Increasing our accessibility 

Working in collaboration with the Royal Association for deaf People (RAD) to deliver support and advice to deaf people in financial hardship and to address the need to better understand carbon monoxide (CO).

Why we’re working together

There is currently no national approach to provide information to deaf people about the rising cost of utilities, the Priority Services Register (PSR), or CO and its dangers. There are inconsistencies with the information available to deaf people and limited options on where people can find advice and guidance on financial support from energy companies on the cost-of-living crisis.

We’re working with RAD to ensure that customers in a vulnerable situation can be provided with clear and concise information and which is easily accessible.

How we are working together

RAD currently have several different means of reaching out to customers, especially those in vulnerable situations, including targeted social media posts and leaflet distribution.

RAD previously had 16 Information, Advice and Guidance (IAG) colleagues and through this project a further five have been fully trained by National Energy Action (NEA) in basic energy awareness. Not only has this allowed them to reach more customers but has also created jobs for deaf people who historically find it difficult to find employment.

We’ve also facilitated an introduction between RAD and Groundwork for extra training for Groundwork staff on BSL. We meet with RAD quarterly to review their ongoing processes and to offer any further services to help with the running of the project.

Project impact and learning

We’ve identified that by working collaboratively, we’re able to reach a niche target of customers in vulnerable situations. Many deaf communities do not access mainstream media and therefore are unaware of some benefits it can bring. We’ve identified that deaf people and their networks are more likely to navigate to RAD’s website and social media pages for access to information in their first language and we can see that so far in this project we’ve reached over 24,000 people through social media alone on the topics of PSR, CO and benefit advice.

This project has enabled us to reach a large proportion of customers in vulnerable situations that would have fallen outside of some of our existing projects due to the lack of accessibility. We’re aware that deaf people have bigger hurdles to overcome when protecting themselves against the risks of CO as standard CO alarms are not sufficient for the deaf community and therefore, would need tailored CO alarms to meet their needs. We’re continuing to identify and look for partnerships to overcome these issues.