Real-life Tales of Earning - Contact a Family

Identifying, packaging and marketing intellectual property.

This case study tells the story of how an informal support network for the parents and carers of children with rare syndromes identified, packaged and traded £1million of intellectual property.

Contact a Family's lucrative social enterprise is a form of mission-related trading. Developed from core activity, trading enables the charity to extend its services in a self-financing manner and simultaneously generate a surplus to make money for other activities undertaken within the organisation: it makes money and advances mission.

It is outstanding example of identifying, packaging and marketing intellectual property.

You can visit the Contact a Family website at www.cafamily.org.uk

Contact a Family ( CaF ) is a medium-sized national charity that supports the parents and carers of children with rare syndromes.

How do you make money from that?

Contact a Family began informally in the mid 1970's when a social worker saw that although several children with disabilities in the neighbourhood used council service none of the families involved knew each other.

In 1979 CaF became a registered charity with a presence in several London Boroughs, putting families in touch with each other and organising activities for the families as a whole not just the children with disabilities. Over the 1980's news of the charity spread and enquiries began coming in from parents across the UK. Many parents wanted information about the particular condition affecting their child and in 1988 Contact a Family established a Helpline to deal with those enquiries.

Expanding the charity

At the same time it was decided that the charity would need to expand it's research base to include information on the many rare syndromes affecting children and that eventually this information should be published. A two-year grant was obtained to employ a part-time researcher that was nearing completion in the summer of 1991.

The result was the accumulation of a mass of intellectual property, which, if properly packaged, could generate funds for the charity to enable it to continue its work. Nobody quite envisaged at this stage however quite how much the research would generate.

Generating income

The CaF Directory was launched in November 1991. It was published in a ring binder and loose-leaf format to enable the information to be updated every six months via a subscription service. Since then the charity has sold over 6,500 copies at £60 and sent out 36,000 updates at £7.50. This generated £660,000 for the charity over 9 years and annually brought in around 7% of our total income. On top of that, the printing of the Directory or an update was also an attractive proposition for funders and we obtained grants of over £80,000 towards our printing costs over the years.

Growing the business

In 1997 they developed a web site and began to investigate ways of including information from the Directory on the site. Given the income generated by the paper version sales, they were naturally cautious about putting the information on the Internet for free. British Telecom gave them a grant to look at the possibility of allowing the public to access the site but for only a limited number of times before being locked out and encouraged to subscribe. This was piloted for a year but the results were disappointing.

So in May 1999 they applied for and won a grant from The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry enabling them to take the plunge and open the site up to unlimited access.

Since then they have entered into a contract with NHS Direct Online to enable them to link to the CaF site for all their information on rare syndromes which is a prestigious "seal of approval" for the charity. These grants and contracts have meant that the site has generated income of around £45,000. In September it was named Internet Site of the Year at the UK Charity Awards and it currently attracts around 10,000 visitors each week.

Future Directions

However, the paper-based Directory was still the main earner and in May last year they reviewed sales figures and decided that they needed to have a rethink if they were to continue publishing: sales of new Directories were falling and were approaching a level below which printing costs would escalate rapidly.

Yet it was concluded that the decline could not be attributed solely to the website and decided not to abandon but, instead, relaunch the Directory, changing the format to a perfct bound annual. The advantages for customers were that it would be more portble, they wouldn't have the hassle of inserting update pages and it would be half the price. The advantages for the charity were that it would be far easier to administer sales, and printing costs would be a quarter of the original version. Rather than just simply represent the old information in a new format they decided to expand the remit of the publication to include conditions affecting adults as well as children.

The figures showed that to maintain overall profit 2,000 copies of the new perfect-bound edition would need to be sold. The resulting Directory was launched in January 2001 and after 3 weeks 2,200 copies had been sold at £30 each generating £66,000 of income.

A further advantage has been that the paper Directory is classed as zero rate sales for VAT purposes enabling the charity eligible to register and claim partial exemption for certain expenses. This has enabled them to reclaim around £30,000 of otherwise unrecoverable VAT since 1991.

In November of this year the Directory will be ten years old and over those years CaF's intellectual property will have taken three different forms, a loose-leaf ring binder, a web site and a perfect bound book. It is likely that by November sales of this invaluable asset will have generated over £1m for the charity.