Annual report 2018

Our highlights

• A new strategy to achieve everyday equality for disabled people, created as a result of disabled people telling us how best we could help.
• A year of change.
• We managed the transfer of our regulated and day services to another provider.
• New digital and face to face services supported more than 1 million disabled people.
• We invested wisely to ensure we are fit for purpose in the future.
• We now rely on voluntary donations.
• Our donor recruitment doubled with 38,500 donors.
• Total income: £94.6 million.
• Total expenditure: £85.5 million. Including £46.8 million charitable expenditure and £31.4 million on raising funds.
• We moved our focus on to influencing attitudes and policy across three key themes that will most benefit disabled people.

Everyday Equality

Scope’s new strategy, Everyday Equality, sets out our ambition to ensure equality for disabled people under three themes:

• disabled children getting the best start in life
• disabled people living the life they choose, and
• having financial security.

Disabled people told us that to make the most impact we needed to change.

Managing change

We have managed our finances well as we transformed our organisation, putting us in a strong position to achieve the goals in Everyday Equality, while continuing to invest in our sustainability.

We made a surplus from our regulated and day services while transferring them and managed our continuing operations in line with budget. We made profits from the disposal of some property assets and spent wisely investing in delivering our strategy. As a result, we delivered a positive net movement of £8.1 million in total funds.

Scope’s priority throughout this transition was to minimise disruption to our customers and prepare the charity for the challenges ahead. We invested £6.3 million in our future including:

• the launch of our new-look charitable services
• new digital systems to underpin our operations
• relocating to Stratford
• a new model for raising funds and
• management of the change itself.

This programme of strategic investment will continue throughout the remaining four years of Everyday Equality.

Changes to our fundraising model

We are now a voluntary-funded charity, dependent on raising money from donations. Overall income decreased by £3.2 million to £94.6 million because of two factors:

• statutory income was £5.5 million lower as three large services were transferred in 2016-17
• income from property disposals was £2.4 million higher, and the total of all other income was just £0.1 million lower.

The cost of raising income increased to £31.4 million due to an increased investment in our individual giving programme to recruit more regular givers. Expenditure on charitable activities also decreased to £46.8 million because three large services were transferred in 2016-17. We achieved more effective cost management across the organisation.

Improving the lives of disabled people

While Scope has been getting in better shape than ever to tackle the challenges of the future, we have continued to deliver on services, influencing and fundraising.

Our services

• Our online community goes from strength to strength.
• The helpline and supporter care teams responded to more than 23,000 requests.
• Disabled people have received invaluable advice and support from services designed to help them get into work and flourish.

Our influencing work

• We established a £2 million partnership with Virgin Media to significantly bolster our employment strategy, including the Work With Me initiative.
• We reported new research findings on the extra costs faced by disabled people including a report on how much more disabled people need to spend on energy bills.
• We influenced a Government report on disability employment and published research into disabled people’s experiences of talking about disability at work. Our research, analysis, experience of working with disabled people and our subsequent conclusions shapes all our efforts to influence Government policy, business practices and public attitudes to disability.

Our fundraising

• We launched a ground-breaking product to help disabled children and their parents. Mindful Monsters are proving to be extremely useful and popular, and we will be rolling out the concept.
• Our shops continue to be the face of Scope on the high street and generated nearly £23 million of sales.

Download the full Annual Report (PDF 1.6MB) for more detail.