The Lottery officer

The lottery officer

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Jane Taylor presents the results of the first national survey into the nature of work and role of lottery staff in local authorities

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THE SURVEY
In May Lottery Monitor sent out questionnaires to 700 named officials at council offices throughout the UK. Our aim was to reach the individual or team within every council that had primary responsibility for dealing with lottery funding, in order to establish for the first time a national snapshot of the role of a contemporary council ‘lottery officer’. Our covering letter asked that the questionnaire be forwarded to the most relevant officer: we were really hoping for a single response per local authority. (In the event five councils submitted entries from two separate officers.) The geographical spread of responses covered the whole UK, with the West Midlands under-represented and the South-West over-represented. From 149 councils out of a possible 434, and a total of 154 responses, yielding a response rate of one in three, we can present what we believe is an authoritative picture of the role of today’s lottery officer.

The big picture
Eight years after lottery funding began, it still has no settled locus within local authorities. Responsible officers remain scattered throughout different council departments, with a variety of reporting structures, relationships and job roles. Most lottery officers have substantial other duties, too, spending on average one-third of their day on lottery matters.

Two minority definitions of a lottery officer are identifiable. The first is the traditional arts and sport-based officer, who remains firmly within that departmental context. The alternative is an officer attached to a corporate department with a more strategic role and position. The survey also puts beyond doubt the pivotal role that lottery officers play in their links with community groups. It is clear that while there is considerable pressure in the lottery funding world for local authorities to focus their resources on strategic projects, we have in lottery officers an important infrastructure for promoting cooperation and partnership between local groups and the council – a relationship which many local authorities have found it hard to negotiate in the past but which is increasingly seen as a vital component of a healthy local democracy.

SURVEY RESULTS IN DETAIL
Role, location, colleague support
Being a lottery officer is not usually a full-time role. We asked how much time lottery-related work takes; 76% spend half their time or less, with an average allocation of one-third of a job (Chart 1).

Chart 1

Lottery work provides a full-time job for 6%. 10% have ‘lottery’ in their job title, compared with 14% carrying ‘community’ or ‘voluntary sector’ and 15% with ‘external funding’ or equivalent. All bar two of the full-time officers designate themselves ‘lottery officer’. We asked what other duties are combined with lottery work and found that these scatter in many directions, confirming that there is no settled understanding of the role of a lottery officer. However, two broad divisions do emerge, reflected both in how time is spent, and departmental location.

A substantial minority remain attached to the departments in which lottery work was traditionally located: leisure or similar. 27% of lottery officers have arts, sport, tourism, recreation or culture in their job title, and a third work in leisure services, sports development, cultural services or similarly named departments. In line with this, the biggest concentration of non-lottery work falls in this sector.

The second concentration is officers based in the chief executive’s department (6%) or attached to a central corporate or strategic department such as economic development, finance, corporate services and so on (27%).

But beyond these departmental contexts, the core elements of the job – those most widely incorporated in day-to-day roles – are voluntary sector support; external fundraising; sport / arts / tourism; and regeneration: 54% undertake work in at least two out of these four areas (Chart 2). 18% work in community services-type departments and the same number in regeneration, planning, etc.

We asked how many other people in each officer’s authority also work on lottery matters. We find an average of 4.3 officers per council involved in lottery work, but this masks the fact that in more than a quarter of councils (26%) there is just a single lottery officer – and in 12% of councils lottery is not a full-time job for that single individual. Nearly half (46%) of councils have four to six officers (including respondents) sharing lottery duties (Chart 3).

Chart 2

Chart 3

In a few cases these are clearly corporate-based teams, but for the most part they are contacts within the various key departments: education, arts, countryside / environment and so on. 15% of councils divide up lottery responsibilities among seven or more people.

We asked how long lottery officers have been in their current role (Chart 4). There is a high level of stability, with a quarter having been in post for five years or more, and more than half (55%) in post for two years or more. At the other end of the scale, 18% have been in the post less than six months. And jobs seem to be stable in their definition: despite the relatively fluid lottery / external funding scene, for three-quarters, their job title has not changed.

Performance targets, corporate responsibilities
We asked whether lottery officers had been set any performance targets in their work, whether financial or not. For 80% the answer was no. Among the remaining fifth, our follow-up question yielded some interesting examples of target-setting.

We asked whether lottery officer posts were wholly council-funded, and a decisive 96% said yes. Among the 4%, other sources of funding were cited as: SRB, RDA, shared council funding, European Objective 2, social inclusion partnership, and, in one case, a lottery board.

