Hello everyone,
This week the whole of Brain Tumour Research came together (because of the heat we did this virtually) for our most important meeting of the year.
During our Summer Team Development Day each team presented their objectives for the forthcoming year and the plans and strategies to achieve them.
For the fundraising team this was all about driving income. Because, of course it’s our wonderful fundraisers who enable us to fund dedicated research into brain tumours at our Centres of Excellence and who support the campaigning we do. The team also reported on our fabulous Member Charities and Fundraising Groups who are such a key part of the Brain Tumour Research family.
The Marketing and Communications team outlined how they are going to get our messages out to the widest possible audiences. This involves how the materials they produce will help fundraising campaigns like Wear A Hat Day achieve their targets. It is also about how sharing your stories in regional and national media amplifies our voice. There are also targets for the social media team to make sure we remain the voice of our community.
The research team talked about our ambitions for increased research funding, and the plans for spending this.
As for the campaigning team we outlined our key priorities which are:
- Government funding to support increased research spend to at least £45 million by 2029
- Government to enable growth of a sustainable research ecosystem to drive innovation in research into brain tumours and the translation of this research to patient benefit
- An increase in number of brain tumour clinical trials, and percentage of patients accessing those trials in the UK
Sitting underneath these top line objectives are KPIs, PIs, plans and ideas to set us on the road to making these big three objectives happen and it is these endeavours that lead us to set up MP meetings, continue to provide secretariats for cross party groups across the UK and produce materials making our case that are eye-catching and impactful.
It is these activities that we report on weekly in these updates.
We believe that every supporter of Brain Tumour Research is a campaigner at heart too because they want change and an improvement in the options for people diagnosed with a disease that has likely bought such trauma to their lives. So, at team meetings we encourage the wider team to talk about our campaigning work when out and about and to encourage people they meet to become a part of our campaigning community and help us make a difference.
We have campaigners covering a large percentage of UK constituencies, but we want more people and even wider coverage, so our appetite for growth is huge.
Team Development Days are a chance for us to meet new team members, and it is all too common that new recruits join us with their own brain tumour stories. Sadly, these can be of premature loss of close relatives or friends, and is why it such a personal cause for us as a charity.
This week our founding CEO Sue Farrington Smith MBE’s niece Alison Phelan would have been celebrating her 33rd birthday if she had not been lost to a brain tumour on 7th June 2001, three weeks before her eighth birthday. Sue always says that the Brain Tumour Research team should be like sticks of seaside rock with the words Brain Tumour Research running through them and it is that culture that persists and was evident at this year’s Summer Team Development Day.
One of our new members is Sam Bromiley who joined us on Monday as a Policy and Public Affairs Manager. We will introduce you to him next week.
That’s it for another week.
A busy, but hopefully not as hot, week awaits and we will update you, as always, next Friday.
Wishing you a peaceful time until then.
Karen, Hugh, Katherine, Jana and Sam
