- Aim: Actively promote safer listening messages by ensuring that 250,000 people take action to protect their hearing. Promote safer listening messages to nightclub customers by building strategic partnerships with 25 nightclubs in the UK.
- Impact: We reached more than 250,000 people by distributing more than 95,000 pairs of earplugs at festivals, club nights and other events, achieving more than 26,000 page views per month to our website www.dontlosethemusic.com. We send out 1,700 eNewsletters per month, promoting safer listening messages.
We have worked directly with a wide variety of nightclubs - including London clubs Ministry of Sound and Heaven - and DJ Magazine to raise awareness of earplugs and tinnitus among clubbers.
- Aim: Ensure older people take action and check their hearing by promoting the health benefits that hearing aids can bring. Enable one million extra people to be fitted with hearing aids within five years.
- Impact: We recruited Miss England, who is profoundly deaf in her right ear, to launch RNID's ‘Ear of the Year’ awards, encouraging people to look after their hearing.
To date, more than 375,000 people have checked their hearing by calling our telephone hearing check.
We generated more than 48 million media opportunities to see the hearing check number and campaign messages.
- Aim: Ensure the entertainment industry fully complies with the new Noise at Work regulations by March 2008 ensuring that everyone has a safe working environment.
- Impact: The government has delayed the publication of its compliance guidance Sound Advice. In the meantime, we are working with entertainment venues such as bars and nightclubs, including the Luminar chain of night clubs, with information about their duties towards their employees.
- Aim: Invest £800,000 in world-class research to position hearing science as attractive and beneficial to scientists, business and the general public to ensure further investment.
- Impact: More than £800,000 was awarded to our research programme which attracted more than 30 quality research proposals. An independent advisory panel of leading UK research scientists rated many of these as "world class" and four major new research projects have begun.
14 companies worked closely with us to better understand the opportunities of hearing research, with new drugs for tinnitus and protection from loud noise entering the early stages of clinical trials.
In an exciting breakthrough, our grant programme led to the discovery of specific changes in people's genes that make them more likely to lose their hearing as a result of smoking or obesity.
Our ‘Hearing the Future’ conference for 170 members was oversubscribed.
- Aim: Identify and evaluate at least 100 new product designs for listening products, working in-house and with manufacturers, academics and the design community.
- Impact: Nearly 100 industrial design students took up RNID’s challenge to design attractive and innovative hearing protection products. After judging by leading UK design companies, the winning design - an "Ear-card", a unique credit card style solution with compressed hearing protection plugs - was prominently featured in a leading design magazine and the national press.
We launched the UK’s first affordable fully digital listener, the RNID Sonido, which is already outselling the original RNID Crystal by 300%, and selected 30 new products for retail.
- Aim: The above aim and impact is available in BSL
- Impact: You should be seeing a video here instead of this text. Please visit the Macromedia site to get the Flash Video Player.
Dr Ruth Taylor's story
Dr Ruth Taylor is working on research to try to understand why sensory cells die. In particular, she is looking at why the death of sensory cells continues over long periods of time once triggered by initial exposure to a damaging effect such as loud noise.
“Once sound detecting cells (that convert sound vibrations for the brain to understand) are lost, they are not replaced and that’s why hearing loss is permanent. With the support of RNID, we are carrying out research into why sensory cells die and how best to prevent this.” Ruth
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Did you know...
95,000
pairs of earplugs were distributed at festivals, club nights and other events.