Halfway through our ambitious strategy, we reflect on what we’ve achieved and learned.
Our five-year Strategy 2020 has six goals aimed at building a humanitarian movement, supporting people in disasters, preventing suffering and promoting peace, overcoming adversity, strengthening our organisation and providing safe, secure blood products.
We have just released our 2018 Annual Report, looking back over the last year. In the past few months, at just over halfway through our strategy, we also took stock of the past 2.5 years, since Strategy 2020 commenced. In FY17, we refined the strategy with measurable outcomes against each goal, and a roadmap to achieving each outcome – based on changing rules, changing minds and changing lives. In FY18, we built strong foundations across many of the outcomes, with significant research and testing, along with continuing our everyday work.
We are immensely proud that we have:
- broadened the concept of volunteering to include not only formal, traditional roles, but inspiring self-organised, mass mobilisation of people to take humanitarian action.
- focussed on building a better experience for our customers, starting with our website, as well as a positive and strengths-based approach to fundraising.
- built stronger partnerships with the not-for-profit sector to support our clients; with the corporate sector to expand our reach and bring innovation; and across the Movement to address regional issues such as migration.
We are progressing well against most of our outcomes, although we are not quite where we had had hoped to be. We are confident the strong foundations built over the early years of the strategy will allow us to amplify our efforts and focus over the next year towards our outcomes.
In our mid-point review, we also clearly identified five outcomes that we will not achieve as intended within the timeframe. These are some of our most ambitious, complex outcomes that we recognize our ambitions are unlikely to be achieved by 2020. Our aspiration is unwavering and we are now re-looking at our targets for 2020, to articulate and drive for the difference we want to make.

As we move towards 2020, we will maintain the focus on our outcomes and we’ve also identified three key areas to strengthen:
- building our digital capacity, both in customer-focussed digital products and internal financial and communication systems.
- working more collaboratively internally and externally to achieve outcomes; being more willing to try, test and learn; and being flexible and adaptive through human-centred design and agile principles.
- better understanding and telling the story of the difference we’ve made, using appropriate indicators to measure progress and impact.
Progress and success against each outcome at this mid-point of Strategy 2020 is detailed below.