The Brief
To change public attitudes towards blindness and blind people.
Our approach
We approached RNIB to explore what they were doing to address negative public attitudes towards blind and partially-sighted people. The charity knew these attitudes were an issue so they commissioned Versiti to explore how we might help them change attitudes.
As social psychologists, we knew that simply asking people about their attitudes would not unearth deep-seated assumptions and prejudices. We therefore combined various projective techniques, an eye-condition simulator so that the public could ‘experience’ slight loss for themselves and empathise with partially-sighted people, as well as implicit association tests to surface perceptions and archetypes of blind people, and to test the extent to which attitudes could be changed.
Impact
The project led to a radical transformation of RNIB, from an ‘old-fashioned, Victorian caregiver’ to a modern charity focused on empowerment.
Insights fed directly into the new corporate strategy, new logo and strapline (See Differently), and new marketing and communications campaign to ‘normalise’ blind people. Service users’ satisfaction and fundraising have improved. New partnerships with commercial organisations have been struck.
The project was Finalist for: Aura Insight Impact Award 2020.
This single piece of work forced us to look at things differently. The research helped RNIB narrow down its priorities and led to a major strategic change which we can attribute directly to the insights from Versiti’s research.
We rebranded the organisation to capture insights from the research with a new logo and strapline: See differently.
We developed new partnerships based on the Everyman archetype which generated £600K in benefit in kind. We could not have anticipated this breadth of actionable insights nor asked for a greater impact from a single piece of work.
Hilary Ingleton, Head of Research
RNIB
Yours to keep
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