Building our reputation

I’ve been reading the results of what we call our Perceptions Research today. It’s the second wave of a series of focus groups and telephone interviews, in which we asked first our supporters (members and volunteers) and then a wider sample of the general public who enjoys days out, about how the see the National Trust. We asked them whether they trust the National Trust, whether they’d recommend us to others, if they feel that the National Trust understands their needs and whether they feel close to the Trust.

In the South East, we score well on the first two (more than 50% score us eight or more out of ten), but less well on the second two. Only 33% give us a score of eight or more for Understanding their needs, and only 15% feel close enough to us to score eight or mroe in that catagory.

I understand this research will be repeated every year, and our performance as a region will be rated against these scores. In a way, the “closeness” score as a function of all the others, but the easiest one, I think, to improve is the Understanding rating. If we can communicate better, not just with our visitors, but also with our neighbours, we will be more open, accountable and listening and understanding. And thats part of the reason why I started this blog.

But the research also asked people about the four areas of our work, Countryside, Heritage, Farming and Environmentalism. And interestingly, our public wants us to focus more on the countryside and the environment. Its especially intersting to see that those people who are currently not members or volunteers would like to see us do more on green issues.

Of course a lot of communication work take place on our pay-for-entry sites. And those places are more often historic buildings than areas of countryside. Obviously, we don’t want to plaster signs and interpretation panels all over the countryside. But the research does suggest that maybe we should communicate better about the work we do in the countryside. I’m thinking  for example that the A3 HIndhead tunnel work, about  which we have been communicating very well, might be the focus for even more productive dialogue.

Gift aid

I was reviewing entry prices for 2009 today. As a charity it’s obviously important that we monitor prices carefully, retaining value for money while ensuring the income that we need to maintain our places for ever, for everyone. My region is one of the financial engine rooms of the Trust, providing one of the three big chunks of what we call our operating contribution. The situation has been made more complicated in recent years by the introduction of Gift Aid On Entry (GAOE).

Many charitable visitor attractions have claimed GAOE for years, asking visitors to confirm their admission price was a charitable donation, and allowing the charity to claim the tax the visitor had already paid back from the taxman. It requires some administration, not least when the visitor pays their money, so for a long time the NT declined to follow suit. We had no problem doing it in membership, people fill out a form already to apply for membership, so its a matter of adding a tickbox and an extra signature to that form and you’re done. Filling out a form every time to buy a ticket, especially when you’ve come to have a nice day out away from the desk is a different matter. Eventually we were persuaded that is was worth the extra hassle at the entry point and decided to do it. Then Gordon Brown changed the rules.

Claiming gift aid on the admission price was not in keeping with the spirit in which gift aid had been set up, he said. Gift aid was about encouraging people to make charitable donations, not to redefine money they were going to spend anyway. To qualify for gift aid on entry, visitors would have be be actively giving a donation (at least 10%) over and above the price of admission. 

So just as we were starting to do the whole GAOE thing, we were presented with having to achieve two processes: not only did we have to convince people to fill out a GAOE form when they paid, but we’d also have to convince them to pay 10% more than the normal price of admission.

As it turns out this new requirement was the easy part. Over 80% of our paying visitors are willing to pay the extra. But to qualify for the extra tax back from tax man, we need all those who paid extra to fill out a form giving us permission to do so, and to do it correctly. This is a lot more difficult.

So when I was reviewing prices today, I was looking at a spreadsheet that had the prices our property managers want to charge at one end, and the expected operating contribution that the wider National Trust expects us to deliver at the other. In the middle are an awful lot of calculations that basically say “if the expected number of visitors all turn up, and pay the expected price, then we should end up making what the National Trust needs from us a region” to pay fro all the conservation projects we’ll need to do next year”. Those calculations are based on just 60% of the people who pay the extra donation on top of the admission filling out a GAOE form correctly. Just 60%, but we can even manage that right now. Right now, it appears to me that properties are managing to get about 40% of the people who pay the extra to fill out the form properly.

The shortfall that leaves us with as a region is equivalent to everybody paying an extra 20p on their ticket price. Of course, we should work harder at making it easier to fill out the form. But I’m thinking, should I also just put up all the prices by 20p?

Events

I spent a good deal of the day yesterday discussing the summer season of events in the region. Ticket sales have not been good, and it’s not surprising. Who wants to book an outdoor event while the weather has been as poor as it has this spring. Now we’ve seen a turn in the weather, I’m hoping we’ll see an improvement in ticket sales.

