The Shakespeare Hospice – Is a Hospice a home?

Context: The Shakespeare Hospice is a successful, well known and well regarded local-to-sub-regional hospice. They are ambitious and innovative. Having lost the funding stream from a pioneering project at a local recycling centre, income had flat lined. A sub-branding initiative to develop services in GP practices had caused confusion. This was hampering their efforts to develop new practices and increase the number of people they helped.

The requirement: Why, with no direct local competition, were they not increasing penetration of their services? Why weren’t numerous new funding initiatives delivering a higher return on investment? Why was there limited recognition of the pioneering work that The Hospice did?

In examining the challenges, it became clear that The Shakespeare Hospice did not know how they were perceived even by those who were aware of them. If this was known, perhaps the way in which The Hospice communicated its services and promoted its fund raising could be used to inform and entice?

It was concluded that Glued would conduct qualitative research for The Hospice to establish an understanding of how The Hospice was perceived by its patients, carers, staff, trustees, the local community, supporters and donors*.

The outputs: For The Shakespeare Hospice there were few surprises. The term hospice was emotionally charged – almost taboo – and the term Shakespeare was in danger of localising the scope of what was offered. 

They also found those who hadn’t engaged with the hospice were unaware of a number of key facts: that services were provided at home and not in beds in the hospice; were available to carers, families and relatives of the ill, as well as patients; and had been developed to improve people’s lives, including teenagers with life-limiting conditions and survivors of life-limiting conditions. The list went on. 

Perhaps the key finding was that the taboos around the term hospice were preventing those that had not engaged with the hospice from seeing their innovation, scope and positive approach.

The results: Glued recommended a name change or evolution to address the pre-conceptions of the word ‘hospice’ and development of a brand around the new name that would trigger awareness of the Hospice’s pioneering work.

This represented significant change for an organisation that had benefited from their identity for 16 years, and could not be done without careful planning, taking into account people’s awareness and allegiance.

At present, Trustees are debating the naming and identity required. This is prior to a year-long preparation and planning phase, during which time those who have already engaged with the Hospice will be informed of it’s new name and new style of communicating and promotion, before public roll-out in 2017.

This focuses on significantly increasing awareness, positive perception, funding, and, most importantly, the number of people with whom The Hospice works, along with the scope of services delivered. The underlying message is that everyone deserves a good life.