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SOFII’s view:
It’s difficult to do justice to a capital campaign as wide, complex, ambitious and successful as the Wishing Well Appeal for the world famous Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital. The best we can aspire to is to give readers a taste of the different aspects of the appeal and to direct all further interest towards Marion Allford’s comprehensive account of the campaign, which she describes in her book ‘Charity Appeals: The Complete Guide to Success’. What follows is a condensed summary of a major capital campaign which, at the time, was the largest appeal ever mounted in the UK and certainly one of the most successful. All who were part of it shared an exceptional emotional experience and a justly deserved sense of achievement. The lessons for today’s fundraisers are legion.
NB:
There are many aspects to this story, so to try to give you the detail you might need we've prepared five more linked pages, including an informative two-part article from the director of the appeal which, when read in conjunction with this exhibit, will give you a complete picture of the campaign. See below for links.
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Name of exhibitor: Marion Allford.
Email: maa@marionallford.com
Website: www.marionallford.co.uk
Name of exhibit: The Wishing Well Appeal for the redevelopment of Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital.
Date of first appearance: The appeal ran from October 1987 to June 1989.
Category/area of fundraising: Capital campaigns.
Country of origin: UK.
Summary/objectives:
The Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital (GOSH) is justly famous the world over for innovative patient care and advanced research, which has developed some of the most progressive and effective treatments and procedures in patient treatment and care, especially for young children. At the time of this appeal (see below for current figures) the hospital was treating 9,000 in-patients and 60,000 out-patients annually. Most of these were very sick children referred to the hospital from around the world, because the combination of specialised expertise that they needed would not be available locally.
‘My wife and I have shared with other Great Ormond Street parents that curious mixture of alarm and dismay, combined with relief on being told that your child is being refereed to Great Ormond Street. Your precious child, needing to go to what is the most famous children’s hospital in the world. Dismayed because you are under no illusion, it is serious, it’s very serious and the case needs the very best care that is possible. And then the relief: the relief that your child will have the very best care that there is.’
Television presenter Jonathan Dimbleby
on what it means to be a Great Ormond Street parent.
Despite its fame and many achievements, in 1987 the hospital was in urgent need of extensive redevelopment. At that time the total cost of ensuring that this internationally acclaimed facility would be properly housed and equipped was estimated to be £72 million (around US$110 million). Of this huge sum, £30 million was guaranteed by the UK government provided that the hospital itself raised the remaining £42 million. The task of raising this vast sum fell to a carefully constructed team of professional fundraisers and volunteers established and led by seasoned architect of large capital appeal campaigns, Marion Allford.
At the start of the appeal, the future of the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) was in jeopardy because of outdated and inadequate buildings and facilities. The hospital was then housed in old, even obsolescent buildings, built long ago when concepts of patient care were vastly different from what they are today. New operating and recovery rooms were needed, as were post-operative recovery areas, intensive care units, seminar rooms and play areas. GOSH was one of the pioneers of the concept of total family care, which allows family members to stay with the sick child throughout the treatment. Yet there was no parent accommodation and at any one time up to 150 parents had to sleep each night wherever they could find a space.
The objective of this appeal was nothing less than to secure the survival and continuance of what is arguably the world’s finest children’s hospital.
‘At one extreme was our surprise and delight
at receiving, through the post, five pence
(about US8¢) sent by a five-year-old to
‘Great Ormond love Sarah’. At the other
was a nice letter of response enclosing
a cheque for £3 million, with no strings
attached. And it wasn’t even April 1st!’
Marion Allford, Director of the Wishing Well appeall
Overall fundraising strategy:
‘Even appeals for such emotive causes as children’s hospitals have been known to fail by using the wrong strategy – or no strategy.’
So says Marion Allford in the two accompanying articles which describe in detail the overall fundraising strategy. Click here to see or follow the links above. In these articles Marion outlines the seven key factors in ensuring success of an appeal and describes in detail the four main parts of a classic capital appeal, then goes on to share her reflections 20 years later on this remarkable and instructive campaign.
Fundraising costs;
The policy of the Wishing Well Appeal was to keep costs to a minimum and to attract pro bono assistance and gifts in kind wherever possible.
A general rule of thumb is that it is seen as respectable for big gift fundraising to have a cost-to-income ratio of about 10 per cent, whilst public phase fundraising is much more expensive – nearer 25 per cent to 30 per cent. Because of the massive public response, the Wishing Well Appeal was able to keep its costs to approximately 2 per cent of the funds raised.
Creator/originator:
Marion Allford led the professional and volunteer team. She was appointed because she had a successful track record in setting up and running multi-million pound appeals and came originally from a public relations and marketing background with ‘blue chip’ UK companies.
There was no fundraising structure in place before the Wishing Well Appeal, so it had to be set up from scratch. The director aimed to use minimum staff, backed by suitably qualified volunteers, before the money started to flow. At the height of the Wishing Well Appeal, there were up to 100 office volunteers, working in rotas, manning six telephone lines in a very inadequate basement. They were magnificent.
Special characteristics:
This was at the time the largest ever appeal of its kind in the UK. It is still – 20 years later – the largest capital appeal achieved for a UK hospital.
Influence/impact:
It is impossible to overestimate the huge impact that this appeal, along with another great appeal of the time the NSPCC’s Centenary Appeal in 1984, had on the conduct of capital campaigns in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. It became the blueprint that others followed and its influence is felt still, to this day.
Results:
A total of £54 million was raised by the appeal, £12 million ahead of the target, which at the outset had seemed so impossibly huge. In addition, raising the £30m from the government was an achievement of the appeal too. Before the appeal structure was in place, the hospital had been told that there would be no statutory funding for the redevelopment.
Why do you think this exhibit merits a place in SOFII?:
This is a campaign of historic significance, not just because of the scale of its achievements but because of the range of professional techniques that were used. Also, a complex, carefully assembled team of amateurs and professionals came together behind a common objective, to dramatically exceed their already ambitious target.
Apart from responding to the emotiveness of the appeal, this business-like and imaginative approach to the setting up and management of the appeal was picked up and written about extensively by the press. It even led to a television programme about using business methods to benefit charity.
The appeal’s outstanding success is all the more remarkable because it was launched to the public one week after ‘Black Monday’ on 19 October 1987, when the world experienced the largest one-day percentage decline in stock market history.
But what was so special?:
Yes, it was a very big appeal, the biggest at its time. But it was special because there was no fundraising machinery at GOSH before this appeal, it was set up from scratch and completed in four years. The other big appeals were pulled off by large, on-going fundraising charities with well-established fundraising infrastructures.
Any other relevant information:
The three most important components of any appeal are the cause, the leadership and the overall strategy.
In this appeal the cause was about as emotive and compelling as you could have: sick children. The Wishing Well Appeal was enormously well connected, which helped every aspect of the appeal no end. The leadership was, as normal, vested in the charity’s trustees, but here a special appeal committee was set up under the chairmanship of former government minister Lord James Prior.
The Royal Patrons of the appeal were their Royal Highnesses The Prince and Princess of Wales.
The first double-page spread from the appeal brochure shows the Royal Patrons at home with their children.