But in fact, declining sales have been a trend we’ve recognised over the last five years. When I joined the Trust, we were organising our own large scale events at a number of properties (my favorite was Ian Brown’s comeback at Claremont Landscape Gardens), but we could see that, with every other green space or back garden jumping on the bandwagon, there was a more fragmended demand for such events. After a couple of costly misfortunes at Petworth (where a performer’s sore throat turned a massive profit into a costly loss, for example), and a perception of outdoor event fatigue in our audience (I think its very interesting that Glastonbury didn’t sell out this year), we pulled back from running our own large events. Our current events strategy is to continue with outdoor theatre, where the rewards are not so great but more properties can participate, and at larger venues, hire out sites to events promoters. This means we only get a facility fee of thousands of pounds, rather than a profit of hundreds of thousands, but the risk is also  reduced.

This strategy should mean there’s less work to do as well, but yesterday I got involved in concern about one event that so far has had miserable sales. We could say “sod it, we still get our fee,” but even though the event is run by somebody else, there’s still a risk to the National Trust’s reputation iof the event turns out to be a miserable failure.

Fingers crossed for a glorious summer.

Other blogs

Now that I’ve started this blog, I’ve been more interested in seeking out other blogs, and mentions of the National Trust in other peoples blogs. I’ve already left a comment or two where people have expressed frustration with the Trust’s processes behavior, and have offered an insight into what might be behind it. But I’ve also discovered Preservation Nation, from the US National Trust for Historic Preservation. It looks like an offshoot of their Preservavtion Magazine, and I wonder if we should be doing something similar.

That site’s own blogroll leads me to a blog recording the restoration of a building, which is something I feel we should have done as we opened up the new house at Scotney Castle. Another, on the management of President Lincoln’s cottage, talks about scholarly research and conservation techniques. 

There’s also a resource blog, for US National Trust sites, which offers an insight into how they are run (and in contrasts with the way we run the UK (except Scotland) NT. A link from that sites takes me to a specialist blog for Modernist sites. I got all excited about this one, wanting to post a comments directing interest to The Homewood, a modernist building in my region, but then I noticed the blog hadn’t been updated for almost a year.

There are also mentions of the National Trust in in blogs covering subjects as diverse as green issues, family finance (I’m glad to see this one concludes we are good value for money), politics, and sheds!

But the most interesting blog where we get a mention is Past Thinking, which I’m going to have to explore in more depth. The entry that dragged me to it was one about our planned investment in e-engagement, which is indeed very exciting news. We have one of the most visited websites in the charity sector, but in many ways one of the least successful. I heard that that study last year showed that of over seven thousands pages of information, six thousand hadn’t been looked at! The post ends with a plea for the Trust to make resources available via a Creative Commons license (more on this later), which reminds me that Creative Commons was cited in a criticism about the Trust’s last venture into blogging.

Of course, the Trust were the main mover behind the One Day in History Blog a couple of years back, but technically that wasn’t a blog, and is now stored at the British Library (which is my way of saying I can’t find a link to it). I say its not a blog, because surly a blog has to cover more than one day? If there’s any reason for one at all, it is so that ideas can develop over time, rather than being a snapshot. It’s a mighty fine archive I’m sure, but a blog? I don’t think so.

Discipline

One of the things about this new job, is the email. Now, I like to have a large inbox. I find searching for stuff within Outlook a lot more satisfactory than trying to find stuff within the wider world of windows. (I use a lovely Mac at home) So I’m happier to leave stuff in the inbox than file it somewhere and then have to try and remember where I put it. Which means I have also been happy to leave a running total of fifteen hundred or so emails in my inbox.

But this new job seems to come with larger attachments. Regional Operations and Planning Group papers, mystery visitor reports, and spreadsheets detailing weekly sales in Catering and Retail, with fancy graphs and the like. And these big attachments have been filling up my inbox every day, to the extent that I’m forbeidden to send any emails until I’ve dealt with and deleted the biggies. That’s no way to prioritise my working day. So I’m going to have to train myself to be more disciplined with email, keep the inbox as clear as I can. To this end, I’ve set up ylthe age-old “Action/Filed/Later” system and programmed Auto-Archive to be brutal in archiving filed stuff after just five days.

I could be more disciplined elsewhere too. I have a reputation for keeping my desk piled high with paper. I’d already set the challenge to myself of keeping my new desk a lot tidier. Perhaps the “Action/file/later” method should appear physically too.

NT Shops – Love’em or loath’em?