We wanted to find out more about current levels of responsibility and reporting relationships in the council. 18% have ‘manager’ in their job title – although this is not always a clear indication of seniority. Just under one-third listed a director/ head of department as a line manager; five report directly to the chief executive and another two to the deputy CEO. Just under a quarter told us that in addition to their departmental manager, they also report to the chief executive’s department: in most cases where this happens they are already located in a corporate department or free-standing unit, rather than a traditional functional department.

Main working relationships, role, outside contacts
Daily contacts show a high level of consistency in terms of outside relationships (Chart 5). Top of the list, 88% liaise regularly with local community groups. Then come the lottery distributors (77%). Consistent with findings about the

Chart 5

importance of external fundraising within the role, non-lottery funders form the third most frequent set of contacts for lottery officers: 62% play some part in brokering partnership funding. And a surprisingly large number – 58% – are in regular contact with local strategic partnerships. This last figure suggests that LSPs are developing rapidly as key structures, and, encouragingly, that lottery officers are acknowledged participants.

We examined levels of contact with the lottery boards in rather more detail (Charts 6 and 7).

Chart 6

Chart 7

It’s only to be expected that Awards for All scores highly across lottery officers, in terms of both weekly and monthly contact. As we have found in previous surveys rating distributors, working relationships with Awards for All tend to be straightforward and productive. Levels of contact with other lottery boards show, yet again, that Community Fund and the Sports councils have solid local relationships (even though fewer lottery officers are the main contact point for the latter boards), with NOF only just trailing them.

Chart 8

Lottery officers consistently have least contact with the Arts boards (Chart 8). While there are some obvious and sensible reasons for this, it perhaps also indicates an area of under-exploited potential. For instance, while 41% say they are the main contact point for the Arts boards, only 20% list an arts officer or department among colleagues who also deal with lottery matters, which suggests that in a substantial minority of councils no one is taking clear lottery responsibility for arts contacts.

We will have to wait for the Heritage Fund to roll out its regional staff and its new programmes with their emphasis on more, smaller local awards, to see what difference that makes, but this, too, undoubtedly represents another area of opportunity for lottery officers.

We asked, in relation to the lottery distributors, what exactly the lottery officers’ role is. Do they advise community groups and council departments? Do they write bids? (Chart 9).

Chart 9

Officers have a very clear role in advising others about the lottery distribution maze. 90% advise community groups about one or more of the boards: ranging from 84% in the case of Awards for All down to 50% for Arts. And 81% offer advice to council colleagues – covering all of the boards, but again with the least input when it comes to Arts.

58% also get involved in bid-writing for one or other board, a fifth of whom help put together bids to all the boards. The lowest level of involvement among bid-writers is with the Arts boards (23%); the others are fairly evenly matched, with 34% helping write for NOF, Sport and Awards for All.

We then asked lottery officers to rank the different aspects of their work in terms of their relative importance. For more than 60%, a clear priority is working with community groups on their lottery bids, rising to 82% if second priority answers are added. Compare this with the 20% who say their first priority is to set up and coordinate partnership deals with other organisations and fun-ders (this function was a second-order priority for a further 39%). A handful specified their role in writing applications as a priority.

Networking
Either officers are all locked in fierce competition or their networking potential is seriously underdeveloped: 7% communicate weekly or more and 39% rarely get together (Chart 10). On this evidence there must be many valuable lessons going unlearnt.

Chart 10

This observation reinforced responses to our inquiry about whether officers would appreciate more contact through a lottery officers’ forum (Chart 11). More than 60% would welcome more networking contact both via a virtual forum and occasional meetings or practical events.

Chart 11

Examples of performance targets

’£400,000 in grants over 4 years’
‘To increase the amount of funding awarded... in line with the % of population resident in the area’
‘60% success rate’
‘prioritise two major capital + other minor projects’
‘50 organisations assisted per annum, five funding events per annum’
‘Local performance indicator relating to number of groups supported, local performance indicator = £xx funding received by groups we have supported’
‘increase in number of applications and successful applications to the Community Fund’
‘£102 of lottery per head by 2005/2006’
‘£500,000 per annum’
‘two major bids a year’
‘£100k a year’
‘team target of £2.2m a year’
‘position in the lottery league tables’
‘to raise level of lottery funding to coal-fields average’
‘Grant for HLF projects (two large estate bids £10m)’
‘four bids / year’