Our new campaign to take the stigma out of the stoma
In the coming weeks and months, you’ll start seeing something new appear across our website, our social media channels, and out in the world: a familiar toilet door sign, but with a small and powerful difference – a urostomy bag.
This image is the visual heart of our new public fundraising campaign, Sign of Support, and we wanted to explain to you, our members, why we’ve created it, what it’s setting out to achieve, and how you might see it show up.
Why now?
As a charity, we depend entirely on fundraising to keep our services running and to grow them further. But when we sat down to
explore how best to raise our profile and widen our donor base, a few uncomfortable truths came to light.
Most people simply don’t know what a urostomy is. Even where public understanding of stomas has grown in recent years, it
tends to stop at colostomies awareness of urostomies lags far behind. The language doesn’t help either: urinary diversion, bypass, bag, pouch, stoma – inconsistent terminology makes it harder for people to find us, or to know that what they’re going through has a name and a community around it.
There’s also the matter of visibility. Living with a urostomy can feel like a sensitive, even isolating experience – but usually only at first. Members tell us again and again that the anxiety and embarrassment they felt in the early days eased once they’d lived with their stoma a while, and once they found others who understood. The problem isn’t necessarily the urostomy itself – it’s that it’s invisible, and so it stays unspoken.
On top of this, we recognised that, as a charity, we haven’t had a strong, consistent tone of voice or visual identity. We had no single image or icon that was easy to grasp and recognisably ours. Sign of Support is our answer to all of this.
Why a toilet door sign?
Toilet signs are everywhere, we walk past them dozens of times a week without a second thought. That’s precisely why we’ve chosen this image to lead the campaign.
By adding a urostomy bag to that ordinary, universal symbol, we’re helping to make something usually hidden instantly visible. It takes urostomies out of the territory of the unseen and unspoken, and places them quietly, matter-of-factly, into everyday life. Our image is not a generic stoma sign, but overtly a urostomy.
It’s a simple idea, but a deliberate one. We wanted an image people would recognise instantly, that would spark a second look and, hopefully, a conversation.
What the campaign is asking for
Sign of Support launches alongside a new fundraising appeal, built around the line: “Let’s take the stigma out of the stoma.” The appeal explains, in plain terms, why greater visibility matters: many people still don’t know what life with a urostomy really involves, and when they do find us, we want nothing to stand between them and the support they need. That’s a principle we hold firmly: nobody should have to pay for care and support at the moment they’re at their most vulnerable.
Regular donations help fund the free information, reassurance, and support that allow people to rebuild their confidence and independence. Crucially, this campaign isn’t just about our existing members and donors – though your regular giving remains vital to keeping our services free and accessible to everyone who needs them, whenever they need them. It’s about reaching a much wider public too.
Greater understanding among friends, families, workplaces, and communities means more people willing to back us in bigger ways too: sponsored runs, skydives and bake sales and everything in between. The more familiar and visible urostomies become, the easier it is for people outside our community to understand why our work matters – and to want to support it.
Speaking to the Urostomy Association’s existing members, Brian Fretwell, Chairman, said:
“We hope you’ll recognise a bit of yourselves in this campaign, and feel proud to see it out in the world. If you’d like to get involved, join in our inaugural Urostomy Awareness Month, share the campaign with friends and family, or host a fundraiser of your own, we’d love to hear from you.”