Attended the Supporter Enagement Group today. One of my favourite duties. Before my current role I attended on behalf of the Community, Learning and Volunteering function, and its a group that has allowed me to have an impact on the way the whole Trust thinks. But enough about me, one item of particular interest was a review of our retail offer.

I don’t know what you think about NT shops. I’m ambivalent. On one hand, there’s a level of consitency about the quality of what we offer and its a source of gifts that I know certain members of my family will love, but on the other … ugh! What a bunch of twee, old-ladyish stock!

It seems our visitors reflect this dichotomy. Those who shop in our outlets love it, and they are a very succesful shop chain. But a significant proportion of our visitors hate the shop, and never go in, let alone buy anything. So how do we make the shop more attractive to them without alienating the people who love it?

The retail team have taken the bull by the horns, and I think they have come up with a pretty radical approach: relying less on centrally sourced stock, empowering shop managers and letting shops differenciate themsleves according to the nature of the place they are in. So for example, most of our shops’ stock is currently centrally sourced: about 70%. But under the proposals shops at iconic properties could source up to 80% themselves and might only offer 20% centrally sourced stock.

I think this is great, but some of my colleagues wondered if this was radical enough. Our shops our an important source of revenue, and as a charity we have a duty to make as much from them as we can, but if we expected less money out of them, would they become more engaging places?

Forever vs. Entrepreneurism

When I was writing about my visit to Mascalls, it dawned on me that it had taken two years to get to the very beginning. Contrast this with the exciting developments at Sissinghurst. I visited this property on Friday, to advise on access to the new vegetable garden they are creating which will supply the restaurant. It feels as though this project has taken no time at all. I wasn’t in on the beginning of of, but it doesn’t feel long ago that people were saying “we’re thinking about this” and already on Friday the restaurant was serving home-frown salad with a pea and cheese tart. A TV company are filming the process for a fly-on-the wall documentary to be broadcast next year,and the camera was hovering over our table as my colleague, the vegetable gardener was tucking into her plateful.

But the challenge of making the garden accessible is quite difficult. Not that there aren’t all sorts of things that Sissinghurst could do to improve access, but rather, because even after my visit, I’m struggling to understand what the end result should be. When I think about access and the Disability Discrimination Act, I’m always looking to offer equality of experience to people who might face barriers to enjoying the full experience. It seems to me that this project has progressed so fast that no-one has yet identified what the end result, in terms of visitor experience, should be. Now, in my new role. I’m asking basic questions beyond the remit of my old job, like is this part of the paid-for visit (or “within the pay perimetre” as we call it) and I’m not sure anyone yet has come to a definite conclusion.

So the Sissinghurst project contrasts interestingly with the way the National Trust normally makes decisions. We move a a glacial pace normally, and think through every decision carefully, arriving at, if not the right decision, then at least the best decision. It remain to be seen whether a project like Sissinghurst will give us a kick up the backside, or make us retreat to the comfort of our old, slow ways.

Involving people

Today I visited Mascalls School to meet with a group of young people who will, over the next three years, become our Young Curators at Scotney Castle. The Young Curators project was conceived almost two years ago, when we were first thinking about opening the new house at Scotney.

A bit of history might be useful here. The House and Garden at Scotney Castle were given to the National Trust in 1970 when the owner, Christopher Hussey, a champion of the National Trust and the Country Houses movement, died. His widow lived on until she was 99, and stayed living in the house at Scotney Castle. When she died over two years ago, we began to think about opening the house (called the New House as the remains of the Castle itself, in the garden are thought of as the old house).

From the outset we had a vision of opening the house in a new way. For a start, we wouldn’t sit on it while we conserved it for five years, and then open the finished product to the public. Instead we would open it in stages, letting our visitors watch as we prepared the house for public consumption, and even get involved in defining what the finished product would be. At the same time, we were approached by a local Decorative and Fine Arts Society. They were inspired by a sister society in the North West who had worked with a local museum there to create a group of young  volunteer gallery guides. We discussed the idea of working with a group drawn from across all the year groups at a local secondary school. That way there would be some continuity during the three years of the project, as 18 year olds leaving the group would be replaced by 11 year olds joining it. The problem was, how would we find a school willing to let such a diverse group of students out of lessons at the same time to work with us?

Enter Mascalls, an arts specialist school in Paddock Wood, whose entire student body is organised in just such a way, with over 80 Advisory Groups consisting of around fifteen students from across the age range, rather than the old system of forms and yeargroups.

