Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Welcome to Jackie’s question and answer live video chat.
The first question is about the cost of the rebrand
- this has been asked by a number of people.
First is @deafinitelygirly:
‘Wouldn’t the rebrand money be better spent
on improving services for deaf people?’
@BespokeMax asked: ‘What difference do you expect to make to the charity
and I wonder if you think it will return an investment?’
@SpareTomato: ‘Given everyone is having to cut budgets
in the current climate is an expensive rebrand actually worth it?’
David G Jones: ‘How can you justify spending £260,000
of charitable donations on something as mundane as a name change?’
Suzie Jones: ‘Shouldn't the money be spent working together on projects
with another deaf charity to cover the range of people who need your support?’
Gary: ‘I understand the rebrand is costing £260,000 over three years,
this equates to nearly £87,000 per year,
what exactly is this going to be spent on?’
OK, thank you.
The first thing I would say is that at least 2 of those questions
mention the figure £260,000
and I think you’ll find most organisations
whether they are charities or private companies
are very secretive about what they spend on rebranding.
When we first discussed with our trustees
the fact that RNID needed to rebrand itself,
a couple of our trustees who are involved in business said
"gosh that is going to cost millions, when I was involved in a rebrand
with my company it was millions and millions of pounds",
and we don’t have millions and millions of pounds to spend on it,
so we set ourselves a budget
which in terms of the scale of other rebrands
is actually fairly modest, it sounds a lot of money
but is actually believe me is fairly modest for this kind of exercise.
So that’s the first thing I would say is that we haven’t been secretive
we have been very open about it
and a lot of people have welcomed that openness.
So what has the money actually gone on?
Well it has gone most importantly on three stages of research to find out
what people think about RNID, what people know about RNID
and then to go through possible names
that we could have that reflect the work that we do better
and at each stage we involved a lot of people,
and I’ll talk a little more perhaps about that later
when we come on to some of the questions specifically about the name.
And £100,000 of that £260,000 is being spent on the final bit
which is all the signs that we have to change,
we’ve been talking about this rebranding with the staff for a long time,
so we have told them to make sure they run down their supplies
of headed notepaper and leaflets and so on,
so they don’t go out and order a whole pile more
just before we change the name.
So we are trying to be as cost effective as possible,
but obviously signs on buildings and so on need to be changed,
and we have allowed £100,000 for that.
So the big question then is, is it worth it?
Well, we wouldn’t be doing it if we didn’t think it was worth it,
and we are doing it primarily because we think this will enable us
to provide even more services in the future
because we will be seen as more relevant to more people
and that will also help us in terms of getting more donations
and more income so we can do more work with it.
It is a big exercise rebranding it is not a trivial matter at all,
as I said before big companies spend millions on this,
and a lot of time employing lots of experts.
We have used our in house experts
and creative teams as much as possible,
but obviously we don’t know everything about branding
we’ve had to use some outside experts as well.
OK thank you question two is about the demographic
and the groups of people we speak to.
Now, first question is from @IHeartSubtitles:
‘Do you have a particular demographic in mind with the rebrand?’
@TomSteel: ‘Why is the new brand aiming to cast the net wider
rather than focusing more on the profoundly deaf,
you can’t be all things to all people?’
@MaryHillRoadlad: ’Why change our name RNID,
you say it isn’t reaching people when it clearly is well known to millions,
or are you just trying to reach out to the youth of today?’
Stuart: ‘So where do the deaf and older generation fit in with this rebrand?’
Ok, thank you.
Well one of those questions said "Why are you changing your name
if it is well known to millions?"
I wish that was true but if we were already well known to millions
we would not need to be changing it,
but we started off this process by researching
and asking members of the public,
asking our own donors and supporters and our service users,
do they know the name RNID what do they think we did,
and the evidence that came back from that
is that overwhelmingly members of the general public
by and large had not heard of us!
They confused us with RNIB or even with RNLI,
actually I know from my own personal experience
when I was about to come and work here
and I said to someone I was going to work at RNID
and they said "what do you know about lifeboats then?"
It seems a pretty daft thing to confuse us with
but people do confuse us with all sorts of things,
so the fact that even our own service users would know about us
and the one service or couple of services that they personally use
but had no idea what else we did.
So not only had millions of people had not heard of us,
but even though those that had heard of us,
or those that had some connection with us
didn’t actually know about the range of things that we did.
So, who are we trying to reach?
We are trying to reach everybody,
everyone from people who don’t have a problem with their hearing
but who need to understand that it is important to protect their hearing
when they go into noisy places or listen to their MP3 players.
They also need to, we think, stop and think
about what the impact of hearing loss is on other people
so they can interact better with people with hearing loss.
They need to stop and think about how they communicate,
whether they are speaking clearly,
whether they can be understood properly.
