Get ready to be inspired as we sit down with Emily Cherry, a powerhouse in the charity sector. With two decades of experience under her belt, Emily is the CEO of Bikeability, the Chair of The Breck Foundation, and a trustee at My Black Dog. In this episode of On The Same Landing Page, she reveals how she has overcome challenges and driven success in the world of charity through innovative data-driven decision-making. If you’re looking for practical advice and insightful anecdotes from a leader who has truly made a difference, then you won’t want to miss this episode.
Astra
Hello and welcome to episode 15 of On the same landing page. As always, I’m your host Astra Newton and I’m here with Jason. Say hello Jason. Classic dad joke to start the podcast off there. And this week we are joined by Emily Cherry. She’s a self-described charity lifer who’s been an official media representative for the NSPCC For 15 years and has worked with charities for over 25.
Normally, when we have a charity guest on we tend to focus on just one particular charity. Emily We are afforded an opportunity to talk about much more of them because she is involved in quite the handful. Emily, welcome to the podcast.
Emily
Oh, it’s a pleasure to be here. Lovely to spend some time with you both talking all things charity and.
Astra
All things charity, indeed. That’s a great place to start. Can you just give us a brief overview of your history, the charities you are currently involved with and their respective missions, which will probably fill half of the podcast?
Emily
Yeah, definitely. Well, yes, I so I absolutely love the charity sector. I’ve had the greatest pleasure to work for some of the biggest children’s charities in the past. So you’ve mentioned the NSPCC and Childline. I was also at Barnardos and the Children’s Society and just fell into the charity sector with the love of volunteering originally. That’s how I kind of joined in whilst I was at university.
So the charities I’m now involved in, so it’s such a privilege and an honour to be able to be chief executive of Bikeability which is the Department for Transport Cycle Training Programme for Children and Families. So we train about half a million children and families every year and we’re on a massive scale up by 2025 to be able to train every child in England.
So it’s a huge privilege and honour to leave that work because just teaching children cycle is a life skill is just a joyous role, which is great. But then I also have a couple of other charities that I sit on boards of, so sadly a very different charity from the perspective of the cause. So I’m chair of the Breck Foundation.
So this is an online safety education programme which was absolutely founded on the biggest tragic circumstance you can ever face as a parent. So. Lauren, Her son Breck was groomed and murdered in 2014, and she sets up the Breck Foundation in his name to make sure that no other family or parent went through the absolute heartbreaks that they did as a family to make sure that children that have to stay safe online.
And then the final charity is a is a newish one where I think we’re four years old now nearly, called My Black Dog, and that’s a peer to peer mental health charity. So we do guest chats, we’re online and people can contact us free and confidentially. But the difference with my Black Dog is that everyone who answers those phones and chats has their own mental health battle and struggle.
So we come from a perspective of knowing and understanding and empathising in a way that some of the professional mental health charities that don’t use volunteers in that way. So it’s a really exciting three charities.
Astra
Well, well, it’s amazing that you have time for three, especially being the the chief executive of Bikeability, which I know you’ve said before. It’s quite a labour intensive role and takes up sort of 90% of your time. So juggling that and the other two charities you’re involved in and My Black Dog and the Breck Foundation, what does your sort of week look like?
What is your role across the different charities and how does it differ?
Emily
Yeah, well, I think I mean, he’s a great example of why we’ve moved to much more flexible working since the pandemic. You know, in 2020, when I joined Bikeability. Previous to that, I was commuting to London every day. Now I work at home because we’ve cancelled the office. We’re completely flexible, flexible working. So actually I’ve suddenly got four more hours in my day when I used to be sat on a train pointlessly commuting into London, and that’s when I then find the time to do more work for other charities.
So getting that better work life balance, I do long days. I do a lot of travels. I do do do a lot of evenings and weekends as well. But from my perspective, I’ve always felt as a charity leader, yes, it is vital that we give back our skills and experience to the sector and don’t just focus on the one cause.
So it’s always something that I’m going to be committed to volunteering my time.
Astra
I can’t believe that you’ve got an extra 4 hours back and you decided to start new charities most people would spend the extra 4 hours in bed
Jason
So I know not to scroll through Twitter as I’ll probably have I would have spent some sort of my 4 hours, it’s inspiring stuff.
