North Devon Hospice
World first fundraising innovation
Every year, North Devon Hospice faces the challenge of raising some £4m from a dispersed and mostly rural population. As much as a quarter of that total comes from legacy donations. But when legacy receipts fell dramatically, the hospice faced a major shortfall in funding.
Bray Leino has worked with the hospice for 30 years; together, we identified three objectives for a fundraising campaign:
- Inspire and facilitate difficult legacy conversations.
- Enable the hospice to celebrate legacy donors as their most important, precious givers.
- Ensure the campaign could continue without regular investment.
Our solution? The Forever Stone: a world first fundraising innovation, combining millennia of local history with cutting edge technology to secure the future for one vital community service.
We sourced a two ton, 400-million-year-old piece of local stone and crafted it into a powerful monument to legators. Then we developed a state-of-the-art augmented reality experience which enables visitors to interact with the stone and reveal legators’ life stories. The Forever Stone image has been developed into a logo for use in hospice comms, and hospice staff wear Forever Stone pin badges, taking the important message into every room, home and ward they attend.
The Forever Stone has given North Devon Hospice some control over a previously unpredictable but crucial element of their fundraising, with annual donations increasing 566% - from £300k to £2million.
The permanence of the monument, easy maintenance of the tech and remote accessibility enables the campaign to raise millions with zero financial investment, including during the turbulent fundraising climate of the Covid pandemic.