Rainbows Children's Hospice

Rainbows Children’s Hospice –
Care for children and their families

Rainbows Children’s Hospice provides respite, palliative and terminal care to families who have a child with a life limiting illness. The Hospice has served the East Midlands and South Yorkshire region, since it opened in 1994. Rainbows Children’s Hospice needs £1.8m every year to remain operational and receives only 9% statutory funding. Fundraising is therefore an essential activity for the Hospice.

the original system

Rainbows Children’s Hospice used Filemaker Pro to record details of their contacts and donations. The limited storage of data allowed only the most recent information to be held. This meant that Rainbows had no historical data available, making it difficult to target specific groups of supporters or to analyse the donor base effectively.

Rainbows Children’s Hospice began the process of looking at potential new systems in August 2003 and after shortlisting suppliers, thankQ was chosen.

the new system

Rainbows went live with thankQ in March 2004, with the finance module added in June 2004.

The main reasons that Rainbows cite for selecting thankQ include:

• the way thankQ is structured
• the close integration between thankQ and other applications, like Sage and Microsoft Office
• The ease of use and flexibility of thankQ, which allows Rainbows to work the way that they want.

the benefits

Since the implementation of thankQ in March 2004, Rainbows have made a number of specific improvements to their system, as Sandy Porter, Fundraising Administrator comments: “As you work with thankQ, you want even more from it. You see that there are other things you can gain from the system”.

A specific development from the standard system enables Rainbows to track the progress of grant applications to trusts and to make notes of specific deadlines and meeting dates. Integrating this functionality with the Action Manager module allows users to set actions on fellow users to complete specific, related tasks.

thankQ’s powerful searching functionality, such as the ‘yellow box search’ has also reduced the amount of time spent by Rainbows staff trying to find the information they need in the system.

One of the most notable impacts on the organisation has been the ability to share information easily between different departments, improving communication and knowledge at the same time. For example, before thankQ was implemented, Rainbows’ fundraising department would have to ask the Accounts team for details of donations from their supporters. Now with all the information in one central database, users with appropriate access rights can get the information that they need.

ESiT’s ability to react quickly to change requests and thankQ’s flexible structure ensure that the system will continue to meet Rainbows’ needs into the future as the organisation grows and develops.

thankQ provides Rainbows with:

• Sophisticated reporting and searching functionality
• Improved data storage
• Better understanding of their supporters and donors through data archiving
• Accessible information throughout the organisation

Rainbows Children's Hospice (PDF - 60KB)