Astra
So as you’ve worked as well, as well as the one’s you’re on board with now like you said you’ve been with banardo’s and the NSPCC and alot of children based charities, what like one common thing about charities that you think charities do well or that they don’t do well and could be doing better, what’s the common themes that you see.
Emily
Is a common theme? So I think just talking to the public about the cause and the issues is something that the charity sector does really well. You know, we are here for the public benefit. That’s critical for charity purpose, charity mission and and to get charity registration. But how you then talk to the public about the cause and the mission that you’ve got highlighting, particularly in the areas I’ve worked in social injustice, really difficult issues, you know, shining a light on, quite frankly, some of the unthinkable and unspeakable things that happened to children.
But doing that in a way that helps the public to understand, to want to get behind charities, to support them is something I think we just do phenomenally well as a sector. And if you to said to me when I was I was thinking about my time at NSPCC when we were looking at the pants campaign, which is a child sexual abuse campaign, if you’d have said to me as a parent of a I think my daughter was about two at the time that I would feel comfortable talking to my own children about sexual abuse at the age of two.
I’d have gone now. But the charity sector does a really great way of supporting parents to have those difficult conversation, giving you the tools, helping you to to talk in that age appropriate way. And I just think that that’s that’s one of the best things that we do as a sector is help the public to talk about the unthinkable, pass on that information and advice, and really help people to not go through what some people had to tragically go through.
Astra
Yeah, I mean, on the flipside of that, obviously, you’ve got, say, the NSPCC in talking sensitively about issues that be triggering for parents, children pretty much anyone in society, and then by Bikeability, which is teaching children to ride their bikes safely and stuff both of those things, although one of them seems really happy and one of these quite dark areas, as I say, they both involve a little bit of emotional upsets, I suppose, I mean, Bikeability might sound like a happy children riding bikes, but there’s also there’s a lot of unfortunate stories that happen in that sector as well, isn’t there, that you have to portray again in schools and stuff.
Emily
So there is and you know, for for us as a charity. So whilst we can provide the training through government funding so that giving children the skills and the confidence to be able to cycle, it breaks my heart. And this speaks to our charitable purpose that if you’re not a child who has access to a cycle themselves, we can’t provide that for you.
Currently we can with fundraising, with partnerships and support and additional funding, and that’s why the public come in and where funding comes in. But it really breaks my heart that we have to say to some children, you can’t take part in training unless we can find you a cycle. We mostly do. We we try not to leave children out, but you know that that is not something that we currently have enough funding for every single child to do is give them access to the training and to the cycle.
Astra
You’ve touched a little bit there on obviously the storytelling and the audience and stuff. As one of the key things that you think is important across charities to do now. How do you do that? How do you approach a sensitive issue with children, for example, and make it so that they’re engaged, not just bored like, oh, parents go away talking to you about this stuff, but getting across without as well.
On the other end of that is scaremongering and making them frightened and that sort of thing. How do you get that across?
Emily
Yes, I think I think it’s where the children’s sector, the charity sector, do this really well because they do take massively complex, difficult issues and then break it down. We always approach a subject thinking, you know, what’s what is the core thing we need to get across to children and how can we do that in an age appropriate way that gives them the knowledge and the skills and the information, but isn’t in a way that scaremongers like you say or or scares them.
So breaking it down to core simple messages, finding fun, creative, engaging ways that you can talk to children, sometimes that’s through gamification and thinking about how can we turn this in in a way that really creatively engages children. Sometimes that’s about finding new ways to talk to them through cartoons or social media, different kind of challenges and events and things that you can do.
But really just breaking it down to those core messages that you want to get across to children. Well, I always think about harm when we’re talking about messaging. It’s something that we’re very clear at the Breck Foundation. You know, we have a educational story which is massively tragic. You know, Breck’s story is powerful because it has the most tragic ending.
But what how we tell his story is by helping children understand and spot signs and things and then instil in them. Speaking to trusted adults is the most important thing to do and and and helping them identify who those trusted adults are.
Jason
How do you do that? In a way this kind of doesn’t require someone to go, hang on, We’ve not got the balance there by like, is there a way of measuring like, this is kind of rocky. This is too negative or do you have like a structure or process that you go through or is a group of you that comes that decision?
