Southmead Hospital Charity Boosts Buskathon Donations with Give A Little and CollecTin

Hannah Jones, Community Fundraising Manager at

, explains:

“We started our contactless donation journey around five years ago with another provider and the devices served us well but they were coming to the end of their life. We needed new devices in time for a busy Christmas period and after carrying out some research, we discovered the CollecTin More contactless donation boxes, which can be used both portably and in fixed locations, so they were ideal. We really liked the features that the Give A Little software provides such as the ability to create multiple, branded campaigns, enable Gift Aid, marketing consent and receipts so the combination of CollecTin and Give A Little was my recommended choice.”

The charity’s biggest fundraising event is at Christmas where they run a Buskathon with the local John Lewis in Bristol where local musicians busk over several weekends in the run up to Christmas. Hannah explains how using the CollecTins and Give A Little as part of the Buskathon fundraising approach significantly increased the amount raised:

“This year, with the help of the CollecTins and Give A Little, we raised an incredible £19,000 for our hospitals – more than double what the Christmas Buskathon has raised in any other year since Buskathon began in 2016. I think that being able to allow donors to choose between three amounts (we opted for £3, £5 and £10 and a choose your own amount option), led to most people donating at least £5. We saw more card donations in general too, which was great.”

Being able to create different campaigns through Give A Little is really useful for the charity as they support all areas of their hospitals:

“It’s great to be able to create campaigns for different fundraising activities. For instance, we have a volunteer-run stall in the hospital that raises money for our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, while live performances in the hospital atrium at Christmas raise funds for our award-winning arts programme, Fresh Arts. It’s much easier for us to track and segment our income through reporting by campaign as well as by device, which streamlines the income process. We have separate campaigns for stalls and collections, and strategically created our collection designs with a clear call to action (to donate!). It’s really useful that you can have a Give A Little campaign with Gift Aid enabled for collections like these and one that isn’t so we can easily switch to the right one depending on the fundraising activity.”

Hannah has plenty of ideas for expanding the use of Give A Little over the coming months:

“We run a twice-monthly event called Bake Well where staff teams hold bake sales in the hospital and sometimes compete against each other. We are planning to increase these to once a week and provide the CollecTins to staff so they can easily collect contactless donations. We are also very keen to explore Give A Little Tap to Pay so that we have an affordable way for our volunteers and staff to fundraise with their smartphones without us needing to invest in additional hardware.”

Watch this space for more!