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ask the Scottish Tourist Board about the possibility of a feasibility study being carried out to see how the STGA could benefit from being a more national organisation rather than regional. A National Council meeting at Perth discussed the idea with Mike Williamson, a market research analyst from market research company, TMS. The majority vote at the end of the meeting was that TMS should go ahead with its survey of members and subsequent proposals. National chairman Robin Hodge, and committee members Kevin Connelly and Catherine Martindale worked with the consultants who carried out their study between December 1994 and February 1995. The Scottish Tourist Board funded three quarters of the market research with the STGA national council paying one quarter. TMS pulled no punches.
‘The Scottish Tourist Guides Association has achieved much since it was formed in 1959,’ it said. ‘However, shortcomings in its national strategy and structure are now being exposed, and the association’s reliance on a branch structure and on the commitment and voluntary effort of particular members can cause rivalries and misunderstandings. Despite the misunderstandings and disagreements that do surface, there is a real camaraderie among many STGA members – but this ’club’ feeling must now be accompanied by a more business-like approach. The STGA needs to become a real trade association devoted to helping members build their business in a tourism marketplace which is competitive and rapidly-changing.’
The report said the STGA had traditionally been a city-based association branching out from Edinburgh to Glasgow and then to Aberdeen and Dundee. The branches had adopted broadly similar structures although constitutions, levels of subscriptions, booking systems, etc varied. But it said the national dimension had always relied on co-operation between branches rather than any clear central structure with executive powers of its own.
‘There is no national STGA constitution as such, although, curiously, the national council has its own ‘constitution’ – rather than being a national committee operating within the terms of a national constitution as would be the norm,’ it said. ‘The national council allows for members for each branch to sit on the council, but there is no national constitution to define the number of branches or how they are to be set up!’
Although a national training strategy and programme was steadily emerging training courses were still at branch level. TMS said issues for the future included a need for still greater national control/co-ordination of the programme to overcome the ‘competition’/inflexibility inherent in a branch-based structure when 30/35 trainees were required to make a course viable – which may result in too many guides being trained in the major centres in a particular year with too little opportunity for smaller numbers of potential guides in the more outlying areas to get equal access to training.
Among its proposals TMS recommended the STGA should be established as a company limited by guarantee. It also said that individual guides should be members of, and pay their subscriptions to, the new national STGA – with provision for some proportion of the resulting STGA budget being remitted to branches to spend on local activities which were consistent with the national strategy. ‘This, of course, would be the obverse of what currently happens, whereby subscriptions are decided and paid at branch level, and with a set amount being remitted to national level,’ it said.
TMS also said the national council should have clear executive powers and should be elected by the membership nationally. Crucially it recommended creating a permanent member of STGA staff, supported (particularly in the winter months) by specialist and voluntary help from STGA members on training, marketing, bookings, etc.
A key role for the new STGA member of staff would be to quickly establish herself/himself as the national point of contact with the STGA, and to promote the STGA to those with a direct or general interest in it,’ it said.
TMS said the continual changes in the personnel involved in marketing the STGA, the lack of any single point of marketing contact with the association as a whole, the lack of a properly resourced national marketing strategy and budget, and the informational rather than promotional design and content of the members’ list had all hindered marketing effectiveness despite the best (and voluntary) efforts of the people involved. ‘Marketing
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