Will all towers ring for the King? I would also argue that before embarking on another national PR and recruitment campaign, we first need to carry out an internal PR campaign to make sure that any influx of new recruits can be handled properly. It's interesting that ART has received around 2,000 RFK enquiries in recent months, and although the number of fresh enquiries has slowed right down, there are now a significant number coming back to ART asking if there is somewhere else where they can be taught to ring. They are keen to learn but only making very slow progress at the tower where they are learning. — Roger Booth
Well, you certainly don't need to argue as far as I'm concerned, I think you are absolutely right! Your comments about struggling to keep progressing exactly mirrors my experience when I started - the issue is not a new one. Getting people through the door is easy in comparison to keeping them coming back. That needs internal PR and coordination to be done
first, not after we have a queue.
There's a tower in the association who has taken on 10 new ringers as part of RFTK. I appreciate the enthusiasm, but how are they going to deliver a quality experience, how are the learners going to get the amount of rope time they need to keep progressing, what's the drop out rate going to be, and what's that number of new people going to do to the dynamics of the existing band?
We've deliberately not gone "all in" recruiting, including not recruiting for RFTK because we realised we didn't have the ability to cope with a big influx of learners. Instead we've concentrated on steady organic growth via people who really, really want to learn. A very keen adult learner who started a year go has rapidly caught up with the rest of the band (we are mainly CC & simple methods) because we concentrated on getting her up to speed as quickly as we could and she's now a "core" member. We are doing the same with the 10 & 12 year olds who started recently (not as part RFTK), again the plan is to give them the best possible learning experience so they keep coming. And I've had two more people ask today during our tower open day, although we didn't say anything about recruitment during the day.
Learning to ring is a big investment in time on all sides, and in the case of teaching, investment of a scarce resource. From Ringing 2030:
- "The pipeline needs strengthening."
- "We need a steady supply of people wanting to learn."
Yes, and yes!