One of the benefits of our Future Lab partnership with Oxford University is that we have discovered a whole new route to engage with students in collaborative, mutually beneficial ways!
In March, for the first time, we took part in the Micro-Internship Programme via the Careers Service, University of Oxford, offering two four-day internships, with two students taking part in each.
Although short, these internships support Future Lab’s small team with much-needed additional capacity for research and data analysis, while the students benefit from insights into the working world, the heritage sector in particular, as well as new skills and experience to add to their CVs.
The focus of the two internships was event programmes and digital marketing. Today, we would like to share with you the results of the Event Programmes internship!
Our two students each undertook a different strand of this internship: one looking internally, analysing attendee feedback and identifying areas of strength and weakness, and one looking externally, exploring the event programmes of peer organisations.
HB&P’s event programme has evolved a lot over the last few years, from an Autumn Visits programme of in-person events only, to a year-round programme of both in-person visits and online talks. Our audience has also begun to diversify, with some events, such as our Seaside Heritage Symposium and online training session on the cleaning of historic building façades, catering more to heritage professionals. We have collected feedback from these events and this has been used to help us shape the programme, but until now, we have not had capacity to carry out a deep analysis of the data, to identify trends, needs and opportunities for improvement. So we were delighted to welcome Elizabeth McCluskey, who dug deep into the data and reported back on her key findings.
Overall, HB&P’s events, whether in person or online, are very positively received and appreciated for the opportunity to visit niche sites or those that are not usually open for public visits and to hear from knowledgeable experts. The accessibility of online talks was a key strength, sharing expertise with anyone regardless of their location or range of mobility – whereas the accessibility of in-person visits was raised as an occasional issue, both in terms of location/travel distance from home, physical access (such as step-free access) and also ensuring there are opportunities to sit and rest. There was also potential to think further about the timings of events, to ensure that multi-site in-person visits were balanced well, and to consider whether different timings for talks aimed at professional audiences would be more suitable, for example to fit within working hours.
Our second event programmes intern, Sei Fujimoto, carried out the peer learning strand of the project. Referring back to the preliminary sector scoping work that HB&P and HILO carried out in Stage 0.5 of Future Lab in summer 2025, Sei identified a number of heritage organisations that run an events programme and conducted an analysis of the types of events these organisations held, exploring pricing models, frequency and target audiences.
She found that, while tours, talks, lectures and seminars still made up the largest categories of events, the types of event were diversifying, for example to include workshops, performances and concerts, seasonal and member-exclusive events. This broadening range also increased the diversity of audience.
She suggested that if HB&P varied the type of event we offer, this could help us engage with new people, create new collaborative relationships, and also bring benefit to the historic sites by increasing awareness about them and encouraging new use. She also recommended following up in-person visits (which typically have limited capacity) with a related online event, increasing access to the site and encouraging repeat visits. Member-exclusive events could also encourage a sense of community within our membership.
Her additional recommendations included trialling seasonal events with a targeted, common theme to attract a new demographic of audience, and to hold events specifically targeting young people. A final practical suggestion was to improve the events page on the HB&P website to make it easier for users to navigate between different event types and find what interests them most.
The Future Lab team were incredibly impressed with Elizabeth and Sei’s work, especially considering that all of this was achieved in only 4 days each! These insights will be invaluable as we review and seek to improve our events and engagement plan.
Words by:
Christina Avramakis, HB&P Operations and Development Manager
