An Open Regional Initiative
Best Southwest
Cultural Baseline
A measurement framework built in Duncanville, designed for the region. The data it produces belongs to all four cities.
The Region
Four-City Cultural Geography
Duncanville
Baseline origin — CIS Year One deployment
DeSoto
Regional audience — open for adoption
Cedar Hill
Regional audience — open for adoption
Lancaster
Regional audience — open for adoption
Click any city to navigate the map. Best Southwest residents move freely across these four municipal boundaries for entertainment, employment, and daily life.
The Initiative
A Methodology First.
A Regional Picture Second.
The Duncanville Arts Foundation is running a 24-month controlled field study at Arts Junction, measuring how residents engage with local arts experiences and whether that engagement represents a genuine change in where they spend their entertainment dollars. The instrument is standardizable by design.
The Best Southwest Cultural Baseline is the regional extension of that work. Duncanville's data tells a municipal story. Data from all four cities tells a regional one — and a regional picture is far more useful to every city, every arts organization, and every funder considering investment in this corridor.
The Foundation is not proposing a governance structure or asking for institutional commitment. It is making the methodology available and inviting DeSoto, Cedar Hill, and Lancaster to generate comparable data on their own terms, using the same measurement instrument, so the region eventually has a shared baseline it can build from.
No city has to join anything. The data is the offer. A DeSoto arts commission that runs one program using the Cultural Investment Index produces a scorecard that is immediately comparable to Duncanville's — and immediately useful to DeSoto's own decision-makers, independent of anything the Foundation does next.
The Regional Geography
Why All Four Cities
Produce a Truer Picture
Best Southwest residents do not experience municipal boundaries as cultural boundaries. The entertainment spending pattern is regional whether or not any investment strategy reflects that. Here is what each city contributes to the regional baseline.
Duncanville
Baseline Origin
Year One of the Cultural Investment Strategy runs here, beginning August 2026 at Arts Junction. Duncanville data establishes the first municipal scorecard and sets the methodology in practice. ZIP codes 75116, 75137, and 75138 form the primary measurement geography.
DeSoto
Regional Audience
Adjacent to Duncanville along the eastern boundary, DeSoto households already appear in Duncanville activation data as secondary audience participants. A DeSoto adoption of the CIS instrument would let DeSoto measure its own residents' behavior rather than appearing only in another city's scorecard.
Cedar Hill
Regional Audience
Located southwest along the FM 1382 corridor, Cedar Hill residents travel to Dallas and Fort Worth for cultural programming. Cedar Hill running the CIS instrument locally would measure whether closer alternatives change that behavior — a question Cedar Hill's own planners and arts commission have standing to answer.
Lancaster
Regional Audience
Located southeast of Duncanville, Lancaster residents' out-of-city travel patterns align with the substitution behavior the instrument is built to measure. Lancaster data would strengthen the regional recapture picture and provide Lancaster's decision-makers with a comparable evidence base.
What the Data Shows
Three Things the Regional
Baseline Measures That
Municipal Data Cannot
Duncanville data answers Duncanville questions. Regional data answers questions no single city can answer alone. These are the three measurement dimensions that only become visible at the regional scale.
Regional Recapture
How Much Spending Stays in the Corridor
When a DeSoto or Cedar Hill resident attends an activation in Duncanville instead of driving to Dallas, an entertainment dollar stays in the Best Southwest. The CIS measures this at the point of ticketing through ZIP code capture and at the event through the substitution survey. Municipal data alone cannot calculate corridor-level recapture.
Substitution Geography
Where Residents Would Have Gone Otherwise
The F3 substitution survey asks attendees what they would have done if the activation did not exist. Responses naming Dallas, Fort Worth, or venues outside the Best Southwest are the strongest possible signal of regional recapture — spending that would have left the corridor entirely. That signal is regional, not municipal.
Model Transferability
What Works Here Can Work There
The CIS instrument is published and standardizable. A program that graduates in Duncanville has a scorecard. If DeSoto runs the same instrument, its scorecard is directly comparable. Over time, the region accumulates a shared evidence base that supports collective advocacy to the Texas Legislature and the Texas Commission on the Arts.
An Invitation
If Your City Wants to Run
the Instrument, We Can Help.
The Cultural Investment Strategy methodology is not proprietary. The scoring rubric, the survey instrument, the baseline method, and the CII composite formula are all published. Any city with a venue, a ticketing platform, and the willingness to ask one question at the door can generate comparable data. The Foundation is available to consult with arts commissions and city staff in DeSoto, Cedar Hill, and Lancaster at no cost.
How the Region Maps to the CIS
What Best Southwest Geography
Means for CIS Measurement
Every CIS activation at Arts Junction draws from all three audience segments defined in CIS v2.0, Section 4.2. The Best Southwest geography determines how Secondary and Out-of-City segments are defined, reached, and measured in Duncanville's Year One data.
| Segment | Geography | Best Southwest Cities | CII Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary | Duncanville ZIP codes 75116, 75137, 75138 | Duncanville only | F2 (25%) + F3 (20%) |
| Secondary | Adjacent Best Southwest municipalities | DeSoto, Cedar Hill, Lancaster | F1 (30%) velocity contribution |
| Out-of-City | Regional — no ZIP constraint | Dallas, Fort Worth, and beyond | F3 (20%) — strongest substitution signal |
Working Paper
The theoretical foundation for substitution-based cultural measurement — and the case for regional aggregation of CIS data across Best Southwest cities — is developed in Measuring What Matters: A Standardizable Behavioral Measurement Instrument for Municipal Cultural Policy Decision-Making.
Read the working paper →