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NEWS

Introducing the Legion's new strategy

Dear member,

I am delighted to share with you our new One Legion strategy and an update on reviewing how we work. We have previously shared information about the strategic review, which is a significant piece of work. We started off with looking at our charitable remit – Remembrance, Campaigning and Welfare. We needed to ask ourselves ‘how can we make the greatest difference to the lives of those most in need?’, we must be confident that our work can meet the changing needs of the Armed Forces community and their families. This led to the decisions to close our Break Centres and Handy Van Service, and to enhance our Remembrance and Campaigning work.

The next step in the review was to produce a long-term strategy for the Legion, to inform all our work and decision making, and find ways to improve how we work.

Our new One Legion strategy

1. What we want to achieve – our vision

We needed to find a way to explain our unique role as many people don’t really know all that we do – many just see the poppy – with little or no understanding of the breadth of our work.  We do so much because over time, we have picked up activities in response to a variety of situations, rather than having a clear direction to provide consistency in our work and service for beneficiaries. We need to be clear about what we want to achieve and must work together towards the same ambition.

We have previously shared with you a working vision, and I can confirm the Board of Trustees have approved this single vision we can all work towards: ‘To bring together our nations, communities and individuals to create better futures for our Armed Forces community and their families.’

2. Why our work matters

The second part of our strategy is reinforcing why the work we do is so important. We are remaining true to who we are through continuing Remembrance, ensuring the unique contribution of our Armed Forces community is never forgotten, delivering welfare and campaigning to enable those we serve to live fulfilled lives, and working with our people and wider network who want to make a difference and see their positive contribution. Please view the video which highlights this.

Video – The Royal British Legion’s Vision

3. How we’ll achieve our ambitions

The third and final element of the strategy, is how we’ll achieve our vision, which is through five strategic priorities that will guide our work. We will create better futures for our Armed Forces community and their families by:

1. Growing and nurturing public support through awareness, education and participation.
2. Understanding and adapting to the needs of the Armed Forces community.
3. Raising income to deliver integrated, sustainable and cost-effective services.
4. Collaborating with our network of Partners, Members, Volunteers, Staff, Fundraisers and Supporters.
5. Living our values to attract and develop great people. Changing how we work We’ve spoken before about the need to adapt to the evolving needs of our community and as they change, so must we. What we do today is often what we’ve done before, and this can lead to us not being as joined up as we could be in how we work. During our strategic review, we identified improvements we need to make to how we work in these areas: 

• ‘Customer’ – we use this as one word to include our beneficiaries, members, volunteers, staff, partners, supporters and fundraisers. We need to ensure all of our customers have a great experience no matter how or where they come to us;
• Insight and Data – we need to use more insight and data to inform our decisions;
• Strategy – our next steps will be setting specific objectives for what we want to achieve so that we can deliver the strategy. We will also find ways to measure how well we are delivering our work in creating better futures for our Armed Forces community and their families.
• Products and Services – we will produce processes for 1) establishing new products and services and 2) for improving current products and services so we continually adapt to the needs of those we serve;
• Members – you are a vital part of who we are and what we do. We want to look at how we can improve supporting members in undertaking your important work in helping the people we serve.
• Engagement – we need to be more consistent and joined up in how we communicate and engage with our many audiences, both in terms of content and channels we use.

Change will not happen overnight, but we will progress steadily to develop our work. We will keep communicating with you about our progress, whether through email, Legion magazine and face-to-face events, such as the Annual Conference and Membership Meet-ups in the summer.

Next year, we celebrate one of the most significant and exciting milestones in the Legion’s history – our centenary – and I very much look forward to us working together on delivering our new strategy to ensure the Legion is fit for the next 100 years.

With very best wishes,

National Chairman, Board of Trustees