Emily
Yes, I think what’s what’s good about the charity sector and particularly sort of the larger charities is is having that whole range of staff. So you bring together policy staff, you bring together communications experts, marketing experts, people who’ve got expertise in teaching and talking to children, getting that core group of multi-disciplinary professionals and saying, how do we break this down and make sure that we’re telling this in the right way that doesn’t harm children, but doing it with that constant thought throughout your entire process of so we can talk about difficult things but we need to leave children with this is not a desperate situation for you.
And if you’re experiencing and you’re feeling and facing this, this matters. And this matters to adults in your life. And let’s work out who that trusted adult is in that space that you can go and talk to. And that’s something that the NSPCC has always done so well as an organisation is is taking those difficult issues, working it through as staff, testing it with children to make sure that the messaging lands well and then rolling out that service a little bit more effectively.
Jason
That’s that’s interesting aswell, the way that you can kind of get people interested in sense of the target audience as in this case is children get them interested in what you’re doing. How about how does that work when it comes to getting other people, other stakeholders interested, like, for example, yourself, How did you get involved in these charities?
What about it attracted your attention? And then how do you change that message when you’re trying to get talent involved in the organisation or fundraisers or donations back?
Emily
Think Yeah, I think I mean, we always think I always think about who am I speaking to, how do I want to present the information and how do you talk? You know, I’m a I’m a storyteller and I think I can tell stories to children and make sure that the message is in that right way. You tell stories to adults, you tell stories to ministers, politicians, the media.
When you’re kind of doing these things, ultimately it’s what is the story and what do we want to get out of it? And then how do I make sure I can create that personalised hook so that individual that I’m talking to so if I’m in a room with a group of adults, I might think I need to take more of a parent angle here because we’re talking about a children’s issue.
And I need to understand and think as the mind of a parent, what do they need or want to know about the cause or the impacts that we’re creating? And how do I make sure that’s the focus of what I want to talk to with children? It might be much more how do I make sure I’m telling that story with hope and helping them see a way through through if they’re ever presented with that difficult situation with ministers, with funders, with people who want to fund it, how to recreate that emotional hook, to draw them in so that they want to be outraged by what what this issue in this course is addressing so that they want to get behind and support it. So I think it’s just that tailored communications approach.
Astra
Obviously, when you’re dealing with all of these dark areas like the NSPCC and the Breck Foundation, it’s very difficult subjects and it’s not sort of a desk job that you can leave at 5 p.m. and then forget about. You take that stuff home with you, which is kind of how my black dog was born before my black dog, or excluding the sort of inclusion of that.
What was your experience of support and care available to people that do work in charities and have to listen to these horrific stories day in, day out, and then also retell them and retell them and relive them.
Emily
So I think it’s really interesting with the big childrens charities is that that is something that they have massively invested in. So, you know, for example, as a as a Childline counsellor, you go on shift, you get a briefing from a supervisor, you come off shift, they debrief you so that when you leave the room you are not left with any of those thoughts, feelings and emotions and processing of what you’ve experienced in that day.
That’s really great with the big charities and they’ve got the resources and the fundraising to be able to do that. It’s much harder in small charities. So this is something we’ve thought a lot about from a My Black Dog perspective, because currently we’ve got three staff members, so about 100 volunteers, three staff members, and that’s a lot for those three staff members to manage 100 volunteers and what they’re processing and what they’re dealing with as well as their day job.
This is where I wish we could have more volunteers to help and support small charities to take on the burden and the support to the staff and volunteers who are doing in that space, or is where I wish corporate companies would get behind and say, you know what, We don’t need all of our health care packages and wellbeing packages for our own staff.
Can we donate this time to smaller charities so that they can support them? So I think I’m going to make a rallying call through your podcast to say, come on corporates, can you get behind those charities that the smaller ones that really need to do much more of that staff and volunteer care but haven’t got the funding out there or indeed, if there’s a trust or a foundation who would just fund staff care and and volunteer care for charities, that would be an absolute dream.
Astra
Yeah, well, that’s that’s something a lot of people talk about, business is now sort of responsible for the wellbeing of their staff and the sort of employee assistance programs and stuff like that. And in many ways, charities do still have to operate like businesses. You know, they they just aren’t for profit. And so it seems a shame that people working in those sectors would be sort of left behind and not have that support, but onto operating a little bit more like a business.
