Is your own fundraising culture holding you back?

The results of the 1st quarter analysis of hospice management accounts, as undertaken by Hospice UK in association with db associates, don’t make pretty reading. 

83% of the 94 participants were in the red, 10% higher than for the same quarter last year. The collective deficit of £20m was up from £12m in 23/24.

As the above graphic shows, the biggest single factor is payroll costs, up by 9% year on year. Indeed, over the last two years, the average hospice salary bill has risen by around 20%. Most of this is, of course, down to matching NHS salary increases. 

Total income actually rose by 5% year on year. It’s just that expenditure grew much faster, by around 8.5%. 

Legacies (20%), statutory (7%) and retail (5%) all saw healthy increases. The legacy figure is a ‘re-bound’ as the same quarter last year saw a 27% decline against 22/23 figures, showing the volatility of this income stream.

What is striking, however, is that fundraising income fell by 6%. 

I have written before about whether hospices are more comfortable with transactional income generation activities (retail, lottery and events) than transformational ones (major gifts, regular donations and legacies). And also how support across the organisation is needed to allow ‘pure’ fundraising to flourish, especially within care teams. 

However, sometimes it seems the cultural blockers are where you might least expect them. Within fundraising teams themselves. 

Speaking to fundraising consultants, interims, but also CEOs and Care Directors, I increasingly hear of resistance to new ideas, of comments such as ‘we have always done it this way’ or the ‘that’s not how hospices do fundraising’. 

Even in some cases, that in memoriam or pro-active legacy marketing is not really the role of fundraising, or even unethical in principle, whereas the evidence is to the contrary. 

Such feedback has also come from new hospice IG Directors who join from other charities, often with very good CVs. 

Moving from roles where they were not working day by day alongside service teams, users or (sometimes) opinionated volunteers, can be a hard transition. 

But when their own teams are also resistant to change, that can make it much harder. There are several examples of such people moving on quite quickly. 

Until recently, the pandemic is a convenient breakpoint, hospices could get away with such cultures in their fundraising teams and still be financially ok. Not anymore.  

It’s convenient to put the blame for worsening fundraising performance down to the cost of living crisis, increased competition or the wider organisation not ‘getting’ fundraising. 

No doubt such factors have an influence. 

But sometimes the answer is also within, not just without.