Because if we want to change the world, we first need to change ourselves

But for all our pride in who we are today, we know that we will not be able to deliver this strategy unless we continue to change.

Our ambitions require more resource and so we need to increase the amount of money we raise. So we plan to increase our annual income from £14 million in 2021/22 to £27 million in 2027/28.

We need to:

• Get better at offering people ways to fundraise and donate that suit them best. The more we can offer fundraising opportunities that are tailored to people’s interests and relationship to blood cancer, at the right time for them, the more money we will raise.
• Be highly ambitious, looking at different activities and opportunities that could provide transformational growth. We currently raise around £3.5 million per year in this more innovative way, but we aim to increase this to almost £10 million per year over the next five years.
• Stay responsive to insight and trends that offer transformational opportunities and the chance to grow our income much more quickly.

It will not be enough to just get better at raising money. Across the whole charity, we need to change how we work, to be better able to develop the right campaigns and services that people with blood cancer need. Developing our product and service design approaches will be key to us playing our full role in driving forward the research agenda.

Our new customer relationship management system (CRM) and website have given us the foundation to improve how we are able to communicate with people in the right way at the right time.

But we still sometimes take an approach of telling everyone about everything we’re doing. And too often we treat people as either fundraisers or service users, when the reality is that many people affected by blood cancer want to both benefit from our services and contribute financially.

So we will focus on using data to improve how we are telling people more about the things that are relevant to them, and less about the things that aren’t.

It’s not just about what we let people know about – we need to get better at meeting people’s needs in how we develop fundraising programmes, research funding, health information, services, and campaigns. We are proud of how we responded to COVID, working in a cross-organisational way and responding quickly to events and changing course when that was in the best interests of our community.

But we need to make sure we are working in this way in everything we do. To do this, we need to:

• Consistently deepen our understanding of the needs of people affected by blood cancer, so that everything we produce is designed to meet a need more effectively than it’s already being met.
• Increase involvement of people affected by blood cancer across all our work.
• Make better use of data to inform our decisions, including regular testing and being prepared not to go ahead with something depending on what the testing tells us. To improve how we do this, we need to significantly improve our digital skills right across the charity.

And improving how we work also means working better with others. Our work responding to COVID has been a powerful reminder that we can often achieve more when we’re working in partnership, and we will actively seek out partnerships with charities, companies and institutions that share our values and our determination to beat blood cancer.

Our research tells us that people affected by blood cancer who are in touch with us have a better experience and better outcomes than those who are not. Yet we do not reach and support all of those people who could benefit from us. Involving a larger, more diverse community in our work would in turn make our organisational decision-making better. So this strategy will only be successful if we significantly increase the size of our community.

Building a large community and involving them in every aspect of our work won’t just mean we fund better research, develop better services, and make sure we’re campaigning for the things that will really make a difference. It is only if people affected by blood cancer are in touch with us that they will be inspired to fundraise, whether taking on challenges, organising events, shopping in our online shop, or making donations, to contribute to our mission of reaching the day when blood cancer is beaten.

As well as growing the community of people we’re in contact with, we need to ensure our community reflects the diversity of people affected by blood cancer. Unless we are involving a broad range of people in developing our work, there is a risk our work will not meet everyone’s needs. In particular, we are not yet in contact with enough people affected by blood cancer from ethnic minority groups, and so improving this will be a key focus for us.

Our positive working culture has been built through embedding our values – striving for results; being united as a family; standing in others’ shoes; and making knowledge count – across all of our work. We have achieved this by ensuring we are constantly talking to and listening to our community; by keeping our focus on the cause of beating blood cancer; and by creating a working environment where staff are trusted and treated like adults. Agile working, where we focus on delivering outcomes rather then where and when people choose to work, are things we were already doing before the pandemic.

Our success in this means we are now a charity that the best people in the charity sector want to come and work for. We've been accredited by Best Companies as a “world class” company to work for. We greatly benefit from having highly motivated employees, whose commitment to our cause means we consistently deliver high quality work.

So while strategies usually focus on the things that need to change, a big part of our focus for the next five years will be retaining and building on this positive culture to ensure we remain a charity where brilliant people can do their best work. Key focuses will be further developing leadership skills; improving how teams from different parts of the charity work together; and becoming more diverse and inclusive.

We will focus relentlessly on these four areas of work, because they will be like the legs of a swan – not always visible outside the organisation, but vital to our ability to move forwards quickly.