Southern Area Hospice Services provides specialist palliative care to individuals with complex life-limiting conditions. They aim to enhance the quality of life for patients so each person can live every day to the fullest.
We think the service they offer is incredible. But, it’s not easy to deliver a high standard of specialist palliative care as a not-for-profit organisation.
Not all heroes wear capes
All Hospice services are provided free of charge to patients. Which means that Southern Area Hospice Services needs to fundraise £3.6 million this year. This is the current cost of operations and could increase in coming years.
As a small team, they rely on the support of 300 volunteers. With approx 150 of these people helping with vital fundraising.
The Hospice team found that communicating and managing their incredible volunteers was extremely time consuming.
“It was taking too much time to individually text people. Plus, the network was failing to deliver messages and volunteers were not showing up to shifts.” Southern Area Hospice Services.
The team needed a better way to manage volunteers. One that didn't take hours of their time. And a communication style that worked for the generous people volunteering their time too.
Because, if volunteers don’t turn up to a shift it can have a big impact on the fundraising target.
“If we don’t have a volunteer to staff a fundraising shift, we can lose £50 to £200 each time for our main fundraising activity. It doesn’t sound like much but it really adds up over time.” Southern Area Hospice Services.
Making sure the price is right
So they went searching for a solution. Online texting was the perfect fit. It’s efficient and has a high delivery rate. Plus, the Hospice team knew that texting worked for volunteer communication.
However, Southern Area Hospice Services are extremely cost conscious. They raise a large portion of funding themselves and over 80% of this funding goes directly to patient care with the remainder going to service costs.
After assessing a range of providers, they settled on ClickSend. “After assessing three providers, we realised that ClickSend stood out because of the complete ease of use and the reasonable pricing. The cost was a big consideration.”
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The Hospice team now uses ClickSend and online texting for the majority of their volunteer communications. They use it for volunteer callouts, shift confirmations and reminders. Along with personalised thank you messages and instructions.
It’s given the team much more freedom in their day-to-day too.
“Texting on the handset was quite gruelling, sending messages via ClickSend has revolutionised the way we work — it's more efficient and coherent. Plus the volunteers love it as well.” Southern Area Hospice Services.
Southern Areas Hospice Service are already considering how they can use SMS in new ways. They’re considering MMS for fundraising drives and automations to save even more time. We can’t wait to see what they do next.
Ready to put down your handset?
We can help your not-for-profit communications team maximise your reach to get the best out of limited resources. Book a demo with our team to learn more about SMS and ClickSend.