I know that you are and very interested in data and you were previously before coming on board with Bikeability. It wasn’t a very data led company versus now you’ve sort of you’ve banging the the drum for data and it is now a data-led organisation. Can you just talk a little bit about how you managed to A, instil that? Because data can be very boring.
I suppose there is an element of storytelling in that as well, but B just the importance of that data, both in fulfilling the mission and getting funding and recruiting volunteers.
Emily
Yeah, it’s, it’s, you know, it’s absolutely critical as a charity, if you cannot tell your your organisational story through the data and the impact that you’re having, you’re failing in your mission, but you’re unlikely to be able to kind of grow as an organisation. It was painful, to be frank. It was a good 12 month long process of cajoling, persuading a bit of carrot and stick approach to it.
But ultimately I think what got us through that period is just having that clear, single minded vision set. If we do not, if we are not able to track who is taking on our services, what’s happening to them. As a result, we’re going to give government and other funders an excuse to not fund us. So there will not be jobs, there will not be roles, there will not be opportunities for children to cycle with confidence unless we can tell their story much more effectively.
And and having the right systems to do that and getting alongside and not expecting people to do this without you. So we’re going to give you the tools, we’re going to give you the resources to do it, but we expect that you’re going to do it. And I think those were the things that really helped us to get it across the line.
Astra
Yeah. So as people think of storytelling as quite like a literary thing, but you’re right, you can tell it in numbers and words, and the two of those together is truly a force to be reckoned with, especially in the audiences that you’re speaking to or government and such work. So very numerical driven. And a lot of these and that approach.
Jason
Just another approach as well, where you take it from the point of view of they they may not fund us. It’s like why should they fund us given given that like we’re starting from zero mentality. It’s quite a good way of thinking about it because you are competing with a whole bunch of reasons why they should spend that money.
In other areas, know other things that they’re excited about, right? So yeah.
Emily
You can have the most incredible charity services making a lot of impacts, but unless you’re able to talk about the WHO, the what and the why, you are doing it in your fund, that’s what your funders want to know. And they want to understand what has happened as a result.
Astra
Have you out of interest since you’ve sort of become a more data led charity, have you seen an increase in the funding that you’ve been able to raise?
Emily
So we’ve certainly so I took over in 2020, we were getting £12 million a year the last financial year. So we’re almost just about to finish out. We that was a record 20 million year. So that’s 8 million in two years in terms of record increases in funding that we’ve achieved. So yes, we’ve definitely seen seen a growth.
But I think for me it’s about some of the other impacts of that data strategy that I’m probably the most proud of. So wonderful. We’ve got record funding in 8 million and thank you very much. Government in difficult times for investing in Bikeability. But for me it’s about the children. So when I first came, we looked at the data.
We’re talking about real children here, right? So let’s say we looked at children receiving Bikeability from those with special educational needs and disabilities was 1% of all delivery. If you look, I looked at Department for Education statistics and in in schools there’s about it’s about 15% of children in the mainstream school system have a diagnosed reckon recognised special educational needs and disability label so we’re getting to 1% 15% exist in the system because we went down the data rate because we mandated recording who was was going our courses from gender, age, ethnicity, people, premium and S.E.N.D.
We’ve risen that in 12 months from 1% to 10%.
Astra
Wow. That’s a much bigger win in terms of the funding that we have saying it’s all about 40.
Emily
Thousand children who may have, two years ago, not have gotten Bikeability because we weren’t asking the right questions. We didn’t know they had Sandy before they were coming to the course, so we couldn’t plan for that. We couldn’t bring in adapted cycles. We couldn’t change the funding model. So now we give up extra top out, top up funding if our instructors needs to bring in an adapted cycle or they need to do a 1 to 1 because that child’s got behavioural issues that need a 1 to 1 session and can’t work in a group session.
All of that wouldn’t have been there if we hadn’t have done the data work.
Astra
Yeah, that’s amazing. I was just going to say, obviously, as you say, it’s the end of the financial year. And it’s annual reporting season, which we know is, is crazy time for charities anyway, particularly when you’re working with three of them. But I know you do impact reports as well. And I was going to ask why that’s so important.
But you sort of laid it bare the for us really that without seeing this funding a 40,000, was it 40,000.
Emily
Yeah, 40,000 children.
