14. A Year in the Life of Elizabeth Gaskell’s House
Posted
17th January 2025
in 10 year Anniversary, blog, blogsNnews, Gaskell House Blogs
12 – 17 January 2025
This week I was relieved and very pleased to finally see the five page feature we got in January issue of Lancashire life celebrating our 10-year anniversary. It was great local coverage for our small museum – a big thank you to Paul and the team for taking me up on the idea! (photo below of the main spread)
Sunday 12th was our monthly second-hand book sale and despite the remaining snow we had a good turnout of visitors and we sorted through lots of new stock.
Monday for me was back-to-back meetings including a webinar about a new grant from Museum Development North, our fundraising committee and my final group sessions on the AIM Spark leadership programme. The fundraising committee has a very positive meeting outlining a clear plan (and date in May) for an event we are planning to thank some of our private donors for their support over the past 10 years. Lots of actions for me including contacting various speakers and putting together a list of attendees.
We also discussed ideas for how we can encourage more people to support our £10 to celebrate 10-years fundraising campaign. We have had a good start but we still have a long way to go to hit our target by October 2025. Like so many cultural organisations out expenditure costs are rising fast and if we want to keep on doing what we are doing then we need to bridge some of the gap through donations. It costs £14,000 a month just to keep the House open and that’s excluding any major maintenance jobs!
I always have a fear that after the snow melts it will leave behind a major crack or hole in the building. I did spot a very small patch of crumbling rendering near the entrance but so far my fears have been largely unfounded (touch wood). However, we are due to get report on the condition of the building very soon so this will give me a more professional and knowledgeable report on the building condition.
On Wednesday I met with our panel to choose three young writers who applied through the Writing Squad for our inaugural writers residency. It was fascinating and thought provoking meeting and we were all so impressed by all the applicants. We will be formally introducing our three writers in the next few weeks but I really can’t wait to meet them in person and get started – they all have some great ideas which I’m very excited about.
Later in the day I met with Sam from Olympias Music Foundation to discuss ways we can work together over the next year and again discussed lots of ideas. Whilst I was in and out of meetings we had a busy afternoon visitor wise, clearing out of cake in the Tea Room and there was lots of progress being made on planning for our volunteer event in Feb thanks to Katy and Lucy.
In between all this we had a minor website hitch but it got sorted fairly quickly so that when I left the House at the end of Wednesday I felt very uplifted and inspired by all the wonderfully creative people I’d met or talked about that day.
Our first major online event of the year was also held on Wednesday evening – An introduction to Ruth. The event had actually sold-out the week before but we had been able to increase our Zoom licence and we sold over 130 tickets in the end. Coincidentally this month also marked the four year anniversary of Lynda, our Events Manager, joining the staff team (thank you Linked In for the reminder).
Thursday requires some kind of fan fair as we had our bi-annually VAQAS inspection. This is where we are ‘mystery shopped’ by a quality assessor from Visit England, and they inspect (and scrutinise) the visitor experience from the website and online ticketing to the welcome in the building, how clean and accessible we are, and how good the Tea Room really is (or isn’t). It is a slightly scary process but its also incredibly helpful as not only do we get a score and rating, but we also get practical advice on how we can improve. The final report, which we should get in a few weeks, will help us identify training we need to do with volunteers and future projects and building/operational improvements. The initial feedback from the assessor was overall very positive so I’m smiling!
Despite this I was feeling a little frazzled after the inspection but I just about managed to get through our trading company board meeting on Zoom at the end of the day.
Friday is my admin day so its more report writing, meeting planning, scoping grant applications etc. ahead of our main board meeting next week. Amongst the reports the board have a documentation policy to review and a report about the results of annual volunteer survey which Katy has compiled. The latter is really interesting and provides us more valuable insight about what our volunteers really think! (Spoilers – 91% of volunteers said they felt extremely or very appreciated for the work they do at Elizabeth Gaskell’s House).
The data will be shared with the volunteers in a few weeks together with an action plan providing responses to their comments and feedback. The feedback from the survey has also enabled Katy to put together a programme of talks and trips for the volunteers – the line up she shared with me this week sounds really good, starting with a trip to Ordsall Hall in March.
Lucy shared her second blog about 2024 wedding highlights this week – this week focusing on style!
Sally Jastrzebski-Lloyd
