September 2023
Featured in this insight: Culture, heritage & leisure
45% of heritage sector panellists believe the sector is over-reliant on volunteers: A survey of people working in the heritage sector and who sit on UK Heritage Pulse's panel – created by the National Lottery Heritage Fund to deliver collaborative data and insight for the UK's heritage sector – has revealed that 45% believe the sector is over reliant on volunteers. It also found that a quarter of respondents (24%) believe there is an opportunity to make more use of volunteers, while a little under a third said that the reliance 'is about right'.
The survey also revealed that almost half of the 241 respondents polled said the sector was most reliant on volunteers for public-facing roles such as room hosting, tours or interpretation (46.7%) with 38% relying on unpaid support to deliver education and learning programmes to function at full capacity.
Other areas where respondents said their organisation is reliant on volunteers was for technical skills including maintenance (42%), admin and finance (39%) as well as research and archaeology (35.3%). A third selected conservation and collection management (33%), while just over a quarter said they were reliant on volunteers for collections accession or cataloguing (26.7%). Managing health and safety (28.7%) and marketing (24.7%) were also cited, along with engaging with visitors transactionally such as through ticket or cafe sales (22.7%), pastoral roles (17.3%) and security (13.3%).
The research also found that smaller organisations were more likely to feel over-reliant on volunteers.
Heritage Pulse panellists were also asked about their experiences with recruiting volunteers, with almost three in five saying that recruiting suitable volunteers was 'challenging' (58%). In fact, just 14% described the recruitment process as ‘going well’.
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