Our New Normal



The good news is that we are back off furlough, well almost. The Museum will be operating the flexi-furlough scheme to help us through the next couple of months, so my working week will be interesting over the next few weeks. The Museum will be run on a skeleton staff, with only two members of staff on-site for the foreseeable future. This limits what the Museum team can do. At the moment, it is open the doors and regular cleaning with a few other smaller jobs in-between. Not ideal, but it is about survival.

Like most Museums, opening the doors took some serious thought. We want visitors through the door, to see our Collections, learn about the local history and enjoy their time in the Museum. But the reality is that even opening the doors comes with a cost. Visitor income is crucial to our survival. And once we take staff off furlough, you can throw in staff wages that have to be covered too. It is a gamble. Will people actually step outside their front doors and visit heritage sites? Or will they be reluctant to take the plunge? All this had to be weighed up before we made the decision to open yesterday.

So we took the chance, but needed to make sure it was easy for people to book the on-line tickets. So a press release was written and distributed. Hopefully, we wouldn't be overshadowed by the opening of pubs. We have a reasonably good relationship with the local press. A decent spread in the local weekly paper The Cumberland News was a good start. Plus I was interviewed by Richard Corrie from BBC Radio Cumbria before we opened yesterday. It gave me a chance to thank the local businesses that we have worked with, and reassure folk that we were prepared and ready to open our doors at 10am. Plus on-line support came from local sites that retweeted and shared our postings. It is good to know that the support is there.

Day two. Nick and Angela are at the reins, on this extremely windy and blustery day. I briefed them about Super Saturday and the minor tweaks that had happened throughout the day. Once the weekend is over and we have all got used to operating differently, we will settle into our new daily routine. We will work out what we can do and can't do. It may take a few weeks for our 'new normal' to settle in, but one thing is for certain - it feels good to welcome visitors back into Alma.

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