All of the questions suggested for June's UK Heritage Pulse survey

We invited members of the panel to suggest questions for June’s UK Heritage Pulse survey.

In this short video, a representative of the independent researchers who manage UK Heritage Pulse talks about how the questions were chosen and adapted:

Select CC to enable subtitles, or read transcript

The suggested questions in full

The questions have been grouped by the research team at Baker Richards.

Environmental sustainability

How environmentally sustainable are your activities?
What are you doing to make it easier to make energy efficiency improvements to listed buildings?

People / Workers / Volunteers

How do we support under represented groups to access, work and feel valued in a sector that is often white and middle class?
What is the sector doing strategically to create sustainable jobs rather than project based volunteer engagement schemes ?
What questions do you ask to ensure your workforce has different backgrounds and perspectives?
How can we engage younger volunteers / volunteers from outside the immediate area (ie village)
How does your site care for museum workers engaged in facilitating workshops/events for vulnerable people such as women who have lived experience of domestic or sexual abuse?
How can heritage be made more relevant?

Resilience

How can we safeguard the future of heritage, especially considering financial uncertainties and the future (sustainable) careers for heritage staff?
Many of our organisations are charities and therefore struggle for money, how can we balance the need to engage with the growing costs of even staying open?
Does your organisation currently run an operating deficit? How much of a priority is eliminating the deficit? Are you cutting programmes or services to help you eliminate the deficit?
How does your organisation cope with the digital world
How can large costs such as maintenance and fuel be funded by annual grants?
Is there a way the training in heritage skills and awareness about the impact design and materials can make to the built environment? Can we do a streetscape project to marry skills training to residents to Planners to councils to artisans?
Where do you get your research, how do you make the decisions you do without undertaking the necessary research, why are the main talent and skills within the sector the lowest paid and why are these individuals not engaged in decision making. Also can the leaders and representatives explain why there is such a vast pay difference between themselves and those that deliver consistent, high-quality decisions and content
What do you feel is the most important aspect of heritage that we need to preserve right now?
1. Engaging & motivating volunteers for smaller heritage organisations can be difficult. What techniques and examples can be shared to help smaller organisations do this? 2. How can people from low income households under financial pressure be motivated to engage in heritage?
At a time of great stress for the sector how can we promote mergers and takeovers to stop valuable knowledge, experience and skills being lost?

Operations

We have museums that are overflowing with artefacts that aren’t on display and which the wider public have no real access to. We are also gathering more materials all the time How should museums address this challenge? Should we start to see museum collections as more fluid, with only relatively small numbers of artefacts that are held forever?
how do you get affordable buildings insurance for your heritage assets

Visitor demand

heritage is being made now, do you have any plans to capture individuals stories in particular to capture how they are managing on low incomes during this cost of living?
How might the ‘£value’ of activities be measured – that is the benefit of savings contributed to health and social services? It seems only cost can be measured, not benefit.
How do we reach out better to the public
How would you suggest funding for transport is included more centrally within bids to facilitate attendance of the more isolated in remoter places?
How we can become more relevant to visitors who traditionally do not see us as a place they might want to visit.
To what extent would you say that audiences are at the heart of your organisation? (Possibly clarify with for example, does everyone in your organisation think about your audiences? Are decisions in your organisation made with audiences in mind?)

Heritage Fund / Historic England / UK Heritage Pulse related

What ideas do you have to offer further support for private heritage attractions, that do not rely on grants but are not for profit?
Why don’t you support more small and very valuable organisations, that work at grass routes more sustainable funding. It always has to be a project. We just want to do what we do well. Not waste time and energy coming up with new ideas
Can you fund staffing costs please?
Where is the evidence base across the different types of heritage offer (e.g. museums, parks, attractions etc) about which ‘types’ attract which ‘audiences’ and thus which is the most inclusive area / type of heritage – surely NT, NLHF, HE etc have data that could be combined?
How can we hook up with other groups who have similar problems to ours? How long does it take to receive funding once our application has been accepted?
Why are you not taking a more pro-active and assertive role in protecting our historic environment? Here in [REDACTED FOR ANONYMITY], the City Council is conducting a veritable war on the city’s built and archaeological heritage with buildings of quality and distinction being torn down and replaced with buildings of low architectural quality. No one from any of the major heritage bodies ever comments on this situation and heritage groups in the city have to work alone to oppose the reduction of the city to a mere clone town. Has [REDACTED FOR ANONYMITY] been ‘written off’ by HE and other national bodies and if so, why?
Would you consider funding local organisations to help more low income households engage with heritage?
Why do you give a greater proportion of the grant budget to large well established organisations and less to the much smaller grassroots organsiations?
Why is your consideration of the heritage sector apparently limited to visitor attractions and the like? It is far wider than you evidently perceive and includes commercial and professional organsiations who do not necesarily use volunteers or rely on local authority or goernement funding.
What support can you offer or get for community heritage where running costs and revenues are the greatest challenges – money always seems to be linked to capital or outreach and it would be good to have something similar to the ACE NPO’s for community heritage for example

