The Swedish Childhood Cancer Fund has a strategic, goal-focused approach. It ensures that we keep our operations on the right track, so that we can be sure to achieve our long-term goal of eradicating childhood cancer. With a new five-year strategy in place, we are ready to step up our initiatives and efforts even more.

When it comes down to it, our work is about saving lives. It is about helping to improve the quality of life for children with cancer and their families through vital support measures. It is about providing information and promoting our important issues in public debate, and it is about strengthening long-term, complex research into childhood cancers. With so much at stake, we must make the right decisions, which is why our strategy is so important.

The core of the Swedish Childhood Cancer Fund’s operations is our three missions, all of which are supported by our fundraising activities. Together, our three missions – research and training, advice and support, and information – aim to generate the best possible benefit from our donors’ contributions. The missions and our overall operational structure are well- balanced and the result of careful analysis of the best way for us to make a difference. Beyond the needs analysis, we at the Swedish Childhood Cancer Fund see several advantages to working with three missions: we create a clear structure to our operations, both internally and externally; we can allocate and demand liability and authority; and we can better set goals, measure and monitor our work. It also allows us to focus our work and activities within a given mission, while also working across the boundaries of the missions.

It all goes together

Our three missions are not separate units, but are mutually dependent. Without the information mission’s efforts to raise awareness of childhood cancers, and without campaigning to shape public opinion, we would have far fewer prospects of establishing important collaborations for the invaluable advice and support operations, or extending our reach with our calls for research proposals, and our fundraising operations would have less success. At the other end, our research mission and that whole part of our operations must be managed properly to maintain credibility in our communications and in the support we provide under the advice and support mission.

Our different missions collaborate closely, and of course the planning, implementation and monitoring of our activities is all coordinated. We also quality assure our work at all levels of our operations. We have internal regulations and guidelines as well as external regulations and demands that must be met. Thanks to our continuous efforts to improve, we are not afraid to question whether we can or should pursue other methods that may generate greater value for those we are here to benefit – the children who are diagnosed with cancer.

The five-year strategy is our guiding star

Based on our zero vision, we at the Swedish Childhood Cancer Fund base our work on the conviction that a clear, concrete strategy should serve as a compass for everything we do. In other words, our strategy should serve as a tool in our everyday work and a guideline for the priorities we set for different parts of our operations. The fact that our strategy stretches over a five-year period, between 2018 and 2022, makes it easier for us to be clear about our position.

In general, our new strategy gives us a new long-term goal for fundraising, an aim to work more proactively to increase research into childhood cancer, and an aim to develop our support for and public awareness of adult survivors of childhood cancer. Our overall strategic ambitions are now broken into long-term and short-term goals, which will be key starting points for our yearly plans and our activity planning in each mission. Our basic philosophy is to work with clear goals, metrics and performance indicators for all parts of our operations. This is how we will one day achieve our final goal – to eradicate childhood cancer once and for all.