Overgate Hospice: the Big Build Appeal

Let’s build a new hospice for Calderdale, together 

That was the call for action from Overgate Hospice aiming to raise £12.7million to be able to create a new multifunctional hospice with a state of the art building. The Big Build Appeal was Overgate Hospice telling Calderdale about the launch of this ambitious new project. The appeal has consisted of a number of different fundraising events, the Big Brew, the Colour Run and the Midnight Walk, as Overgate finds interesting and exciting ways to engage the community with the work of the hospice and the need to renovate its premises to continue delivering quality care and support to those in need.

We have supported hospices with their advertising previously and were only too happy to help with publicising the commencing of this vital project. Overgate Hospice provides expert care, support, advice and information for patients and their families, carers and loved ones, and we wanted to find ways to best support them to continue doing this. People over the age of 18 who have a terminal illness or other life-limiting long term conditions can be cared for at the facility. Fundraising is so crucial because the care Overgate provides is free of charge, and inclusive of all people, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or religion.

Objectives

The primary objectives of these campaigns were to:

- Promote the Big Build Project, which aims to build a new state-of-the-art Hospice facility to help deliver high quality care to residents.

- Help fundraising for the Big Build Project by advertising and encouraging participation in the fundraising events within Halifax, such as the Colour Run, Big Brew and Midnight Walk.

The Big Build Appeal bus rears alone generated 1,100,680 impacts, ensuring the message was spread widely across Halifax. An average frequency of 3.85 demonstrates a repetition which will enable the message to be embedded within the viewer's mind, building a familiarity and understanding of the Appeal.

Strategy and Execution

To maximise the promotion of the Big Build appeal as a whole and then drive interest in each individual fundraising event, we have utilised a range of advertising channels to raise awareness of the various activities undertaken by Overgate Hospice.

Using Acorn and MOSAIC data profiles and consumer insight data, we have created campaigns which have specifically targeted people likely to make frequent donations to charity. This created a more focused approach to complement a high impact campaign.

Strategies have included:

- An advert on Sky digital pre-roll targeting adults across the Calderdale region, which explained why Overgate are in need of a new Hospice

- Bus rears across Halifax, where overshow is a possibility, giving additional free advertising

- Advertising at both bus shelters and rail stations

- Petrol pump advertising where there is significant dwell time

The Colour Run and Big Brew campaigns overlapped, resulting in Overgate Hospice being able to target different audiences simultaneously to encourage a wide audience as possible to participate in a fundraising event.

Launching the Big Build Appeal

Overgate Hospice provides a fundamental service to the people of Calderdale and many in the community will have been touched by its work. Therefore, we wanted to create a campaign which resonated with the local community as Overgate Hospice embarks on its ambitious Big Build project.

We executed campaigns which were impactful, using both images of the staff at Overgate Hospice and fun, colourful imagery of each of the fundraising events, with advertising which would cover Halifax and the surrounding towns to ensure our messages were unmissable.

Campaigns such as these are vital as the cost of living crisis creates challenges for fundraising, as demands on people's finances increase and so people donate to charity less than ever before. By creating a campaign with high-impact and imaging which is interesting and resonates, we've placed Overgate Hospice at the forefront of people's minds when they do donate.

Our experience of the intricacies of various media informed us of the ways we can create added value in a campaign. For Overgate, this manifested in all campaigns featuring bus rears, as we understood the strong possibility of overshow. And this is what happened. Each of the campaigns had am overshow of an average of 10 days per panel on bus rears, generating a sizeable portion of additional impacts for free. 

Petrol pumps were used in the initial phase of the campaign to generate an awareness that the Big Build Appeal was being launched.