Context 146 - September 2016

C O N T E X T 1 4 6 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 6 23 thanking volunteers by showcasing their work and giv- ing them some of the limelight, the creation of social media posts is also a good use of volunteer resources. Volunteers tend to come from the main audiences (local, interested), so putting your social media output in their hands is a good way of engaging with your public. And because it shows how volunteers make a difference, it should also help to bring more through the door. The examples Hayes showed proved that allowing some spontaneity and irreverence into your public offerings makes them more attractive.They also illustrated that there is some groundwork involved in getting those images: continual planning to make the effort, and getting some props or decoration ready, to animate the people first. Crispin Edwards Sarah Hayes explained that perhaps a less obvious but powerful use of social media was to analyse the demographic of your audience and, more important, who you were not reaching. Some social media plat- forms such as Twitter have the facility to provide basic demographic information for little or no charge. This has been helpful in identifying areas of the population to target or encourage in the future. Essentially Hayes’ message was that social media is free, it engages new audiences (often from significant distances), and it increases visitor and volunteer loyalty and choice. Julian Bagg These civil experts are light on their feet Speaker: Rebecca Madgin, University of Glasgow A senior lecturer in urban development and manage- ment at the University of Glasgow, Rebecca Madgin raised a key topic for our profession: inclusivity. Her thought-provoking talk looked at how we as heritage professionals can have a role as a conduit between activists and decision-makers. She used the example of skaters who used a spot beneath London’s South Bank Centre. They love this found place, but when it was threatened, how could they make decision-makers care? We are all familiar with the concept of authenticity, but in most of our work most of us will be outsiders to a great extent. Words like ‘spirit’ and ‘feeling’ are not common in the planning arena, but by getting the real constituency for a place to talk about it, their feelings will come through. Rather than try to interpret or explain this, simply getting your target audience to listen to the people talk, and even better getting them to come to the place and experience it and its people for themselves, can achieve the goal of making these feelings important in the process of decision-making. One of the key challenges, though, is to try to do this before a threat occurs. This makes widespread development and engagement of heritage audiences really important, so that their love for historic places is given some credence when plans are being made for those places. This made me think about the role of heritage champions, and how important it is that this continues to be supported, when so much of our work is reactive rather than proactive. A question from the floor asked how we could iden- tify the activists of tomorrow, before their special place was threatened. Madgin’s answer focused on providing as many opportunities as possible for people to meet and speak to each other. Getting local politicians to heritage forums, or inviting the owners of places to events, might be more worthwhile than we realised. The final point from the floor proposed that heritage was an elite profession, and asked what we were going to do about it. I certainly felt that attending this session will act as a reminder to me to be on my guard against this in my work, and that the day as a whole showed that the premise of the question was certainly not always true. Crispin Edwards Rebecca Madgin’s presentation was particularly useful for the annual school audience as it looked at heritage protection from a very different academic perspective than many in professional practice will have needed to consider. She explored examples where heritage lay at the margins of tangibility and whether it could be assessed as heritage at all. She discussed where attach- ment to a place or structure and an associated ‘lived’ experience interacted with statutory requirements relating to heritage protection. Madgin introduced the concept of members of the community as activists with a stake and a view of a par- ticular local issue as being ‘civil heritage experts’ who should not be ignored by the statutory process. One of the threads of the discussion was that there is often a feeling of ‘us and them’ between those wanting to preserve at grass roots level and heritage professionals Rebecca Madgin: identifying the activists of tomorrow