Crew

Sunday afternoon, risottos on the turn another week at the Science Museum beckons.  Looking forward to meeting the second team of Explainers for their Advance Presentation Skills training.  Highlight of last week was seeing a trainee arise from the ashes of fatigue and deliver intricate, varied, artful and creative presentation skills.  With the right amount of CPD, time and care this Explainer will become a formidable asset for Visitor Engagement at the Science Museum.

Finding emotions

We were thrilled to run our first residential Presentation Skills Training course at the University of West London in September 2011. We had participants from Chester Zoo and The Houses of Parliament Education Service, as well as an eager new team of presenters who will deliver our National Curriculum science and history CREW workshops.

We spent the first three days theoretically and practically exploring the nine essential elements of an interactive presentation, with the final two days applying the techniques to the participant’s specific, shows and talks. This gave everyone the opportunity to be evaluated and try out his or her new skills in a constructive friendly environment.

The course was a great success and a fantastic opportunity for a group of workshop presenters from different institutions and backgrounds to come together share experiences and learn new techniques and skills.

“It has been useful to gain insight into how other companies do outreach. It has been exciting to learn and experience how to really engage an audience.”

Becca Biddle, Safari Ranger, Chester Zoo

“I have really enjoyed this course. It has given me more confidence to be louder and more dynamic…I feel it has been very rewarding. Being pushed out of my comfort zone was challenging but I feel I have achieved in developing a set of skills I can use in my job and develop overtime.”

Corinne, Education Officer, Houses of Parliament

“It has been great to have been given the support by the course leaders. Anything negative has been turned into a positive, and it has been wonderful to see a group of people who didn’t know each other at the beginning of the week, grow in confidence and embrace all the tasks.”

Nigel, new CREW workshop leader

The feedback from all of the participants was excellent with all of them stating that they would recommend the course. So with such an enjoyable and successful course we plan to run it again next year, watch this space!

A big thank you to our new friends from Parliament and Chester Zoo for being such willing and able participants and a huge welcome to Bria, Joe, Julia, Nigel and Arabella to the CREW family!

Discovering the joy of presenting

Its official CREW training in visitor engagement techniques will create fresh and innovative ways to sustain zoos, museums, galleries, science centres and cultural organisations of all kinds.

One of our clients recently reported a 960% increase in their fundraising results due to our training and techniques. This organisation grew their fundraising potential from £1250 p/month to £12000 p/month as a direct result of their CREW training programme.

Our visitor engagement programmes will harness the potential of your staff to interact with your visitors in a creative, educational, exciting and productive way that will generate income for your causes.

You have the people, all you need to do is use them… and we can show you how!

Creating confidence in your staff

Understanding how to engage visitors more effectively

Hope you are all rested. The trouble with having a break is that once the body has turned off auto pilot, it needs a lot of help to get it started again…well that’s what I am finding! Anyway, welcome back and if it is anything like the last year, we’ll be saying ‘Hooray 6 weeks off’ before you know it.

Over the summer while not visiting schools we have been working on our two new workshops Greeks and Storytelling we are particularly excited about story telling as it allows the children to be really creative with their ideas and learn a lot without even realising it!

We are also running our CREW Van Vouchers awards scheme this year, where schools can have a FREE workshop session on collection of only 5 vouchers. For every workshop your school books, our staff when visiting your school will give you a Voucher Reward Board (first visit) and a sticker voucher. So get collecting and remember the school collects the voucher, not the teacher so get gathering.

Visiting your school and getting your children enthused and enjoying the workshop is always very rewarding for us, and it is made all the more so when we receive the great pictures and stories that you send to us, we always run out of wall space during the year! So we have decided to have a CREW on line Gallery so that we can display some of the wonderful work the children send to us.
Lastly, we are training new staff next week, so you can look forward to seeing some new faces visiting your school this year as well as the old mingers.

Here’s to another year ahead!

2011 has been a year filled with training jobs, refresher courses and conferences. The CREW corporate team have been on the road quite a bit over the last couple of months. No one knows the M25 better than we do!

So we thought we would show you what we have been up to……..

Here is our very serious Managing director enjoying delivering the CREW staff induction day/ customer service training at spaghetti house, we don't know what his pizza tasted like but we can tell you that the Spaghetti House Pizza is really good!

Managing Director and Training Manager enjoying the parilamentary reception for Biaza, Where the evening and guests explored the possibilties for widening public acces to science through the activites and provisions of the Zoos and Aquaria in the BIAZA memebership. With our history and experience of training the very best of the best in the Sceince Museum explainer teams we believe we have a vital role to play in helping the DBIS (Department of Business, Innovation and Skills) and BIAZA meet these excellent goals.

Here is Adam Senior Managing Director and Helen Field from The Fuselier Museum in Manchester. Enjoying the AIM conference and conversations about staff development and current economic climates that effect the museum industry.

Here is Bala very serious training manager delivering customer service training to some of the Lemurs at FOTA wildlife park. We are not sure of what the Lemurs were called but we called them Dave and Nick...

Some of the delegates listening to and excellent presenter outside FOTA's Sea Eagle enclosure. Barbara is exactly the type of staff member we like to work with during our communication/ presentations skills courses. She represtents excelllent good practice, she is relaxed, funny, honest, engaging and presents perfect human interpretation of the Zoo's collections. This is exactly the kind of valuable Human resource that we work with Zoo's to define, refine and replicate across their wider teams. Well done FOTA for an excellent experience.

Observing, evaluating and refreshing The Lemur feeding talk at Newquay zoo during our Animal Talk Presentation Skills, Refresher course.

Newquay Zoo

The CREW Refresher Course...

