Customer story: St Oswald's Hospice

St Oswald's Hospice is a much-loved charity based in Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne, providing specialist care for adults and children with life-limiting conditions across the North East of England. The hospice offers inpatient care, end-of-life support, respite for children and young adults with complex needs, and a range of outpatient and palliative services. 

Fundraising is the lifeblood of everything the hospice does. With supporters ranging from one-off donors to legacy pledgers, volunteers to corporate partners, the demand on the fundraising team, and the technology behind them, is considerable.

The challenge

Before Donorfy, St Oswald's ran its donor management on a CRM that had been in place for decades, built largely around the specific quirks of the people who used it. The system had served its purpose, but over time it had become a significant barrier. 

"It was quite antiquated, quite slow, and I think it discouraged people from digging in and being curious," Ian explains. "It was very compartmentalised, so it was difficult to get a full picture of a supporter. It didn't really lend itself towards multifaceted relationships." 

This was a particular problem in hospice fundraising, where supporters often wear multiple hats. A volunteer might also be a legacy pledger. A company might fundraise through an event and donate separately. In the old system, those connections were hard to see and easy to miss. 

There was also the issue of integration. With no API and no web connectivity, getting transactional data into the system fell largely to Ian himself. Every import meant exporting spreadsheets, cleaning the data, and uploading it manually. It was a time-consuming process that simply could not scale. 

"There was a lot of heavy manual lifting, predominantly by me, to export spreadsheets, tidy data and import it into the CRM." 

St Oswald's ran a full tender process before making the switch, evaluating Donorfy alongside well-known alternatives including Beacon and Raiser's Edge. It was a rigorous assessment, and Donorfy came through on multiple fronts. 

Cost was significant. As a mid-sized hospice, St Oswald's needed a system that could genuinely serve them without the price tag of enterprise software. Donorfy came in substantially cheaper than both alternatives.  

"Size and scale-wise, Donorfy seemed a very good fit for our charity." 

Equally important was the principle of native integrations. Ian had seen what happened when systems were customised beyond their intended design: undocumented workarounds, dependencies on individuals who eventually left, and support teams who had no idea what had been built. He wanted to avoid all of that. 

"My mantra was: if we're going to get the product, let's use the integrations that are native to it. That provides the best support, the best advice, rather than all these bespoke solutions that are yours and yours alone." 

Why St Oswald's chose Donorfy: 

• Out-of-the-box integrations with no hidden costs
• Significantly more affordable than comparable CRMs
• Clean, intuitive interface the whole team could use
• Native connections to GoCardless, Stripe, Eventbrite and JustGiving
• A platform built specifically for charities 

St Oswald's signed with Donorfy in April 2023 and completed a twelve-week onboarding programme. Due to internal changes, they didn't go live until January 2024, but Ian sees that extended transition period as time well spent. 

Rather than migrating everything wholesale, the team made a deliberate decision to leave behind supporters who hadn't engaged in the last ten years or joined the database within the last three. It was a clean break, and it meant the new system started with data that actually reflected the charity's active supporter base. 

"We drew a line in the sand," Ian explains. "If they haven't given in the last ten years or they're not new to the database, they probably don't exist to us in an active capacity. So we left a lot of those significantly lapsed supporters behind." 

For other hospices considering a similar move, Ian's message is direct: there's no perfect moment to switch, but the discomfort of change is worth it.

"We've never regretted it for a minute. Even the people who'd been here longer than me have converted to it. It's a lot more accessible and easy to use, and it's more future-proofed." 

Integration: Connecting the whole supporter journey 

From the moment St Oswald's went live, the integrations made an immediate difference. Supporters can now self-serve: making donations online, setting up direct debits via GoCardless, signing Gift Aid declarations, and registering for events through Eventbrite. Data flows directly into Donorfy in real time, without anyone at the hospice needing to touch a spreadsheet. 

"All of that has removed a lot of the need for manual admin. It's a lot cleaner, and the information is there instantly." 

More recently, St Oswald's went live with a new donate button integrated directly with Donorfy's payment infrastructure, including mobile pay. For Ian, this is a meaningful shift. In a world where people rarely carry cash or cards, removing friction from the donation journey matters. 

"Unless I can use Apple Pay or tap my phone, you'd probably not get my business. I think we'll get more bang for our buck with donations the more we deploy mobile pay." 

Dashboards and worklists: Smarter decision-making 

One of Ian's favourite features is Donorfy's reporting and visualisation capability. The team can now build dashboards that give a clear, at-a-glance view of fundraising performance, and create worklists that direct the team's attention to what matters most. 

Whether it's flagging recent donations where a Gift Aid declaration is missing, identifying supporters with incorrect campaign coding, or tracking legacy pledges, the system surfaces information that would previously have required significant manual effort to find, if it was found at all. 

"We've been able to set up worklists through a range of transactional things, tags and activities, so teams can actually focus on and work towards specific goals. It's just made everything cleaner and easier." 

Supporter relationship management: seeing the full picture 

Perhaps the most important shift has been in how the team understands its supporters. Where the old system struggled to connect the dots between a person's different relationships with the charity, Donorfy makes the full picture visible. 

Campaigns, events, volunteering, giving history, legacy intentions: all of it is in one place, accessible to anyone on the team. If a member of staff moves on or is unavailable, whoever picks up a supporter relationship has everything they need. 

"It's that full joined-up journey of a donor. Having it so that anyone can step in and pick up where the last person left off is incredibly valuable." 

Two years in, St Oswald's is still evolving with Donorfy, and that, for Ian, is part of what makes it a good fit. The system has grown alongside the team's confidence, and there is still more to come. 

The reduction in manual admin has freed up time that can be redirected to supporter engagement. Integration with payment platforms means supporters encounter fewer barriers when they want to give. The dashboards mean the team can make informed, data-led decisions rather than simply continuing what they have always done. 

"The ease of use, the integration with other platforms, and the ability to get out that key information about your supporters to actually make informed decisions, rather than just keep doing what you've always done." 

Ian is clear that the value of a good CRM only compounds over time.

"You need to put the groundwork in. But if people are recording things properly, you get so much more out of it. The more you put in, the more business intelligence you get back." 

Looking ahead 

With Donorfy now part of the Access Charity Suite, Ian is keeping a close eye on what the partnership means for future development. He's particularly interested in what Access's wider not-for-profit portfolio might bring to the table, and keen to explore Access's learning suite as his team continues to develop its CRM skills. 

His advice to any hospice or charity still sitting on the fence? Stop waiting for the right moment. 

"There's no good time and no bad time to switch. It's always going to be difficult to move a full team, change is change. But decide what's actually useful in your current database, take that with you, and everything else is a clean slate. We've never looked back." 

Would you recommend Donorfy to another hospice or charity?

"Definitely, 100%." 

What's the single biggest benefit Donorfy has brought to St Oswald's?

"The ease of use, the integrations, and the ability to get the right information out to make informed decisions." 

What would you say to a fundraiser on the fence about switching CRM?

"We've never regretted it once. Take the leap, the clean slate is worth it." 

How would you describe Donorfy to a colleague who'd never heard of it?

"It's easy to get to grips with, even from an admin perspective. It's diverse enough to manage campaigns, events, pipelines and opportunities, and the configurability means you can segment and pull out exactly the donors you need." 

Best thing about working with the Donorfy and Access team?

"There's still a human touch. You're not doing it by yourself. The support is there, and they genuinely listen to feedback."