How Together for Short Lives raised £58,000 in partnership with Morrisons

The story

About Together for Short Lives

When a child’s life is expected to be short, there’s no time to waste. Together for Short Lives make sure the 99,000 seriously ill children and their families across the UK can make the most of every moment they have together, whether that’s for years, months or only hours. The charity stands alongside families, supporting them to make sure they get the vital care and help that they need.

Together for Short Lives does this through helping to raise vital funds for the 54 children’s hospices across the UK, and through their family and support hub  providing easily digestible information about available support so families can spend less time searching for help and have more time together. They connect families with support services and other families who understand what they are going through, so they don’t feel as alone.

Together for Short Lives started in October 2011 after a merger with Children’s Hospice UK and ACT. The Charity operates across the UK with a team of 42 colleagues and a head office in central Bristol.

The challenge

Creating a bespoke charity challenge with matched giving

Together for Short Lives was selected by major supermarket retailer, Morrisons to be their chosen charity for three years in February 2022. As part of that partnership, every Morrisons store and site is twinned with their local children’s hospice. This means all funds raised by these stores and sites goes directly to support their twinned hospice. Funds raised through Morrisons Head Office and in-store supplier events go towards funding grants which hospices apply for to make improvements to their facilities and support families in making precious memories together.

As part of the corporate partnership, the Morrisons Foundation offered to match fund the amount raised by colleagues that were fundraising up to £1,000. This was a great opportunity for the charity but it meant there were a few requirements to ensure that Morrisons and its colleagues got the most out of their experience.

Firstly, the registration and set-up process needed to be as straightforward as possible. With lots of different stores and hospices involved, keeping things simple and organised was essential.

The charity also wanted to ensure that the campaign felt like a community effort and not lots of different stores fundraising separately. This meant finding a way to include the efforts of the different locations in one hub to cultivate that sense of togetherness.

Together for Short Lives fundraisers preparing to take on the Yorkshire Three Peak Challenge

To bring all those elements together and to put on a unique and appealing fundraising opportunity, Together for Short Lives turned to Enthuse and its partnership with Charity Challenge. While Enthuse specialises in digital fundraising, Charity Challenge’s expertise lies in putting on exciting fundraising events that capture the imagination. Whether that’s a trip to Machu Picchu, travelling across the Sahara, or in this case, the famous Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge. So not only did Together for Short Lives have a fundraising platform for its corporate partner, Morrisons, to use, it also had an enticing challenge to offer them to encourage participation.

The more approach by Enthuse

Providing the best fundraiser experience

The Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge consisted of a trek of the famous three peaks in Yorkshire – Pen Y Ghent, Whernside and Ingleborough with a target to complete all three within 12 hours.

A total of 79 Morrisons colleagues took part on the day to fundraise for Together for Short Lives, with the earliest entrants being put into a draw to win a £100 hotel voucher and the top fundraiser winning a £50 restaurant voucher to help drive engagement.

As the Together for Short Lives and Morrisons partnership model is quite complex, with all stores and sites being twinned with their local children’s hospice, it was important to have organisation from the get go. Thanks to Charity Challenge and Enthuse, the charity was able to tailor questions in the event registration process to capture the store or site number, enabling the cause to report on the event much more easily and allocate participants’ fundraising to the correct destinations. This saved the charity time and spared them a laborious and very manual spreadsheet task.

Another key benefit of using Enthuse and Charity Challenge was that it allowed participants to have their branded fundraising pages automatically set up for them and displayed in their personal Charity Challenge account area. This made it an easier process for those taking part to get started with their fundraising and saved the charity from following up with them to set up pages. What’s more, Enthuse ensured that Together for Short Lives had a dedicated contact for the campaign to create a platform to the exact specifications they were looking for and have any queries answered promptly.

The Charity Challenge partnership enabled Together for Short Lives to put on a unique and engaging event

The event itself having its own profile page also proved useful as it enabled the charity to give fundraisers and donors relevant information about their cause, while also providing one hub for all of the fundraising. Seeing donors match funding from Morrisons Foundation after every donation, a leaderboard and the overall total raised spurred participants on and encouraged them to go above and beyond the original £40,000 fundraising target. This also helped to foster that sense of community and healthy competition that Together for Short Lives was keen to cultivate.

When it came to organisation and reporting, having every participant’s fundraising page information up front enabled Together for Short Lives to keep track of those who needed further support raising money so they could increase stewardship activity where it was most needed. It’s not always possible for charities to support fundraisers with personalised advice and reminders – so this was a huge positive and will have helped to nurture those fundraiser relationships for the future.

The ability to customise the event registration questions allowed us to capture the key information in a complex partnership so that the funds could be distributed to the correct recipients.Aimee Hayhurst – Morrisons Lead Partnership Manager, Together for Short Lives

The results

Fundraising target exceeded by 45%

Together for Short Lives set a fundraising target of £40,000 for The Yorkshire Three Peaks Challenge – including match funding by Morrisons Foundation – which they comfortably cleared, raising £58,200 in total.

The charity exceeded its target by 45% which meant even more money for the great work that the local children’s hospices provide and ensured the partnership with Morrisons was a success story for all parties.

Fundraisers posing at the peak

From the initial event registration all the way through to the communal fundraising hub, Together for Short Lives had an event that felt tailored to their cause, made the fundraising journey simple and allowed their corporate partnership with Morrisons to flourish.

The automatic fundraising page creation was great for harnessing a sense of urgency and the ability to add the match funding provided by the Morrisons Foundation at the donation point definitely contributed to us exceeding the fundraising target.Aimee Hayhurst – Morrisons Lead Partnership Manager, Together for Short Lives