Leeds Civic Trust

• Manage an organisational Steering Group, coordinating volunteers to devise and attract an exciting programme of events, as well as supporting and encouraging our core openers to take part annually.
• Produce an annual 50 page booklet, as well as local marketing including press releases and social media promotion. 

Adapting for 2020

We are really proud of how we adapted our usual offer and reinvented our traditional programme. As an organisation our events went 100% digital and although we were nervous about audience reach and marketing – with less events we managed to maintain ‘visitor’ numbers

We see Heritage Open Days as our annual flagship event, and there is a devoted core of ‘super-fans’, however we are keen to expand our audience beyond those who are familiar with HODs. This year, our online events allowed those who might possibly be reticent about attending traditional in-person events to ‘dip their toe’ into the wonderful world of Heritage Open Days.

Another important change to our usual offering was that this year’s programme meant that those with for example; caring responsibilities, restricted mobility, or other physical impairments were able to take part from their own home. Being able to provide live captioning and subtitles to talks and performances was a gamechanger for us, and although the more traditional audience missed their walks and tours, it has allowed us to engage with a different audience.

This year has been a real learning curve and it really took us out of our comfort zone…but in a good way – we have gone from digital novices to natives! We’ve learnt about basic video editing and production as well as recording our own talks and events, skills which will be invaluable in future.

We feel really incredibly proud of our volunteers and how they rose to the challenge – many of our volunteers had never heard of Zoom before 2020 and for them to adapt their talks, walks, performances and events online has been nothing short of incredible. It has strengthened our relationship with openers, and we all pulled together to keep this year’s show on the road.