Client profile
St Ann’s Hospice is the largest adult hospice in the UK, providing care and support to over 3000 people each year.
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“Out of the many companies we asked to tender for producing the St Ann’s Hospice website, we chose Labrow Marketing. This was because of their integrity and honesty, willingness to challenge our thinking about the site and the hospice as a whole – and absolute confidence in their technical expertise and ability to complete the job on budget, on time and to the highest standard. Over and above these valuable considerations was Peter’s marketing knowledge that added something extra to what we were trying to achieve – not just a website but also a new era for St Ann’s Hospice. Peter has been a pleasure to work with and our working relationship has ensured a collaborative approach that has meant we finally have a website to be proud of.”
Jenny Watts, communications officer, St Ann’s Hospice
St Ann’s Hospice
A fully content managed website for the largest adult hospice in Greater Manchester.
Helping the UK’s largest adult hospice to communicate its services and raise the £16,000 a day needed to keep those services running
When St Ann’s Hospice decided that it needed a website, it approached Labrow Marketing to help provide the solution.
St Ann’s Hospice had recognised that its efforts to communicate its services and raise money to keep those services going was severely compromised by its current website. Originally designed in-house, the website was looking severely dated and was both difficult and time-consuming to maintain – requiring HTML knowledge to edit the files. In use, that meant that the site was often out-of-date. The site had other issues too: the structure of the site was confusing, with many of the hospice’s key services being difficult to find.
Labrow Marketing was selected to provide the new website – and the marketing input needed to restructure the hospice’s proposition. The site had to be content managed, so Labrow Marketing proposed the adoption of the Umbraco content management system, which allows almost all of a website to be updated without requiring any knowledge of HTML.
One of the key marketing issues was to strike a balance between communicating the caring services of the hospice with the need to raise money to keep those services running. The hospice is driven by its vocation to deliver a unique range of services to those with life-threatening illnesses – but the depth of service provided requires a great deal of money: around £16,000 a day needs to be raised. Only a third of the hospice’s funding comes from the NHS. So, the new site had to communicate the caring side of the hospice, but also ensure that fundraising activities had a very high profile.
The structure of the new site is the result of much collaboration between Labrow Marketing and the hospice, redefining how the hospice communicates its services into a structure that is more logical for the outside person. This includes sections not only for patients and carers, but also for the many healthcare professionals who also work with the hospice on a regular basis.
Photography plays a large part in the visual appearance of the new site, with floral pictures working alongside many images from the hospice itself – almost no library photographs are used. The photography was provided by one of our partners, Lesley Chalmers, whose informal and candid style suits the personality of the hospice perfectly.
The new website is also notable for its sheer size – in terms of the number of pages, it’s one of the largest websites created by Labrow Marketing. The creation of the content was divided between Labrow Marketing (for the key ‘positioning’ pages), and St Ann’s Hospice (for the detailed services, news and events pages).
The resulting site is very much a team effort – indeed, one of the key reasons for St Ann’s Hospice’s selection of Labrow Marketing was our collaborative approach, and the fact that we weren’t afraid to challenge the views of the hospice and add value, as a team player, to the overall process.
This website was developed in partnership with Bawden Quinn Associates, which provided the technical development for the content management system and the integration with the hospice’s fundraising system.