Astra
40,000 children. The ability to learn to cycle is incredible really, really incredible. Have you got any more of them stories to that effect of where you’ve put in the social impact report And because obviously day to day you’re sort of in the weeds and you’re looking at numbers and funding’s coming in and you’re up on a road trip and you’re doing this, and then the end of the year you take stock like while we’ve helped, we’ve had such an impact every single day.
Emily
So I think we we also put in a slightly different way of funding this year. So we’ve we’ve got fantastic cycle training that works with with every child. And that’s that’s our mission. But we were slightly concerned about a few groups of children so, special educational needs and disabilities being one but also black and minority ethnic children. There’s a lot of cultural differences with when you learn to cycle and should you learn to cycle and the support for cycling in that community, we didn’t have an instructor workforce that represented the communities they worked in, and we were also really worried about children in deprivation.
So those in poverty and low income who didn’t have access to cycles and teenage girls who just drop off in terms of cycling rates massively and in fact was all sporting by the time they got secondary school. So we said, let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater, but let’s find some other ways of doing Bikeability and go out to different organisations.
So not local councils who hold the funding normally, but ask for charity groups, community groups, schools themselves and come to us and say we’ve got an innovation fund work out different ways of teaching. So this particularly group will give you the money, we’ll give you the resources, will evaluate it and see what works. And that widening participation fund.
We’re just about to publish the report in the next few weeks. And you know what? We’ve got some stinking amazing, great examples due to come out soon that show the difference that these projects make. Stuff as simple as doing a summer school for teenage girls before they come to secondary school or doing some work on body image and self-esteem and self-confidence and self-defence before we got them on cycles.
The absolutely amazing examples training some Muslim women in. I think that one was up in Liverpool and Bradford to work with asylum seeking children and that’s really raised cycling rates in that in that community. So we’ve got some fantastic examples, but that was a mindset from us to say, let’s we don’t have all the answers, let’s go and work with the communities that do have the answers, know those communities and then work out how can we work together much more in the future.
Jason
Such a such a reward to having a bit of vulnerability as well about knowing where your shortcomings are in certain areas and working with other people and other organisations that you don’t see that as much in business. So there’s things that can learn. You can we can definitely learn from in business, from charities, and we’ve talked as well a bit about how charities need to run more as business, but that’s an example of how businesses could learn more.
We always want to do your own thing. It’s like, Yeah, cool that doing maybe a podcast in that area, but we’ll do a better one. Like they’re operating in that market, but we’ll beat them with our market share. So very ego led kind of approach, whereas in your case it’s like they just get the mission done, but there’s get it complete.
And what do you think are the biggest challenges going into 2023 you might have come across and you’ve touched upon volunteering and getting volunteers. Is one of the is there any any other points that you think are going to be a bit of a struggle for the sector?
Emily
Cost of living. I mean, it’s the number one for all of us, no matter what sector you’re in now, can we give cost of living rises to support our staff? Particularly we all work at home and I massively worry about energy bills for my staff team because they all having to work at home because that’s that’s the decision that we’ve taken as an organisation and the funding that we’ve got.
So yeah, the cost of living is number one. We can’t not talk about political uncertainty and we are on a on a whim sometimes with, with the politics here of what will get funded and what will not get funded. Three prime ministers in 12 months. I don’t even know how many secretaries of State and ministers I’ve written to over the last 12 months.
You develop a relationship, you get in the door and then you’ve got to start again. And that takes time, money and energy. So yeah, political uncertainty, cost of living. And I do think there’s there’s something there’s definitely something about volunteers and people. I’m not having as much time feeling so stressed and I see this a little bit. My black dog, particularly with the volunteers, you know, they haven’t got as much time in their personal lives and they’re dealing with so much more.
You worry about the volunteers themselves and the offers and the time that they can give and the impacts on them. So it’s on us to make sure that we’re providing as much support as we can to volunteers so that they feel it’s got a dual benefit to them to volunteering because that’s what volunteering is about. It’s not just that you give up your time and you get nothing out of it.
This has to be at your benefit to help you and support you. And I think that’s what we’re doing quite well at my black dog now.
Jason
Awesome. Yeah, there’s I know some people working in the various government roles and they said there was a time where on the on the council level people just didn’t know what to do because of the political unrest whereby there were weeks, months even gone past where people were like, well I don’t know, are we going to carry on with this projects?
