Foreign Vistors

I’m on my way to Bodiam Castle this morning to meet with a representative of a company that is researching where our visitors come from.

Some of our larger properties are not meeting there targets for gift aid admission, and one of the reasons why might be that more visitors that we thought are coming from overseas, and thus are not UK tax payers, able to sign their tax paid back to us.

So we’ve asked a company to sample a number of properties across the region over this year. At each property they will ask every visitor where they come from.

In time for this meeting they’ve sent interim results, and I must say they are quite surprising. We normally think of ourselves as off the tourist trail. Except for iconic properties, like Churhill’s home, Chartwell we imagine that the vast majority if our visitors are domestic. And so they are, but when we look at paying visitors, rather than members, we discover that foreign visitors account for, on average, 33% of our payers. And where to these visitors come from? So far 20% of our foreign visitors are from Germany.

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.