, shaping how an organization is perceived and remembered, building symbolic and reputational capital and strengthening both its accountability and its capacity to create long-term value.
Deloitte applied its structured framework to 300 European companies, examining how they engage with artistic and cultural assets and how those initiatives fit within broader corporate strategies. Rather than focusing on individual case studies, the study sought to identify recurring models, common practices and emerging trends across industries and national contexts.
“In an increasingly globalized cultural landscape, traditional approaches used by companies managing their corporate collection are no longer sufficient,” Ghilardi explained. “A standardized and comparable framework is needed to assess and manage corporate heritage and art collections as strategic assets, enhancing their reputational value and stakeholder engagement through a fully comprehensive communication path aimed at capturing social impacts and not only economic returns.”
The assessment considered the types of cultural assets involved; governance models and their alignment with stated strategic objectives; stakeholder engagement; communication and disclosure practices; alignment with sustainability and ESG narratives; and the presence of impact measurement or reporting.
Drawing on this empirical analysis and 15 qualitative interviews, the report shows that Corporate Cultural & Art Assets are widespread among leading European companies. They most commonly take the form of corporate art collections (29.9 percent), cultural sponsorships and patronage programs (28.9 percent) and corporate foundations (23.3 percent). Many companies combine several of these approaches, suggesting that cultural assets function less as isolated initiatives than as broader ecosystems supporting identity, engagement and corporate strategy.
Their management, however, remains highly fragmented. Seventy-five percent of companies manage their cultural assets internally, typically through communications, marketing, HR, sustainability or heritage departments, while 25 percent rely on external structures such as foundations or trusts. Internal management can strengthen alignment with brand identity and corporate strategy but may suffer from limited transparency and a lack of specialist cultural expertise; external governance can offer greater autonomy and credibility but risks remaining disconnected from wider ESG strategies.
Reporting reveals even clearer gaps. Only 34 percent of companies mention cultural assets in their sustainability reports, despite their potential relevance to social inclusion, cultural accessibility, heritage preservation and responsible governance. Among those that do, approaches vary widely: 54 percent refer to the ESRS standards, 43 percent to the GRI guidelines, 35 percent to the SDGs and only two companies to UNESCO frameworks. Companies that leave cultural assets out of formal non-financial reporting rely overwhelmingly on narrative communication, primarily through their websites rather than standardized impact disclosures.
Economic transparency is weaker still: only 24 companies mention investments related to cultural assets in their financial reporting, and just nine—3 percent of the sample—disclose a specific monetary value. The weak correlation between turnover and the presence of cultural assets also suggests that cultural engagement is driven less by company size than by strategic priorities, corporate culture and leadership.
These findings point to a clear need to move beyond fragmented, narrative-based approaches toward more structured, measurable and strategically aligned models. The framework proposed in the report is a first step in that direction: flexible rather than prescriptive, it offers companies a set of ESG-aligned indicators through which to assess cultural impact without flattening the complexity and richness of cultural value.
Measurement here becomes a tool for reflection, dialogue and continuous improvement, one that can support managerial decision-making, strengthen transparency and gradually integrate cultural assets into broader governance and sustainability strategies. Making cultural value more visible and accountable can shift the perception of art and culture from symbolic gestures or peripheral forms of patronage to strategic instruments of impact on multiple levels. A shared, flexible framework and methodology give companies a language through which to measure and substantiate, for their various stakeholders, what we have long understood intuitively: that culture matters and still has a fundamental role to play in the sustainable development of our societies. Greater familiarity with these frameworks and their indicators could also help cultural organizations and the art world attract investment and funding from other sectors, at a moment when they need it most.