We don’t know if we’re going to have the same people in charge over the next. It is horrendous for actually getting anything done and that has massive knock-on impacts for the work you do because that’s where a lot of.
Emily
It has a massive impact and I think we lose that. We also have to talk about short term funding cycles and short term strategies. Wouldn’t it be a joy if all organisations, including government, could be thinking ten, 20 years and not 12 months and we’ve got a little bit more stuck, particularly, I think much more exacerbated since COVID that we are still short term planning.
So rising demand across the charity sector, but only short term funding contracts to meet that demand. So by the time you’ve planned started to deliver the service, you’re back into renegotiating on the next round of funding. And that doesn’t help anybody. We need long term security and long term visions that we can be delivering to.
Jason
Yeah, and I say it’s it’s like living paycheque to paycheque. If you’re doing that, you can’t you’re not going to ever get anywhere, are you. And that’s that that’s like saying we’ve charities and businesses if you’re if you can’t see running on the cycle that short how are you ever going to create long lasting change and well I don’t know quite what the Segway is from that as a really serious question into segment 2.
So which is a which is a more of a fun type segment, but what we’ll do is we always ask people to come on. And because we are at Genesis, a marketing podcast, we asked them just to come on and give us some feedback on what they see as the kind of more and most effective channels for bringing attention to their cause or to their business, if that’s the case.
So I’m going to ask you if you could talk, organise these four channels into the into the levels of effectiveness in terms of raising attention. So we’ve got pay per click advertising, which is a Google search, advertising, social media, organic and paid email marketing and social search engine optimisation.
Emily
Oh, so you want to run them ranked?
Astra
Yeah.
Emily
So I think social media is the number one for us at the moment. My, my comms team would say SEO Emily.
Astra
Thank you so.
Emily
Our website is the number one, so that would probably be the number two. Yeah. Then I think pay per click’s, probably the bottom one for us.
Jason
And so that leaves email marketing.
Emily
Yeah. Email marketing in third. Yeah.
Jason
And how, how confident are you make this is across across all of the charities that you help and how confident are you with the marketing that you’re currently putting in place for 2023 And the follow up questions, This will be how are you going to improve that score?
Emily
I think so. We we have like like a lot of charities. We’ve got internal marketing, so that’s all the organisations that we work with, say all training providers and our instructors. So it’s starting and then obviously the external marketing as well to them. I think we’re really confident on the internal marketing. We know who we’re talking to, what we need to talk to them about and how we get to them less so on the external marketing because it is becoming much more difficult to get any free and earned media unless you have got a negative story to tell, which we don’t.
At Bikeability, we’ve got too much for positive story. We can’t get any free media. We don’t have a massive marketing budget, so we can rely on Google ad credits and other things to get out on social media. But I can’t take out paid ads and I can’t do paid for marketing and media to get more people to support us because we just simply don’t have the budget.
So we’re we’re much more concerned on the external side. And how do we create that cut through when we’re competing with organisations that will have hundreds of thousands of pounds in their marketing budget and we just can’t compete in that space.
Jason
And there is like a bit of a pull for reaching for the negative in a storyline because it does get the attention and that is kind of what will work. How do you balance knowing that with keeping your integrity as a charity and not going down that path?
Emily
So this is something of Bikeability that we take an awful lot of care and attention to. We want to always avoids overt danger, rising language around road safety and road danger because it puts parents and children off from them being allowed to cycle. So we’ve deliberately moved our strategy to talk about this being a life skill and confidence building and enabling people to cycle rather than talking about road safety and danger.
When it comes to media, the only media we will get cover coverage for or they will ask us on to is if there’s been an accident. And that’s when they then want commentary on how to avoid that. We don’t talk about avoidance. We talk specifically about these are the skills and the experience and the confidence that we will teach you so that you are better able to deal with any road condition that is face to face with you.
And that’s what the evidence says about our programme. But I will never go on and say to parents, don’t put your children to cycle on the roads. Help and support your children to cycle on the road with our Top Tips. And this is how that you can how you can do it in the most confident and enabling way.
