Our Strategy

Early in 2021, we asked you for your opinions about Wales Air Ambulance through our supporter and volunteer surveys. What you told us was consistent and clear.

• You are passionate about your local community.
• Wales Air Ambulance has an important and specific role within your community.
• You want future generations to be a part of, and to benefit from, our Charity.
• You recognise and value the strong Welsh identity of our Charity.
• You want regular community-focused engagement and content, along with information about our Charity and the services that we offer.

We took your valuable feedback and, along with a significant volume of internal and external research carried out by colleagues across the Charity, we created eight focused programmes that make up our new strategy. Each programme has a specific objective, and we hope you can see where your feedback has become vital to our future plans.

The eight programmes are as follows:

Youth Engagement – We want to deliver insightful youth engagement initiatives to impart knowledge, charity awareness, values and encourage future support

Sustainability – We will demonstrate a long-term commitment to ethical practice, champion a green agenda and uphold our shared responsibility for future generations.

Retail – We will operate a retail portfolio that strikes the right balance between generating income and preserving community presence.

Income – We will ensure that we can continue to deliver our lifesaving service by cultivating, developing and maintaining a diverse portfolio of sustainable income streams.

Digital and Technology – We want to be a technology-enabled organisation that puts communication and connectivity at its heart.

People – We will be a supportive organisation for our employees. We will foster an inclusive and collaborative culture that values contributions, provides equality of opportunity, enables everyone to reach their potential, and ensures that everyone is treated fairly and with respect.

Service Delivery – We will continue to enable the delivery of 24/7 emergency department standard care to you, the people of Wales, wherever and whenever it is needed. We will also ensure that the service is delivered in the most cost-effective manner, maximising the impact of your donations across the whole of Wales. Our Charity will always proactively seek out opportunities to improve patient care and outcomes.

Integrity and Transparency – We will repay the trust that you, the people of Wales, have placed in us by adopting the highest ethical standards, embedding sustainability and value for money in all that we do.

Present through every single programme will be our commitment to our Welsh Identity. We will always recognise the unique relationship that we have with you while celebrating our national identity and ensuring our activities reflect the needs of all the different communities that we serve. One of the core values of Welsh Identity is inclusiveness – we are here for everyone within our country who needs our help.

• We have completed our Welsh Language Project, to ensure that the Welsh language is given due prominence and priority across the Charity.
• In Retail, we have created a customer loyalty scheme, a framework to standardise shop acquisition and opening, a community hub structure with new shops in Caernarfon, Mold and Bridgend, and a retail management information dashboard with training for shop managers to monitor shop performance daily.
• New retail branding has been rolled out creating a pleasant environment for customers.
• Significant progress has been made, centred around a new fundraising strategy. This includes creating a new regionalised fundraising model and the development of a ‘high value’ and corporate team. We have also enhanced our income generation opportunities, such as launching new products for individual giving and community fundraising.
• Considerable progress has been made in the harnessing and use of smart data for campaigns.
• We have moved from a transactionally focused, outsourced IT operation to establishing the Charity’s first in-house IT team. As a result, we have improved our IT infrastructure, connectivity, and cyber security (we are now Cyber Essentials Plus accredited). In addition, we have developed management information systems to aid evidence-based decision-making and delivered a new intranet and a new finance system.
• The Charity has also embraced Robotic Process Automation (RPA), introducing a ‘robot’ that supports administrative tasks associated with our Lifesaving Lottery. This has helped us to raise funds more effectively, build employees’ digital skills, and reduce our environmental impact.
• We now have a trained in-house team capable of developing RPA for other time-consuming administrative processes across the organisation.
• We have introduced new employee onboarding/offboarding processes, our first recruitment software with website integration, and a new eLearning platform with evaluation tools and dedicated pathways for each employee. We have also established an employee benefits package, new wellbeing initiatives, new volunteering schemes, an employee forum and new internal communication and engagement activities.
• We have launched a successful apprenticeship scheme. Two young people have completed their apprenticeships and moved into permanent employment with the Charity, while a third is progressing well. A fourth apprenticeship opportunity has been identified within the Communications team.
• We have undertaken an aviation procurement and overseen the subsequent transition to a new aviation provider, read more here (link to aviation services).

• With the approval of a new service improvement (click here for more information – link to service improvement) we will now focus on the development of a new airbase to deliver a better service for the people of Wales.
• Sustainability and a green agenda are important parts of our strategy. This focus will begin with the development of our new airbase which will include a specific workstream focused on sustainability. The lessons learned from this project will then be developed and implemented across the Charity’s other sites.
• We will develop an e-commerce strategy, planned for delivery in the next 24 months.
• We are delivering a new website with improved functionality and accessibility. It is due to launch in March 2025.
• A project is planned to develop our data maturity, enhancing our ability to use data to achieve our strategic, operational, and corporate goals.
• We will develop and deliver a plan focused on schools and youth/community group activities and engagement.