Funding / models

Do you struggle with getting adequate investment levels in your park and has the availability of capital funds got worse or better over the last 10 years?
Why is there not a list of say the top one hundred projects that need funding that are not directly managed by the leaders in the heritage sector to be directly funded? This would enable a range of projects to be suggested and put forward. As one project is funded a new one could enter the top one hundred to be funded. People could event vote on what they wanted to be put forward as a project. It would also give an opportunity to projects that would normally have no chance to be considered for development and so on.
It sits uncomfortable with me that it is lower income families and communities we target to buy lottery tickets (as an organization, who receive a heritage grant, we are required to raise the profile of purchasing lottery tickets), yet it is more middle class communities (and the heritage sites they are involved in) that benefit from the heritage funding. How does this sit with you?
Heritage is very important to communities, is there enough funding shared to groups who are struggling to keep culture and heritage alive in their area.
Heritage means different things to different people, When it comes to funding, how do you define it?
Do you think there should be an annual committed grant to national faith heritage assets from central government as there is in Europe? More funding is required to assist in engaging with this sector of the community, who in fact could benefit greatly from engaging with heritage organisations on many levels.
Should Arts Council funding be distributed on an equal per capita basis across local government districts?
Why do local Authority’s seem to be not very interested in preserving the Heritage site in their locality

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

What do you find the most effective ways of engaging communities with indices of high social deprivation within heritage projects?
What can be done to make heritage careers more attractive / relevant to young people from lower socio-economic groups? Is the heritage sector really committed to doing this?
Do you really engage with low income households. approximately 95% of our customers are pensioners or young mothers with pre school age children. None of them have a high income.
I would like to know how we can engage with / welcome neurodiverse people more and people with hidden disabilities.
What actions are you taking to encourage visits from low income households?
What mechanism do other Heritage Groups use to attract low income Households?
It is widely accepted in the sector that we need to engage low-income households, how can leaders ensure that there is a top-down approach to appealing to these people, as well as bottom-up?
1. How can the heritage sector respond to the emerging needs of people with low incomes? Everything is relative. 2. How is the role of heritage responding to new migration from the developing countries to Britain? 3. The BBC is often the ‘first responder’ to questions about heritage. It has even mandated that a certain number of faces in a television programme must reflect diversity. Is this the right way of achieving diversity?
Is there a reliable accurate source of data which shares numbers of people facing barriers to visiting heritage places – eg. people living with disabilities, low income and different age ranges within the UK and the regions?
What steps have you taken to ensure that heritage is more accessible and affordable to low income households in the UK?
How much do you know about the causes of low income in your communities and how are you responding to this?
What are effective ways of engaging people from ethnic minorities in industrial heritage ?
How in this sector of short term funded projects are you going to ensure the long term engagement of low income families once the money runs out?
How do we all, as a whole, better engage with low income families and ensure affordable experiences whilst remaining a viable business model?
What are low income households? Is it more likely to depend on class or cultural background as to whether they want to engage with heritage?
What strategies do you plan to put in place to engage and involve ethnic minority communities.
How would you suggest that we engage low income families/people with nature. Our activities are all either low or no cost but still we cannot get enough people to engage from this sector.
When some people are choosing between heating and eating, how can heritage remain accessible to all?
Why does diversity only include ethnicity, and not class, income and political attitudes.
Why doesn’t the heritage sector employ more local working class people who are passionate about their history than university educated non local people?
How have you increased the diversity of your volunteer workforce?
Where are the voices of people from low income backgrounds in UK in the sector’s engagement with the past through the historic narratives that we have created?
Do you feel that the unnecessarily narrow demographic of people who get to decide on what is classed as ‘heritage’ influences the limited breadth of audience the sector regularly attracts?

Politics / advocacy

What advocacy are you undertaking to support your ambitions this year?
What are you doing to challenge government funding decisions for heritage in your area?
What are your priorities for heritage in this general election year? How do you want the sector to change during the next parliament?
Do you think we need to be less woke in our approach to obtaining grant funding and do you think that the dedicated fund for churches should be restored so that they do not have to compete with museums and local authorities for funding?
Is there a danger that the heritage sector is becoming more left wing, political and a little too woke ?
How can we make those outside the heritage sector appreciate its financial, wellbeing and cultural values? I find often those not involved in the heritage do not appreciate all of this, while those working in the heritage sector give it for grated and somehow fail to reach those outside our field. How best to create this exchange and osmosis of ideas?
How are you putting over the importance of heritage? How will you convince planning authorities that a heritage park in a town centre is more important and will generate more footfall than yet more housing having erased the heritage factors?

