JCDecaux has announced that they will be working with five charity partners in 2023 and 2024, including Fighting Blindness. Further to a competitive process, the five charity partners that have been selected are – Fighting Blindness, Alone, Barnardos, Fairtrade and Peter McVerry Trust.
This is the third time that we have been nominated by the outdoor advertising company – throughout 2018 – 2022, the partnership provided our charity with significant nationwide outdoor advertising space.
JCDecaux partners with selected charities for two-year terms, providing each charity with access to their portfolio of outdoor formats, so that they can raise much-needed awareness of the issues that they are facing and encourage people to support them.
For our latest campaign, The cure is waiting, we once again worked with our pro-bono creative agency – In the Company of Huskies.
The call to action in this advert is to 1) fundraise through a call to donate for investment in further vision research and 2) to build on the tireless advocacy work we have done to date (and continue to do) in relation to gene therapy. The posters, which will feature across billboards, bus stops and Luas columns, are impactful, with minimal copy. The advert reads – ‘The cure is waiting. We shouldn’t be. Donate today.’ The inclusion of a QR code allows the public to directly donate on the Fighting Blindness website.
Many people with inherited retinal degeneration do not yet have a clinical grading of their genetic code – a cure may indeed be waiting for unfound recipients. Fighting Blindness finances a patient registry of genetic coding that is utilised for upcoming clinical trials and finding eligible patients for gene therapy. This advert demonstrates that we are waiting. Donations will reduce the wait for many of our community.
This year we had the highest number of applications for our charity partnership program to date and the standard of entries was extremely high. Incredible work is being done by the charity sector in so many different areas. We are really looking forward to working closely with our charity partners over the next two years and we are confident that our formats will play a vital role in raising awareness of the crucial work that all of our charity partners are doing.
Finbarr Roche, Fighting Blindness CEO said:
JCDecaux show exemplary corporate social responsibility by offering small charities this level of publicity and resulting public awareness that provides a lifeline to small charities like ours. Fighting Blindness is aware that without funding there is no research. When there is no research, hope is diminished. We are delighted to have been chosen again as one of the JCDecaux charity partners for 2023-2024. We know that this partnership will bring us to the cure sooner.
About JCDecaux
JCDecaux is the number one outdoor advertising company in the world and the recognised market leader in Ireland with a wide range of advertising formats across 32 counties, including a significant portfolio of large format billboards.
They manage over 3,700 National Transport Authority bus shelter panels in the Republic of Ireland and are the exclusive provider of Luas advertising in Dublin city. They also run the highly acclaimed NOW dublinbikes scheme on behalf of Dublin City Council. In Northern Ireland JCDecaux manage advertising across the Northern Ireland Transport Holding Company’s (NITHC) rail portfolio.