Impact Report 2022

Here’s a taster of the fantastic work from across the society:

Education, training, and personal development

1.5m+ children were educated in water safety via RLSS UK’s FREE downloadable resources - delivered by a mix of schools, educators and leisure providers in a broad range of educational settings.

IN 2022...

Over 48,000 Rookie lifeguards started their journey on the Royal Life Saving Society UK’s pathway in 2022, with the new National Lifesaving Academy offering a raft of opportunities in lifesaving and lifeguarding.

RLSS UK awarded more than

50,000 first-aid qualifications and bolt-on awards.

RLSS UK remains the leading provider of training in lifesaving and lifeguarding in the UK and Ireland, awarding 154,000+ qualifications and awards in 2022. , including 35,000+ National Pool Lifeguard Qualifications (NPLQ).

Did you know?

On average, RLSS UK Pool Lifeguards prevent 1 probable in-water accident every 6 minutes1

RLSS UK Lifeguard Intervention Data 2022 (n=346)

Consultancy, expertise, and partnership

500+ LIFEGUARDS PARTICIPATED in RLSS UK industry leading research to revolutionise lifeguarding.

1.4m+ aqua park visitors benefitted from enhanced water safety protocols.

1,300+ UK accidental drowning cases analysed by RLSS UK raise awareness of important risk factors.

Building our community

764

RLSS UK members showcased skilful provision of RLSS UK lifesaving techniques at our two championship events.

71

2 Royal Life Saving Society UK National campaigns amplified the importance of water safety at critical times during the year.

500+ RLSS UK members joined the Society in 2022, resulting in our total number of members reaching 9,381.

#EverydayHeroes were recognised by the Society

1,817 RLSS UK Lifesavers awarded the Limited-Edition Platinum Jubilee Medallion,

Thank you to all our dedicated members, volunteers, and supporters in 2022.

More than £56,000 was fundraised by our committed supporters, through activities and events throughout the year.

To read the full 2022 Charity Impact Report visit www.rlss.org.uk/charity-impact-report-2022

After a fantastic Drowning Prevention Week (DPW) in 2022, where we saw over 2.5million viewing opportunities of our animation on YouTube, we have some exciting plans for 2023.

We have a brand-new water safety animation which will use the characters from the 2022 animation and build on this to tell the story of the water safety code. The animation will be shared far and wide and we would love for you to help us with that.

We want to ensure that as many people as possible know the water safety code:

How you can help

We know our members and supporters are brilliant in helping us to share our messaging during Drowning Prevention Week, and all year-round. This year, we would love for you to continue to help us share that messaging as far and wide as possible.

Get digital – share our new animation and any of our posts on social media. Use social media to positively engage with various communities. Don’t forget we have lots of resources including videos and images available to download for free on our website.

Run a DPW activity – if you have connections with any leisure centres, pools, swim schools, clubs or activity providers you could run a DPW awareness session. We have some great activity sheets available on our shop website which could help with your session.

Education in Schools – we shall once again be building on our thematic lessons for school children so if you are able to share with or deliver education in schools, together we could make a huge difference to the lives of young people.

Help us to connect DPW with RLSS UK

For many years we have had a huge number of individuals and organisations sharing the Drowning Prevention Week campaign, however, sometimes we see the link back to the Royal Life Saving Society UK is sometimes missing. We would like to increase the link between RLSS UK and the campaign as we know this will create great opportunities for us all.

We want to ensure that when people see and hear of Drowning Prevention Week they think of RLSS UK. This will help us to spread our messages even further, raise more money for the charity and in turn provide more water safety advice to larger audiences, get more people involved with lifesaving, and ensure more people can enjoy water safely.

When sharing our messages or encouraging others to share, please ensure that the Royal Life Saving Society UK is mentioned alongside DPW.

Have you noticed our NEW logo?

This year we have updated the Drowning Prevention Week logo; the logo now fits with the style of our new graphics and animations.

We have updated the downloadable resources on our website so please do head to www.rlss.org.uk/DPW to download the resources and use the new style logo!

The 2022 #DontDrinkandDrown campaign was spread over a month’s period to include not only the usual Christmas period, but also the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

Throughout the month we saw some great engagement and we hope you were able to see and share our graphics throughout the month. We created specific World Cup and Christmas graphics which we shared on our various social media channels and made available to download via our website.

We also saw some great involvement from key water safety partners, such as various Fire and Rescue Services, who shared the #DontDrinkandDrown messaging.

Podcasts

We were able to secure some great partnerships as a number of football themed podcasts mentioned the campaign for free. The podcasts included The Football Ramble podcast, and The Price of Football podcast, both are named in the top podcasts in ‘sports’ on Apple podcasts.

Former Soccer AM presenter, now YouTuber and co-host of Jaack Maate’s Happy Hour podcast, Robbie Knox created an Instagram story for the campaign to help spread the message to his 49.9k followers.

Thank you to everyone who helped spread the messaging during the #DontDrinkandDrown campaigns for 2022.