Re: Avebury: World Megameet. Saturday, 21 August 2010

BuckyE wrote:

Aren't people stupid? The prize SHOULD have been two free passes to a National Trust pay venue of your choice: any time, any place. That would have cost them nothing, and encouraged the winners to visit an NT site and hopefully appreciate the supposedly good work the NT is doing.

Perhaps the National Trust doesn't "Trust" themselves enough? Or maybe they just don't have good publicity people. Loie's librarians are more savvy than that!

It really is extraordinary isn't it. The tackiness of the prizes is almost beyond belief when, as you say, free passes (or perhaps a book from one of their shops) would have cost them (the National Trust) little or nothing at all. It's because official, or semi-official, bodies behave in this way that people lose confidence in them and then go on to wonder what else they might be getting up to behind their miss-managed closed doors.*

So come on National Trust, let's see some acton, let's see a public acknowledgment that you got it seriously wrong here, and that you'll be offering the photo winners an apology and something a little more than a box-of-matches type 'framed' photo of their submission as a prize.

* Re: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxkXdK2hcs4 (04:40 minutes in) where it’s difficult to reconcile that footage with what seems to be a ‘cleaned up’ version of the opening here - http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/about/multimedia-library/conservation-projects/ (Holes in The Hill: The Conservation Project Begins. 03:00 minutes in).