This week we returned to one of our favourite museums, MERL (Museum of English Rural Life), for a Refresher Course with all the volunteers. We were excited to see how far the group had come and how confident they were when guiding a tour around the museum.

The morning began with us watching and evaluating the volunteers tours and after a lovely lunch we embarked on a journey known as the CREW refresher! The whole aim of this course is to re-invogorate, re-inspire and remind the volunteers of what they have learnt with us in the past and it is quite a fun team building experience too!

We split the group into two teams and they were tested through quizzes and physical challenges on all the CREW techniques. The teams gave it all they had as we showed them the prize available for the winners and the refresher sweets available for the losers (yes MD Adam Senior has quite the sense of humour).

We really enjoy working with the volunteers at MERL and believe that all museums should invest in their volunteers as they are a vital part of any team! We look forward to returning to MERL and were very happy to see how their volunteers have benefited from our course.

Getting ready for Evaluations..

Discovering Confidence!

Being Refreshed on CREW Theory.

Using CREW Techniques.

The Prize for the winning team!

Dear CREW,

I am writing with regards to the Ancient Egyptian workshop we had put on by you on Tuesday 21st June. I wanted to leave feedback for Mortimer (I think his real name was John-I do apologise if I’ve got it wrong) We thoroughly enjoyed the workshops and all 3 groups of children were captivated by the performance and experience. They all took part and joined in with the workshop and each and every one of them have learned something new. The children were buzzing when they came out and as a consequence are really enjoying their Ancient Egyptian topic. I would like to say a big Thank you from the year 3 teachers and staff here at Grange Park. We all enjoyed the day and hope to book again next year for the new cohort. We are also looking into some of the other workshops you do as a result.

Once again we thank you,

Lucy Murphy
Grange Park Primary School

In these trying times we understand that many industries are cutting back on things like training. However, we believe that people are your GREATEST resource and it is through your staff that you can create the 3 R’s (Repeat business, recommended business and the much needed retail opportunities). Therefore we believe that if you are cutting back, don’t cut things like training. Make sure you Invest in your staff! If you invest in them you will create a better and stronger business and of course you will have a happier team.

We were very happy to come across an interesting article regarding this by Chris Divine, Workforce Dimensions LLC, Washington (Human Resources Consultants) called ‘People Are The Most important resource in the Workplace’. You can find the article here:

Chris lays out a clear and logical argument as to how it is critical to always tend to the needs and concerns of your workforce. We were also interested to read about his view on training as he says: “Training and Development – This might be one of the areas to be the first to be cut back but it should remain a priority in the budget cycle. Closing the door on increasing employee skills and developing your workforce could be a risky move.”

We agree Chris and we hope the rest of you do to! Food for thought indeed….

On the 16th June the CREW team were very excited about attending their very first AIM Conference which was hosted by the Imperial War Museum, Duxford. We have recently become AIM members and are quite impressed with all AIM has to offer the world of museums.

We arrived at our hotel in Melbourne, Cambridge and were pleasantly surprised by the fact that it looked better than it’s advertisement on the net. We dropped our bags and then headed off for registration at IWM, Duxford.

The conference gave us an opportunity to meet a whole variety of people from various independent museums. We were thrilled by talks regarding ghost’s in castles, using your site as a film location and of course one of our favourite talks was all about two dogs and a nun!

Following these talks on Day 1 of the conference was the AIM dinner which was placed in an old barn on a lovely estate. The food was glorious, the English wine was impressive and the company was fun. All in all a good evening! A night cap then followed with our new friends from The Fusilier Museum in Manchester, good times!

The following day started off with a talk by AIM’S new chairman Matthew Tanner MBE, who spoke about AIM’s ‘Way Ahead’. We were particulalry impressed when Matthew stated: “Among key elements are furthering communications and developing networking with members, increasing membership, raising AIM’s profile still further through advocacy and PR, campaigning on important issues, working with Arts Council England (ACE) for the best delivery for museum development and advice, building on AIM’s grant programmes’ success, developing advice lines for members and developing new income streams for AIM.”

We then attended a workshop hosted by Kids in Museums, we are very interested in the work this organisation is doing. Following lunch and some ‘networking chat’ we hit the M11 and headed back to London.

We would like to thank Justine Stone and Michael Cope for welcoming us into the AIM ‘fold’ and of course to everyone at AIM a massive thank you for a great conference. We are looking forward to the next one!

On the 8th June two of the CREW corporate team set off for Cork, Ireland for the BIAZA conference. CREW have recently become members of BIAZA and we are really impressed by the work they do. We are also really excited about our future relationship with such a great organisation.

This being my first trip to Ireland I pondered the legend that Guinness taste noticeably different and better in Ireland. I concluded that this was mere myth and Irish delusion. But the topic of the conference being ‘Evidence Evidence! Basing decisions and actions on a sound foundation’ I felt an experiment brewing!

So after smuggling our (reasonable sized) hand luggage through Heathrow security we sat down at the terminal bar for “a pint of the black stuff.” Pleasant and smooth, a reasonable pint of Guinness.

Two hours, a plane and a one-armed taxi driver later! Adam and I found ourselves sat in a Cork pub with another pint of Guinness in front of us.

Tentatively we both raised the black liquid to our mouths, poured the famous stout over our tongues and down our esophaguses. LIKE GUINNESY ANGELS SWIMMING IN OUR BELLIES! I stand corrected; much creamier and with less of a bitter after taste than the Guinness in England.

And like the Guinness the BIAZA conference, FOTA Wildlife Park and Cork proved to be surprising, interesting and exciting. A highly stimulating and enjoyable weekend.

Bala McAlinn

Training Manager, CREW

CREW MD Adam Senior and Training Manager Bala McAlinn at FOTA wildlife Park