SeeAbility invests £1m in fundraising to raise £3m

Finance | Tania Mason | 26 Apr 2010

SeeAbility, the blindness and eye care charity, is to spend £1m over the next three years on a new strategy to acquire new individual donors.

The charity, formerly the Royal School for the Blind, has a target of raising £3m from the investment and also hopes to widen its demographic, targeting donors under 30 for the first time. This represents quite a change as the majority of SeeAbility’s cash donors are a lot older.

The organisation will deploy a combination of fundraising techniques, including street fundraising, door-to-door, private sites and workplace giving. As well as recruiting new donors the charity plans to run additional upgrade campaigns to increase giving from existing SeeAbility regular givers.

“We will be using a range of creative ways to engage with new supporters, including encouraging people to try simulation glasses so that they can get a feeling for what it is like to have a visual impairment and empathise with people who live with this every day,” said Emma Smith, SeeAbility’s head of individual giving.

SeeAbility slipped from number 242 to 247th in the Charity 250 Index this year, despite its average income over the last three years rising from £11m to £11.7m. The drop in ranking suggests that other charities of a similar size are growing faster than SeeAbility.

The charity, which specialises in providing services for people who have a visual impairment and additional disabilities, is currently undergoing a major growth phase. New projects include shared ownership homes so that people with multiple disabilities can part-own their own home and initiatives to improve the sight of people with learning disabilities.

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