Ringing Forums

ut only one person (me) is teaching at the moment and this is the pinchpoint. — Jason Carter

As it is almost everywhere. I don't see how we can deliver the quality of training needed to retain and progress the responders to "Ring For The King".

learners are one thing, established ringers, who make up the bulk of the ringing population, are used to a lifetime of "cheap or even better, free"

That depends on who you talk to. When The Ringing Foundation was set up to raise money and channel it into ringing a lot of ringers said 'it's not needed'. — John Harrison

That approach has turned out well then.

If ringing is to grow rather than to continue to decline it needs vision plus long term planning and support, that takes money, and a credible and professionally run organisation to raise it. But I'm pretty sure I'm preaching to this particular choir :joke:

good luck getting £52 per year out of your average ringer... :rofl:

↪John de Overa
if you don't mind doing that John, it would be useful to have. I don't want to miss a question out that we later regret not having an answer to. — Jason Carter

Here you go:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ZlmtNf52veNZoVuUkH-bNt7Jq_hycpQg

What's rather depressing is that all of the problems that were identified 34 years ago still seem to be endemic.

n which case, we would have to compile a dataset by requesting information from associations and merging it with the Dove dataset. — Tristan Lockheart

I've had a look at three association websites round here, they all have lists of towers including branches so I expect most will have, nationally.

One other wrinkle that occurred to me is that some towers are in more than one association, so some deduplication would be needed.

No, I couldn't find a column at that level, just Association. It might be in the database.

The other thing that would be of interest is tower contact details, but I suspect that might have to be obtained directly from Associations, and that might have data protection constraints. The other option would be to scrape it from association websites, where the details are public.

Yet another reason for a direct membership organisation :wink:

I'm part way through cleaning up a plain text version of the two PDF files containing the survey report that were posted earlier, does that have value or am I duplicating something that already exists?

Yes, and the just announced funding is £236,300 a year for the next three years, it's not their only funding stream.

So do we have details of the towers in each district and branch? — Tristan Lockheart

This is a start: https://dove.cccbr.org.uk/dove.csv?geo_region=1&bells=3%2B&ringable=1

Well it's fascinating stuff, but where would the money come from? — Alan C

This press release from an organisation I've been involved with dropped into my inbox this morning. I had a look at their accounts - in the last year their income was approximately £1 million. That's for an organisation started by a small group of people who had nothing but their shared passion, and have built a substantial and well-funded and clearly well regarded organisation from the ground up.

Ringing ticks most of the same boxes they do in terms of culture, community involvement, wellness and many more, but they had none of the advantages that ringing has - no existing national organisation, no access to infrastructure that in ringing's case is probably worth billions of pounds. They are visible to the public perhaps a few dozen times a year, ringing is visible at least once a week in thousands of locations across the country. Global Grooves don't have centuries of heritage in this country to draw on, ringing does. By comparison, I think the case ringing could make to funding bodies is an exceptionally strong one.

As far as I can tell, what ringing doesn't have is an ongoing fundraising effort with contacts to the relevant funding bodies in the UK. Any publicity and fundraising seems to be episodic and based around individual national events such as The Millennium and Queen's Jubilee. Clearly it will good if Ring For The King delivers a crop of new ringers, but if that's all it does I think it will be a missed opportunity. It seems like an excellent launchpad to move funding of ringing onto a long-term, sustainable basis.

What could ringing do with £1 million a year?

Will do, I'm busy today but will try to get it done by the end of the weekend.

But I suspect we need to recreate it, in a more modern age... — Jason Carter

I've had a very quick poke at the PDF docs - they convert quite nicely to text with the layout of the tables mostly intact and only a moderate amount of cleanup required. With that done it should then be possible to cut+paste the tables into a spreadsheet. If that would be helpful, let me know and I'll do a more thorough job.

OK, I wasn't sure what their exact remit was - thanks.

I can't see a way to get to a good enough sample of individuals for quant. analysis without a bias towards prosperous towers and learners on ART, short of a firm being paid to take on the task. — Tristan Lockheart

Haven't we recently announced exactly that?

as someone much lower down in the pyramid, I think your assessment of the current situation is accurate, particularly when it comes to the need for continuing development and the issues around associations.

I think the median ringer has probably been ringing CCs for a long time already, the question is if they have a desire to progress beyond that? And what proportion of ringers actually aspire to ringing peals, or is it of interest only to a small but highly visible section of the ringing community?

Perhaps something to explore in the questionnaire?

it would be good to contact each individual ringer. But we don't have any obvious workable system for that — A J Barnfield

I think it would need help from the associations - as a rank & file ringer I get regular emails from three I ring in, but admittedly that route is only going to reach those of us that are members. The Facebook ringing groups are another route to individuals - both the "regular" ones, the association specific ones and the ones where the learners hang out. As you say it's going to be difficult to get a truly random sample, but perfect is the enemy of good, as they say :smile:

TCs would be more than sufficient — Tristan Lockheart

I think that entirely depends on what you want to find out. There's inevitably going to be a degree of bias from TCs. No TC is going to say "I have no clue how to run things, my ringers are pissed off, many are going to quit and my tower is on its last legs".

The CCCBR's strategic priorities are couched in terms of the needs and aspirations of individual ringers, which I think is right. If you want to find out what individual ringers think then you need to ask them. That should be possible for a reasonable subset via existing association contact mechanisms - email, Facebook etc, but I realise that's not easy. However a workplace employee survey that only asked managers how things are going would be unlikely to accurately reflect the views of employees.

Are we all that scary hereabouts — PeterScott

Sure are :grimace: :scream: :fear:

It's for purely hysterical raisins - I needed an alternate soshul meejah account when we did the publicity for our rehang, then it got traction locally so I kept it going, then when I registered on here I reused it so people wouldn't get confused. No big deal.

I would like to assist! — Nick Lawrence

Thank you - I did reply to your PM, it should be in your inbox. I've provided more detail there.