Jason
But yeah, that’s that’s something we talked about before with a lot of charities, is is that there’s things that will attract a to a to a headline and it’ll be something like I had a crash and it wasn’t my fault and like that will get people to read, but it’s not sending the right message and it’s actually just adding more fuel to the fire rather than helping educate in any way that would make that better.
And that’s really, I think the last point on this was what would you do to improve that? But I think you said you kind of covered that little bit before. For the break, I’ll go on to segments, too, which is fake facts, which I’ve got a little slide presentation for. But for our listeners who just be, I’ll make sure I read everything out.
And so I’m going to share my screen for the benefit of anyone viewing.
Astra
But also. Emily I don’t know. I have never seen these before. So when I would be saying.
Jason
So if you’ve not listened before, they we’re going to put some statistics up and there’s going to be three statistics, all related to the kind of what we’ve been discussing, which is bikeability and cycling.
Emily
That now if I get them wrong, does that mean I’m out of a job?
Astra
You are your employer so I think you are safe.
Jason
Yeah, I’d say for everyone’s, but PPC is the fourth most effective channel and Astra’s not out of a job. So one of them will be fake. One is made up, but not by a lot. It’s only like slightly exaggerated. So it’s quite it’s quite tough and okay, guys, you’re both up. So the first one is cycling made up 1.8% of the traffic in England in 2020.
Cycling has increased in popularity by 300% since the pandemic. Or was it the cycling? As a proportion of traffic in England raised 49% from 2019 to 2020, and I need the false fact, which one is a lie?
Astra
Oh, I think I think the first one might be false only because I know it definitely got more more of an increase after the pandemic. And the third one looks like a more systematically arranged answer. So I think the first one about you, Emily Yeah.
Emily
I’d say the 1.8%, I mean, that was be specific. So it depends on which areas of the country look like of a national travel survey. So I think it’s the first one.
Jason
Is to find out it’s it’s number two.
Emily
So 200%.
Jason
Is still going up. Yeah, hugely going up, but only by 200%, not 300% in popularity since the pandemic. I actually cycled much more since the pandemic. So that on the sample size of Jason Morton, that is also true. 16,000 next. Next round, 16,294 people were injured whilst riding a bike in 2020 is that the UK is the third safest country in the world to ride a bike?
Or is it that 92,055 people injured whilst driving a car in 2020? Which one is fake?
Astra
It’s got to be that the UK is the 3rd safest country. Surely the roads are a mess.
Emily
Yeah, and we have really high traffic volumes and levels the top one, so kill them seriously injured statistics sounds about right. I can’t remember them exactly. That’s off my head, but that sounds about the right. So yeah, I talking the other day there was about 11,000 children killed and seriously 11,000 children sorry, 11,000 adults on the roads in 2022 and it had gone down. So that would feel the.
Jason
Year by five. Yeah. It’s, yeah. Number two. So we have actually 10th with the ten safest country in the world.
Emily
I bet the Netherlands is number one.
Jason
I wish I knew, but I would expect it is. It’s going to be, it’s going to yeah. It’s definitely going to be one of those in the top three. So yeah. Very good then half of all children ages 6 to 11 in the UK are not taught road safety in school. Is that the fake facts or is it that the sales of bikes rose 23% in 2020 due to the pandemic and 67% of people aged five and over on a bike in England?
Which of those is fake?
Astra
Oh, I think the last one it seems to high and Emily, it would be out of a job if it were true.
Emily
Yeah, I think it’s lower than that. Say 44% of children aged 6 to 11 in the UK received by mobility says round about half. So yeah, it’s not a specific the first one bike sales did go up was it 22% now I can’t remember the exact figures but cycle ownership over age five. So I actually think it’s higher than that, which is a surprise. It’s a I think it was about 70% when we last looked at it.
Jason
Yeah, let’s have a look. So Is the fake fact is that 65,000 people aged five and over own a bike in England it’s actually 47% and that I missed the scores. What was the score is is it one or in the end.
Astra
I think.
Jason
Yeah. You’ve both got one that you called out.
Emily
lets call it a magnanimous draw
Astra
Yeah. Like it. My wildly, wildly Flukey and Emily’s is based on years of experience, knowledge. I think we have to call her the winner. Really?
Jason
Yeah. Yeah. There’s definitely a better way to like.
Emily
No, I need to. I need to revise my stats again.
