Aim: To continue to build relationships with corporate partners for fundraising purposes.

Impact: In September 2008, RNID was chosen as The Co-operative Charity of the year for 2009. The partnership was launched nationally in January, with regional launches taking place across the UK at over 160 Co-operative Food stores. Since then, employees from across The Co-operative have been aiming to raise £2m for our Hear to Help projects, which support and provide information to people with hearing aids. Their fundraising will also help us to make improvements to a number of our Care Services projects. Through the partnership we have benefited from a cause-related marketing campaign with Procter & Gamble and other suppliers have supported RNID at corporate balls and golf days. The Co-operative has supported our Hearing Check campaign and raised awareness about deafness and hearing loss to the public by promoting the check in-store and to its 120,000 employees.

See our impact in Scotland.

Aim: To create opportunities for people to be more actively involved in our work.

Impact: We work with volunteers to deliver community-based services, including outreach information and Hear to Help, the service that helps clients make the most of their hearing aids. Most of our volunteers have a hearing loss themselves and are happy to share their experiences and offer advice to clients, carers and professionals.

RNID Campaigns Network Members participated in the first ever meetings in the European Parliament to use a state-of-the-art infrared system that assists hearing aid wearers. They successfully lobbied the Parliament to install this system in its visitor centre and iconic debating chamber.

We appointed a Head of Volunteering Development who has simplified our recruitment process to make us more accessible to potential volunteers. We have put good practice into action, including regularly thanking our volunteers and acknowledging their contribution, which is helping to increase volunteer numbers and commitment.

Aim: To support our members in campaigning for improved access to lipreading classes.

Impact: We encouraged people to tell education providers and central and local government about the importance of lipreading classes. This was done to great effect in Essex. Essex County Council was charging £186 for a 60-hour course (among the highest fees in the country) for classes that used to be free. Learners themselves, supported by RNID, spearheaded a campaign after classes started to close. As a direct result, the council agreed to pay the fees of all existing lipreading students and make free classes available to new learners.

Aim: To make volunteer bureaux, and organisations offering volunteer placements, more accessible to prospective volunteers who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Impact: We have increased the numbers of volunteers who are deaf or hard of hearing by supporting them in their volunteer roles. We have delivered deaf awareness and communication training to staff and volunteers within volunteering organisations and distributed our Volunteer Support Pack to targeted organisations.

Aim: To consult with people who have tinnitus to develop solutions to help relieve the symptoms of tinnitus.

Impact: We released our range of Tune Out Tinnitus CDs – four CDs of differing relaxation sounds. As well as providing relief for people with tinnitus, they also complement the increased range of stand-alone tinnitus relaxers available from RNID Products ensuring that those with tinnitus have more choice in how to address the symptoms and improve wellbeing.

Aim: To consult our members on their needs and experiences, to ensure that we are providing services and campaigning on the issues that matter to them most.

Impact: Our annual survey continues to be highly successful, with a response rate of almost one in three. We will use the results, and comparisons with earlier surveys, to inform our continuing work in improving access to health care and other services for people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

An online survey taken by 630 members revealed that their main problem when watching TV was subtitles, closely followed by background noise.  Typical subtitling problems were their incompleteness, poor sense, poor spelling and unavailability, especially on satellite and cable channels, and on internet-based 'catch-up' television. These crucial results will inform the direction of our future TV access campaigns.

Aim: To ensure that we continue to receive valuable support from our members and to enable them to get the most from their membership.

Impact: 369 members upgraded their membership to Life Membership status, creating extra revenue for RNID and allowing members to enjoy a range of new, extra benefits. We created 'Your say', a members-only part of our website where members can share information and experiences relating to deafness and hearing loss and published The Facts about Hearing Aids, a clear, accessible, 'one-stop' publication, free to members.

Aim: To improve the range and quality of life choices made by people using our care services.

Impact: We developed person-centred approaches to all our care services work, with the first phase of training across all services rolled out. A robust training plan for the full implementation has been developed for 2009-10. We have also fully implemented our policy for involving service users in staff recruitment. More than half of all recruitment to management positions involved our service users.

The Annual Report by the Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI) confirmed that our services achieved highly in these areas: "People are well supported in terms of the decisions they make about their care and how they wish to spend their time. Excellent outcomes in personal care and health care are promoted by competent staff teams that demonstrate a good understanding of [people's] needs".

Aim: To develop a management structure that is more appropriate and responsive to the needs of the organisation, and ensures that we are able to achieve our goals.

Impact: We designed and applied a 'values framework', which defined what the attitudes and behaviour of an RNID employee should be to enable us to achieve our ambitions. We used this values framework to appoint a strategic management team, who have now completed a training programme designed to improve their key management skills. We used the values framework, Values and Behaviours, to redesign our appraisal and recruitment process in the belief that people's attitudes and approaches are a strong indicator of future success and achievement within the organisation. This has helped to transform our working practices and increased employee commitment and clarity about what we do.

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