Cancer Research UK is to refresh its brand this September in a move to better reflect the extent of the charity’s work fighting the disease.

The organisation has responded to public feedback and is committing £680,000 towards a rebrand that aims to illustrate more clearly the work it does and increase its income stream to fund more research into battling cancer.

“Our volunteers felt that their great work was being let down by the brand,” said Richard Taylor, CRUK’s executive director of fundraising and marketing. “We’re not changing it or dramatically altering it, we just realised that it needed to be refreshed.

“Part of this will be by using less cold, clinical language – warming up our communications. We want to show how much we appreciate our supporters.  

“At the end of the day, our aim is to increase our income so we can fund more research and save more lives.”

Taylor stressed that the public are not, in general, clear about both the prevalence of cancer or the relevance of CRUK’s work to their lives – this is despite the fact that more than one in three people will get cancer, and that there are over 200 different cancers known.

Despite being one of the UK’s most well-supported charities, 89 per cent of donations to CRUK are for £10 or less, and it takes 234 participants in its Race for Life to fund a research lab for one week.

Matching scientific ambitions

CRUK wishes to match its fundraising to its scientific ambitions – the charity’s research spend has remained flat in recent years, so it needs to grow its income to fund the work it plans in stratified medicine, genomics and towards establishing the Francis Crick Institute.

“We absolutely believe that refreshing our brand will be a secure investment in future fundraising,” Taylor told civilsociety.co.uk.   

“However, putting a figure on how much is difficult at this early stage. What we do know, is that it will only take 0.003 per cent increase in income over the next five years to have made a positive return on the costs – something we are confident is very achievable.

“Our ultimate ambition is to bring forward the day when all cancers are cured, and to do this, we need to continue to inspire support.  We believe refreshing our brand will help us do that – by engaging new supporters, developing stronger relationships with our current supporters, and increasing funding to save more lives and get one step closer towards our goal.”

Taylor added that those new supporters could include a younger audience, and believes that by switching to a “fresh and modern” brand that works better across digital and other platforms will help this.

New CRUK logo

A major part of the rebrand is the introduction of a new CRUK logo. The familiar arrow of blue dots with a pink one at the tip is being replaced by a large ‘C’ of multi-coloured dots that are dispersing – illustrating both the range of people who come together to help beat cancer (volunteers, patients, doctors and nurses) and how the disease itself can be broken down and beaten.

The logo will also be altered for its usage on other CRUK materials: the dots replaced by numbers for a leaflet of statistics, fruit for a guide to healthy eating, and so on.

CRUK commissioned branding agency Interbrand to help with the rebrand, and while Taylor could not confirm the sum paid to the agency, he did say that it “has been very generous given the nature of the project and that we are a charity”. Most of the total invested will go towards new signage and refitting of the charity's 500-plus chain of shops.

This rebrand comes on the ten-year anniversary of the merger of Cancer Research Campaign and Imperial Cancer Research Fund that bore CRUK.

CRUK recently reported a slight increase in income in its annual financial report for 2011/12.