Our impact

Improving the wellbeing of people using our services

Satisfaction and outcomes are consistently high, with 89% of clients stating that the service helped them to manage their appearance-related concerns.

We use the Short Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale to measure the impact of our counselling and Skin Camouflage Services. Comparing their scores before and after support, clients using these services saw a positive shift (1.6 points).

We’ve highlighted the experiences of some of our previous clients below. For more examples, please see our real stories.

Who are we reaching?

We monitor the demographics of our clients to understand who we’re currently reaching and who might potentially be underrepresented.

• Gender: 79% of clients identified as female, with 20% male and 1% self-identifying.
• Disability: Only 17% of clients identified as being disabled.
• Age range: 22% of clients were between 30 and 39 years old, 18% were between 20 and 29, and 18% were between 40 and 49. 15% were between 50 and 59, 14% were under the age of 20 and 12% were 60+.
• Ethnicity: 61% of clients identified as White (British or other), 18% as Asian/Asian British and 8% as Black/African/Caribbean/Black British.
• Type of visible difference: While clients may have more than one condition, the main conditions seen were skin conditions at 48%, scarring at 32%, burns at 4% and cancer at 4%

Increasing awareness, understanding and acceptance

We want to improve the general public’s understanding of the impact of living with a visible difference and to give people with visible differences a platform to share their experiences.

Our campaigns, education and learning programmes drive change so that the ambitions of people with visible differences aren’t limited by attitudes, behaviours or systems and they can lead the lives they choose.

The impact of our campaigns

In 2022/23 our campaigns aimed to raise awareness of the impact that negative behaviours can have on people with a visible difference.

• Our annual Face Equality Week was themed around staring. It resulted in 110 pieces of media coverage and our video had over 70,000 views on social media.
• In December 2022, there was an incident on the BBC 2 quiz show, Only Connect, where the word “scar” was linked with “blot”, “stain” and “stigma” under the category name “marks of shame”. Our reactive campaign reached more than 164,000 accounts on social media and achieved national coverage including in the Daily Mail, Digital Spy, The Times and The Mirror. We also secured an apology from the BBC and, with our ambassadors, gave the production company in charge of Only Connect a session on how to better represent people with visible differences.
• In total, we reached over 248 million people through 329 media hits. Of these, 181 included quotes or stories from someone with a visible difference, reaching 153 million people.

Our education work

We continue to work with teachers and health professionals, both of whom have an important role in supporting people with a visible difference. Our education resources were downloaded 2,763 times, with our PSHE-accredited A World of Difference resources accounting for 70% of these.