So we want to reach those members of the general public
who maybe don’t think at all about their hearing.
We also want to reach people throughout the scale
to those who are losing their hearing as they get older
and to those who have been born profoundly deaf.
So the last thing I want to say is,
those people who have asked these questions probably by definition
are asking because they have heard about RNID.
So you assume everyone else has heard of RNID,
so you are probably asking the question because you think you know what RNID does.
I can assure you, you are not typical of the rest of the population.
Just last night I was sitting behind a window watching a focus group
of members of the general public who we were using to test out
some of the look of the brand which we will eventually be choosing,
the logo and that sort of thing.
They were told at the beginning,
they didn’t know who they were doing this research for
and once they were all sitting down they were told
this research is on behalf of a charity called Action on Hearing Loss,
have you heard of it?
Obviously none of them have heard of it, at the moment it doesn’t exist!
The next question they were asked was
- what do you think Action on Hearing Loss actually does,
and I was amazed as they reeled off a list of things
that RNID actually does do,
including things like biomedical research that most people don’t think about.
The only thing they got wrong is that some of them thought
perhaps we collected money to help out people
who couldn’t afford hearing aids
because hearing aids are very expensive.
It is actually very worrying, that people don’t realise
hearing aids are free or free to them on NHS,
and no we don’t collect money to help people out in buying hearing aids.
But the same focus group a year ago if they were asked
and we did ask a lot of focus groups have you heard of RNID,
what do you think RNID does, and they had no idea what RNID does.
So already if I needed convincing, and I don’t need convincing
but if I did need convincing, just listening to that group of people
who immediately have never heard of Action on Hearing Loss,
never seen it on the street, never heard of the charity
but can immediately guess what it does as an organisation.
Thank you.
Question 3, all the questions here are concerning the name.
Raymond Dillow asked: ‘Is the name already written in stone?’
The charity Sense: ‘How did you come up with your new name?’
Sarita Taggart: ‘With all the negativity surrounding the rebrand,
do you think you should reconsider and ask for suggestions for a new name?’
Judith: ‘Why has the board agreed on hearing loss
as opposed to hearing impairment as surely hearing impairment
covers all degrees of deafness including tinnitus
and those born without any hearing at all?’
@IlovePink: ‘Action on Hearing Loss sounds like it is just a charity
for people with hearing loss not people who were born deaf.’
Ok, the process of coming up with the name.
So the process involved a number of phases of research
and initially asking people for ideas.
Initially we asked our supporters, we asked our members,
we asked our staff, we asked our trustees to come up with their ideas.
People did send us literally hundreds of ideas
of things they thought would be a better name a to describe
what we do as an organisation and I think from all those suggestions
I think actually Action on Hearing Loss
was the top one, the one that was suggested by the most people.
So the next phase was looking at those suggestions
and the first thing we had to do was take out those names
that already belonged to another organisation.
so there were lots of names that people might have liked,
like hearing aid, or something like that
that have either been either already used by another organisation
or kind of earmarked or patented for use by another organisation,
so legally we couldn’t use those.
And then we went through those names that appeared to be quite silly
or offensive or whatever, and we came up with a shortlist
and we went out with the shortlist.
We did another phase of research asking people what they thought of those names.
And there was an opportunity for people to vote online
on what they thought of those names and I know a lot of our staff and members
and again our trustees and so on had their say on that.
At the end of that process there were four names really
that came out ahead of the pack
- those were Action on Hearing, Action on Hearing Loss,
Resonate which was the name that didn’t have any kind of link
I suppose to hearing or hearing loss or deafness
so is a kind of neutral name if you like and Hearing Matters.
So the Executive Group which is myself and the leadership team
discussed each of those, what we thought of them,
and then we had a meeting with our board of trustees
and they discussed each of those and there were various reasons
why they decided against each of those three they did reject.
They rejected Action on Hearing because that doesn’t actually say anything
about hearing loss and sounds like all we are doing is something
about good hearing or healthy hearing.
In fact one our our trustees said "I joined RNID because
I was losing my hearing so that's what is important to me,
the idea of losing my hearing".
They rejected Resonate for a number of reasons,
one of these is that many people don’t know the word Resonate,
secondly there isn’t a sign language interpretation of the word Resonate,
and thirdly again one of our trustees said
"when my hearing aids resonate that causes me a problem".
And they rejected Hearing Matters again because of the problem with BSL,
and it can be interpreted that hearing is important,
and therefore deaf people are not important
or being deaf is not important.
So that left us with Action on Hearing Loss
which the trustees felt was the best name to describe
what we do as an organisation and covers the range of hearing loss,
they also felt the word loss was more understandable
than the word impairment, which someone asked about,
and yes it is written in stone! �