Over 80, and we were looking for just one… so we had a competition! sent a school a little flyer describing what we wanted to do, and invited expressions of interest from the advisoy groups. The school selected four groups, from those that expressed an interest, to visit Scotney. We introduced them to the house and gardens, then set them a task, to create scrapbook pages, with the help of a “scrapper” paid for by our NADFAS friends.

We judged the groups not only on the quality of the pages they produced, but also on the way they worked together to complete the task, and chose one who will work with us now as our Young Curators.

Today we met with them for the first time in the new capacity. It was an informal chat about what they wanted to get out of the project, because although we have ideas about what we want as an organisation, we also want the project to be led by the young people themselves. What we heard was good:

• They want to be trusted, and given responsibility.
• They want to learn about the National Trust’s responsibilities to conserve beautiful places.
• They want to make Scotney a place that kids drag their parents to, rather than the other way around.
• They want activities that bring them together as a group.
• They want to bring together, and encourage people to make use of, the house, the garden and the wider estate
• They want be given a chance to voice their opinions.
• They want to spend one day a semester (they have five semesters) working with us, plus one midweek spring residential in Scotney’s basecamp.
• They want to bring their own kids (those that plan to have them) back to Scotney in ten years time and be able to say “I did that”

I think we can work with that.

My first day

My first day was on Wednesday. Officially it was Monday, but Sarah, who’s seat I’m keeping warm, didn’t start her new job until Wednesday, so was still around and handing over to me on Monday and Tuesday. How did my first day go? OK, I think. I was at a meeting, which gathers together the all the Property Managers from National Trust sites in Kent, Surrey, and the two Sussex’s.

I had in fact put most of the agenda for the meeting together, as part of my old role. We were looking at Volunteer management, with a focus on our volunteers being the main touchpoint for our visitors. The speakers were great, Mark Crosby our head of volunteering talked about volunteers managing volunteers, Julia Barker PM at Uppark talked about managing change and volunteers, and in the afternoon we had a great talk from Chris Gidlow, Head of Live Interpretation at Historic Royal Palaces, about how they manage their volunteers, employees and contractors as interpreters.

I get a letter

I wrote my first letter in my new role today. It was in reply to a comment from a visitor to Polesden Lacey who want to note her approval that she could still buy a Short Guide there. I ought to explain: a Short Guide is a large format gatefold style leaflet, printed in two colours, which was an alternative to buying a full guidebook or Book of the House, as we call them. In the South East region we stopped offering Short Guides at our properties a couple of years ago. After an experiment, during which we withdrew Short Guides from sale for a month, and sales of Books of the House went up. But I was glad to see Short Guides go for another reason. They were dreadful! Over long, wordy and worthy documents, that were a pain to read in low light. Not inspiring at all, and not free. It meant that at most properties, the only free interpretation on offer was talking to volunteers. Now, I think talking to a real live person can’t be beat. But some people do prefer to read rather than engage in conversation. Why should they be penalised?
I took the opportunity to try out somethng new at Chartwell. Its a large print introduction to the house, which visitors can pick up as they enter, carry around with them and drop off as they leave. Nothing new there. But I took the opportunity to strip out most of the words, creating a confuse introduction to the house and rooms with a 1000 word limit. It high lights just a few objects around the house as “Don’t miss” items, and left questions unanswered to encourage conversations with volunteers and deeper investigation. We evaluated it at Chartwell and it was a big hit, accessible, interesting and FREE!

Since that experiment, we’ve produced others at Batemans and Clandon Park. I love them. I’d recommend them for every property. It’s a real challenge to set – can you interpret you property in just one thousand words?

But back to my letter. Polesden Lacey kept selling the short guide because there are lots of changes taking place there, including a new visitor reception and, just released a brand new guidebook in a format that we call a Colour Souvenir Guide. These are less heavy than the traditional book of the house, in EVERY sense. More colour pictures, less grey blocks of text. They are cheaper too. They’ve been around for a few years, but the format is getting better and better. We wanted to be sure that the content was right though, and not just a cut down version of the old guidebook. So I helped the property team create a Learning Plan. I locked a bunch of property staff, volunteers and regional advisors in a room for a day, and together we identified the most important things we wanted to say about Polesden Lacey. Then we organized those things into three Themes, with an over-arching main theme, that will inform all interpretation for the foreseeable future. We used these themes to lay out the guidebook, and to commision the author. And the result? The only guidebook that the property’s very experienced Area Manager has read from cover to cover. And to think of the hard time he gave me for taking everyone away from their day-jobs for the planning session.

So, I had to thank my correspondent for her kind words about the Short Guide, but also inform her it is no longer for sale.