Other

Why do they charge so much at the ‘[REDACTED FOR ANONYMITY]’ – I couldn’t believe it!! Crazy and unbelievable .. £24.50 for an annual pass! I was visiting [REDACTED FOR ANONYMITY] I only wanted to look around! I could afford it – I have had a good job all my life – But I refuse to pay £24.50 for one visit! I see if you are on Pension Credit you can get in for £1 This is admirable.
1 – Define heritage 2 – Define the historic environment/heritage assets 3 – how can we help people/the sector understand they are not the same thing 4 – How might we develop a more reflecting and participatory definition of heritage that is co-created with the public from the bottom up? Yes this is more than one question but we need to really explore how we get out of late 20th C thinking to make us more relevant to society today, including how we embrace a wider participatory concept of heritage.
Can you do anything to revive the spirit of the excellent conference 2019 of Festival Churches?
How can allotments recognise their heritage and reasons to be an essential part of the heritage community
What are you doing to support low income families carry out basic maintenance to their home to ensure that they are watertight and off suitable energy efficiency measures?
Is it possible to analyse and quantify the benefit of engaging low income households versus the social cost of not doing so? Can it be done (and will anyone listen)?
Do you find the regulation and bureaucracy surrounding the maintenance and conservation of Heritage buildings time consuming, onerous and expensive?
Why do the hierarchy of heritage site fail often to understand the symbiotic relationship that exist between their site and other activities close by.
Do you think it’s possible for heritage to help people feel better about “life” given all the pressures and stresses in the world at the moment, or is it a “nice to have” which disappears when things are difficult?

Transcript of video above

0:00 Hello there, I’m Robin Cantrill-Fenwick. I head up the research team at the independent research firm Baker Richards who manage UK Heritage Pulse on behalf of our commissioning partners.

0:12 And I wanted to explain in this latest round of the survey, in the June round of the survey, how we’d selected the questions that appeared in the survey and how some of those questions were adapted because all of the questions came from the panel in some way.

0:26 So in April, at the end of the UK Heritage Pulse survey that month, we said we’re planning to trial an edition of UK Heritage Pulse consisting entirely of questions asked by panel members.

0:37 The author of each question will remain anonymous. Do you have a question that you’d like to ask leaders and representatives of the heritage sector in the UK?

0:45 And we got 83 suggested questions covering a really broad range of topics. They were absolutely fascinating. We have placed them all on the UK Heritage Pulse website with only a couple of very small redactions that have been highlighted In order to maintain the anonymity of the questioner exactly as we promised we would. So the first thing that we noticed when we opened up the questions was that all of the suggestions were what’s called open questions.

1:12 They all invited a a free text response, a box into which you type an answer. And we know from running UK Heritage Pulse for a few years now that although the responses from that type of question can be really really rich and packed full of information and interesting, actually respondents can find that type of question pretty tiring, fatiguing to respond to. If we put too many open questions in a survey then we know that people tend to drop off because we’re all busy.

1:42 So we know the panel prefer closed questions where we provide a range of possible answers and we have to be extremely careful when we design those questions that the range of answers that we provide doesn’t predetermine the outcome of the question, doesn’t prejudge anything, doesn’t close you off from thinking about an answer that we we might not have suggested. So it’s always a balance between open and closed questions in the survey and once we’d made the question selections that I’ll come on to, one of the first things that we did was to convert most of the questions from open questions to closed questions in order to have the panel respond and to help them stay engaged with the survey.

2:32 When it came to making the question selections I wanted to ensure that we covered new topics. So many some of, well some of, the questions that we received were a continuation of the April survey. In April we’d asked about engagement with low-income households.

2:41 And some of the questions that we received were a continuation of that topic. And I think we may well come back to that topic in in the future but my preference for this round was to to seek out new topics.

2:53 And we’d never asked anything before in any previous round of UK Heritage Polls about contemporary collection. And so the one open question that we did include in this survey was around contemporary collection.

3:06 I wanted to ensure that the questions we asked were timely and covered some of the most urgent uh challenges and issues and opportunities in the sector.

3:14 And as many of the organisations responding in June uh will have recently completed or completed or closed a financial year, we wanted to ask about whether the organisation had ended that year in deficit, if they had, whether they’d intended to and what the outlook was like for budgets and reserves in future.

3:33 And finally again to keep the survey engaging, some of the some of the questions that we received came from contained in the question an assertion.

3:43 And rather than ask the question and accept the premise of the question, accept the premise of the assertion, we thought it would be really interesting to pull the assertion out and to test whether the panel agreed or disagreed with that assertion.

3:59 And so There were a few questions that were attitudinal, where we asked you on what’s called a Likert scale to show whether you agreed or disagreed with the assertion that had previously been encapsulated in a question.

4:15 This is not the end though of that full list of 83 really really illuminating and interesting questions. As we say, as I’ve said they’re published on the UK Heritage Pulse website in full so everybody can see them but in particular we’ve drawn our partners attention to them so they can see some of the most burning questions that are being asked by people on the UK Heritage Pulse panel. The questions will continue to inform future rounds of UK Heritage Pulse.

4:46 We’ll continue to draw inspiration from them when we’re designing questions in the future as well as in other communications. So our partners are looking at these questions and you may well notice that some of these questions are addressed in other communications.

5:00 And we’ll also repeat the exercise in future, offering people an opportunity to ask the same question again or put a different question because we think this round has been really really illuminating.

5:13 So it only remains for me to say thank you very much to everybody who did suggest a question. It was tremendously helpful.

5:20 I hope you find the results of the June survey interesting and we will repeat this exercise in the future. At any time, you are absolutely welcome to contact myself and my colleagues on the research team if you have thoughts on topics we should be covering or questions we should be asking and you can find our contact details on the UK Heritage Pulse website.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash