St Gemma's Hospice

Context

St Gemma’s Hospice serves as the primary hospice care provider for Leeds, West Yorkshire, offering essential end-of-life care and support to patients and families throughout the region. As part of their ongoing development efforts, the hospice sought to strengthen their fundraising approach, particularly in engaging major donors more effectively while executing targeted campaigns to meet specific funding needs.

The challenge

St Gemma’s Hospice needed to refresh their fundraising approach on multiple levels: developing more compelling appeals for broad-based support while simultaneously creating deeper, more meaningful relationships with major donors. Their immediate need was for an effective campaign on the CharityExtra platform, but this also needed to align with longer-term strategies for donor engagement and sustainable fundraising.

Our solution

We implemented a comprehensive approach that addressed both immediate campaign needs and long-term donor relationship development:

1. For the immediate fundraising initiative, we created the Precious Time Appeal—developing distinctive messaging and creative materials that effectively communicated the value and impact of St Gemma’s work for the CharityExtra platform campaign.
2. In parallel, we began applying our Discovery Process to help the hospice develop more effective approaches to major donor engagement, building the foundation for sustainable high-value relationships.

The Precious Time Appeal demonstrated the effectiveness of our messaging approach, exceeding its fundraising target by 40%. This immediate success provides momentum for the ongoing major donor strategy work, creating a stronger foundation for St Gemma’s future fundraising initiatives and financial sustainability.