Ringing Forums

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.

Take a look at this map from Dove, showing the locations of simulators. Some pretty major gaps, even in the major metropolises where they could have a large customer base. — Tristan Lockheart

I'd be a little cautious about reading too much into that map - I know of at least 3 towers in the Greater Manchester area that have simulators and aren't on the map.

Getting towers to respond is enough of a task in itself ... it needs to be strongly supported by local officials or 'big names' — Tristan Lockheart

I think it's worth pointing out that towers can be "off the grid", for decades nobody at my home tower was in the association so we were unreachable. Even now there are only 3 of us. Without including those sorts of towers, any survey is going to be misleading - and sorry, no I don't know how you solve that problem! :grin:

the three broad attitudes I have experienced are... — Tristan Lockheart

I think your three categories are pretty accurate - at one of the towers I ring at a QP is a non-event, if only 6 turn up we'll probably ring a QP and clear off to the pub early, so it's a 1. For my home tower, as far as we can make out, it is 40+ years since the tower band could ring methods, and there are no QPs in bellboard by the tower band, so it's a 3. And I've rung in another tower in the area where it's a 2.

You have to be in the right area and in with the right crowd to get into QPs and peals... — Tristan Lockheart

I think that's right, and I've heard exact same comment from people at surprise major level in this area, so I think it's probably a mostly geographical issue.

lack of quarter peal opportunities as a barrier to completing the higher (4 and 5) levels of ART — Simon Linford

That's right, but it is a deeper issue than just getting a band together for a QP. At my level the first time you ring a QP of a new method is a challenge, one that you need regular practice for. That requires more from helpers than an one-off commitment to turn up for a QP. I've had kind people offer to arrange QPs for me, but unless I'm at the point where there's a reasonable chance of me getting through it, I really don't feel it would be right to take up the offer.

Interestingly, Surprise Minor/Major practices have popped up in two of the associations I ring in, but, as far as I can tell, although they have been advertised by the associations, neither of them have been arranged by them. It remains to be seen if they can be sustained, there's just about enough people at one of them to make it viable. It's also worth noting that without endless clanking away on our tower sim on my own during COVID I would still be at the PBD level, unable to take advantage of either of those opportunities, and there's not much in the area to bridge that gap.