Visiting Hindhead today, to walk through to commons by Gibbet Hill and down to the A3 tunnel viewing platform. Then to the Devil’s Punchbowl café for sausages. Very busy, the good weather has brought out the visitors. Week two last year was so bad because of poor weather, and it started a trend that gave us a very poor result in the region. Today marks the end of this year’s week two, and on the evidence I see around me, it will be a big improvement on last year.
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.
