Us and Them (3)

In previous Newsletters, I discussed the different ways that we can relate to non-ringers, and make the communities in which we ring much better informed about ringing, since from this higher profile and greater understanding should flow benefits, including easier and more effective recruiting. Nothing is guaranteed of course, and acute shortage of ringers may focus the mind. Even if you do need to focus on recruitment, it still pays to think more broadly, to make a more attractive offering, and to try to foster longer term interest in those you recruit.

So who are you trying to attract? Don’t just say ‘anyone willing to learn’, which puts you into the ‘beggar’ mindset, which as we saw in the first article doesn’t give a very attractive impression. Any advertiser knows the importance of having a clear view of your target audience. So let’s think about the pros and cons of recruiting from different groups within the community.

Parts of the wider community

Parishioners – They form a well defined group that you can easily target, and you can enlist the church authorities to help you do so. They should be familiar with the routines of church services, and they should feel some sense of commitment to the church. On the other hand, they represent a rather small fraction of the local community, and many of them may be past the age when it is easy to learn new skills. Nor can you assume that their commitment to the church will mean that they are more punctual, or more regular in their attendance. You might think it would, but active parishioners who already have commitments to the choir, as sidesmen or as church wardens, might put ringing second to these other duties.

As an extreme example, I once trained our curate to ring. He seemed an ideal recruit. He learnt quickly, and was soon confidently ringing good rounds with the simulator. So I invited him to join in the weekly Monday practice, only to discover that he wasn’t available on Mondays. He had visited a practice, but didn’t realise that we only practised on one evening. Even so, he was already good enough to cover reliably, and he could have made progress just ringing for services, but that didn’t work either because when he wasn’t taking the service himself, he was fully involved with youth work. So he never made it to Sunday ringing, and we lost a very promising ringer.

Villagers – A village is not just a smaller version of a town. Villages seem to have more of a sense of community. So although you would be fishing in a smaller pool than you would be in a town, you might find that people identify better with the village as an entity, and that even non-churchgoers take a significant interest in things that they see as being linked with the village’s heritage or cultural identity. Of course you can’t take this for granted, and I don’t know how true it is of the villages in our Branch. The effect is likely to be diluted somewhat when a village expands to become a satellite of a nearby town.

School pupils – A school is unlike any other group within the community, and represents a wide social cross section of it. There might not be a school near you, or it might not cater for the age range that you wish to attract, but if there is, then why not consider trying to develop some sort of relationship with the school. Giving a talk, as I mentioned in an earlier article, helps to sow the seeds of goodwill and interest in young minds, but serious recruiting is a much bigger challenge for two reasons. Schools are under a lot of pressure on their time, so fitting in a substantial additional activity is not easy. To be worthwhile to the school, any activity should benefit a substantial number of pupils, not just the odd one. So the resources you need to support it could be substantial.

Successful school initiatives have included after school clubs and end of year events. They are periodically reported in The Ringing World, and they might provide some inspiration for what you could do. To find when they were published, you can download indexes from ringingworld.co.uk/ . At the time of writing, the Ringing Foundation’s ‘Bells in Schools’ initiative is offering grants to help support innovative proposals for working in schools. There are details on the Foundation’s website: ringingfoundation.com/  .

Connections

Anyone in business will tell you that word of mouth is a most effective forms of advertising. People tend to believe what their friends tell them more than what salesmen tell them, or what they read in advertisements. Recruiting is a form of selling. You aren’t trying to part people from their money, but you are trying to persuade them to invest a huge amount of time, effort and personal commitment. They will only do that if they think it is a fair price for what they get in return. Different people will look for different payoffs of course, from getting a kick out of learning something new to the satisfaction of helping preserve our heritage, with lots of others in between.

Family members – We all know of ‘ringing families’ where learning to ring is as automatic as inheriting the family heirlooms. Not all ringers’ families are like that, but even if there is no expectation of learning to ring, with a ringer in the family, ringing is ‘normal’ in a way that it probably isn’t for many people. That lowers the threshold for giving it a go. It doesn’t always work though. For some young people, it’s not ‘cool’ to do the same things as their parents (though that’s less true if it is an uncle or aunt who rings) so when you recruit ringers’ children, try to offer them ‘their own’ ringing experience, separate from their parents. Family ties can work the other way too, when parents of ringers deciding to learn. They don’t worry about being ‘cool’, but they might be concerned about not being as good as their offspring, so again you need to give them their own ringing experience, regardless of whether they are likely to catch up with their children.

Friends – Having a friend who is a ringer also helps people to see ringing as a normal activity, in the same way as having a ringing relative.

Ex-ringers – You might be surprised how many ex-ringers there are. Some are the ones who started learning and then decided it wasn’t for them, and they probably wouldn’t make good recruits, but others were fully fledged ringers who stopped ringing for all sorts of reasons (job, family, geography, ...). Once you get out of the habit of regular ringing, it is easy to carry on like that, even if the original reason for stopping is no longer there. I know because it happened to me. But given the right stimulus, taking it up again may not be a big step, especially since there is no initial learning process to go through, just a few cobwebs to blow away. All it needs is the right encouragement at the right time.

In the next article I will go beyond thinking about broad groups to target for recruiting, and discuss what type of person makes a good recruit. There is also a report on recruitment and retention on the Guild website at: http://odg.org.uk/pdf/recruit_retain.pdf 

John Harrison December 2010

Article originally printed in the Winter 2011 Sonning Deanery Branch Newsletter, 

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