Jason
But we will include the, the stats and all of the like the, the sources for that information in the show notes as we follow up with. And that brings us onto the final segment, which is strategy analogy. Do you want to do this one, Astra?
Astra
Let me pull up the random. It would generate that. Do you want to just recap for Emily and the listeners
Jason
Yeah. So in strategy analogy we’re going to be presented with with a noun of sorts, a word that we’ve not seen before, which Astra is going to generate now. And we’ve just got to try and relate something that we’ve already discussed or normally we do this revert with marketing. So how is marketing like this word? The analogy which would be conjured up, But in this case we can cover up any of the things we’ve discussed, i.e. while we discussed getting people’s attention, but the right way and not going bottom of the barrel.
Understanding how important it is to tell stories at different levels and whether that means bringing people and talent into your organisation, or just proving that you’re worthy of investment from the government. And there’s been a lot of discussion about, well, how you manage to pull the stories from the charities that you work in and also how you divide up all of this time that you’ve been given so that you’re spending it and those who work from home and the impact it has on people for charities as well.
And does that provide enough time for you to bring it out?
Astra
Yes, I have. I have generated the word, and the word is in the words of Jason Orange patience that was take that joke. If nobody got that.
Jason
patience
Astra
patience Yeah. And I suppose like riding a bike.
Emily
We deal with it, we deal with children and we deal with we need to the our instructors need the greatest patience of patience in the world. Sometimes for the random questions that children will ask whilst they’re trying to teach them complex cycling manoeuvres. And that requires an awful lot of patience. Very much so, but also some humour as well.
But yeah, it’s you cannot work with children if you’re, if you’re not prepared to go at their level and be patient with them.
Astra
Yeah. I think as well riding a bike is probably something that you have to be extremely patient with, particularly when children tend to get frustrated and not want to continue with something they’re not good at. And just like riding a bike need patience running a biking charity also needs patience because like you said, if you’d completed the mission, you would be out of a job kind of thing on the beat.
Nobody like to help. So you need patience to get to where you want to be helpful people. You want to help get the funding that you need essentially, which isn’t really an analogy, but it feels like a nice closure to the podcast. So, Jason, what’ve you got?
Jason
Yeah, I think just patience is has come up a few times in the conversations we’ve had with organisations that try so many different things and measure the results after maybe you know well as long as their budget or as long as their resource or their attention span provides. And that can always often be too short. If you were going to measure many of the number of things we’ve talked about after maybe a one month cycle or achievement cycle, there would be failures.
And if you measured a lot of the most successful companies, after a year or two years, they’d be failures too. There’s a lot of patience to be had in building momentum, getting the message out there, especially with organisations like this, and then saying, Well, we achieved like you talked about at the end, when you do the impact report and you realise how many thousands of children’s lives you’ve affected, that comes down to patience and believing in something and putting the effort in and not measuring it every week and saying about what did we do last week? Was it worth it?
Emily
So when you’re talking about training children, you’re talking about leaving them with a life skill that actually we’ve got to be patient as an organisation that they might not show that skill next week, next month it might not be until they become a parent themselves, when they start to train, to train their own children and think about and think about that.
So let’s have patience and confidence. I’m going to add a can I can I add another one into the analogy? Yeah. I think that the mission and the vision is working to complete a generation of cycling cyclists, and we might not see that in initially with loads more people cycling on the roads. But I am absolutely completely confident and sure that we are making a whole generation of cyclists.
Astra
Well isn’t that awesome sentiment? So that sort of brings a natural close. Is that anything, Emily, you want to add about any of your charities and your rallying cries that you have before we close off this episode?
Emily
I think that just anyone who’s listening, it’s like this is the most exciting sector to work in, in charities. And we need people from a variety of backgrounds, skills and experiences as volunteers, as trustees and a staff members. If you want to get up every day thinking I’m going to make a difference to something or somebody in the world, this is the sector to do it.
And so, you know, if you’re a point in your life where you’re thinking, I don’t know what’s next for me, I say, come to the charity sector and we need you.
Astra
Well, thank you very much for your time, Emily. It’s been fantastic speaking to you. Lots of experience and lots of insights. So thanks for your time now.
Emily
Welcome, welcome and thanks. Thanks for that. Lovely to meet you. Virtually.
Astra
Virtually. Goodbye policies and we’ll see you on the stage.
