Ringing Forums

At the weekend I was with the training officer of one of our larger associations and I asked how many 'learn to ring' enquiries had they received through their association website. The answer was none!

It does seem that although a lot of effort goes into recording peals and publishing all manner of peal statistics, very little research goes into analysing recruitment and training. My experience is also that guilds and associations are not very transparent about how many enquiries they receive, and very precious about where they are forwarded to. Nor is there any meaningful data on what the conversion rates are. Does your guild/association publish any such data in it's annual report? If so what are they?

If we are to recruit and train 10,000 additional ringers in the next four years, we need 40,000 enquiries as about half of them will not get as far a visiting a tower and having an initial lesson, and about half of those who have a first lesson will not be ringing two years later. That means about 10,000 initial enquires a year are needed. Divided by about 50 territorial guilds and associations = 200 per year for the average sized society. Do we get anything like that number?

Fifteen months ago the CCCBR wrote to all its affiliated guilds and associations, asking them to provide a list of contacts in their area to receive learn to ring requests that come through the new CCCBR recruitment portal. Will this work?

What have we learned since Ring for the King? https://bellringing.org/ring-for-the-king-survey/