A day in the life of... at RNIB

Thanks Steve/Nicky for your posts... In answer to Steve's question, and using RNIB as the example, we are an organisation with about 2,500 members of staff and over 3,000 volunteers (including our trustees) and a growing community of RNIB 'Members'. We have a passionate group of people working/volunteering and whenever I take visitors around the building (we operate a free site tour service here at Peterborough, one of our largest sites  and covers 8 acres) they always comment on how proud everyone seems to be.

On the comms approach, naturally whatever way we communicate, we have to ensure it's accessible... PowerPoint is not a natural first for us but if anything it definitely makes us more creative in delivery of presentations/udpates etc!

We have 2 segments of comms teams... an external team proactively working with our campaigning office and getting messages out there into the media and being RNIB's voice. Funding success for the wet AMD treatments being one of our most recent cases. RNIB is also organising a mass lobby of parliament in October as part of our campaign to extend eligibility to claim the higher rate mobility component of DLA - to include people with severe sight loss. That's huge is a great opportunity for staff to get out from behind their desks and go along to help too.

We also... now (!) have an internal comms network throughout RNIB and our new CEO brought that into the organisation so we have really embraced that and building as we go. Some managers haven't bought it but I'm finding, by getting out and about - joining team meetings, chatting to everyone and putting the time in to do that, it's paying off and my workload/requests for support etc have increased way beyond my expectations really. All great stuff though.

I sit between the two teams really... and focus on one particular section of the organisation, which enables me to drill down a bit more on subjects and get more involved to do the proactive comms side of things. To work for a charity, I've found motivating as people want to be here for the cause (mostly) and not just for the job. I have the fortune to get out and about and talk to groups of all walks of life and see some of our direct customers whereas I know that some staff come in, transcribe information into Braille... they never see that customer and so don't have that access for having a drip feed of motivational opportunites. We are working on that though!

We have recently re-branded and attached a new underpinning strategy to our new logo and rolled out a communications programme to all our people - in the form of a workshop/session where all staff had to attend (volunteers are next). We cherry-picked our presenters, to ensure we made best use of the time folks were away from their desks. During that session, we were providing reminders of what RNIB's achieved in the past (such as the postage stamp booklets... RNIB had a huge input to ensuring that whilst they are mainstream, they are 'invisibly' accessible to all). We also had filmed case studies of some customers - bringing home to them how RNIB has helped them have access to everyday living... where perhaps they didn't before... and also shared our new priorities/goals and asked everyone for their opinion, through workshop elements, on what services worked well, what we needed to harness from those services and develop to reach our customers in an even better way. We had really great feedback from that so something to expand upon.

Right... typed loads and so will stop jabbering for now. See you next time!

C :-)