Blue Skies Hospital Fund is a registered charity operating as part of the NHS Charities family. They are the charity for Blackpool Teaching Hospital and raise money to enhance the care the Trust offers to patients, whether they are residents of Blackpool, Lancashire, or South Cumbria, or one of the millions of holidaymakers who visit each year.
Although only a small team of employees, they have a number of volunteers and celebrity patrons, who all work to raise money throughout the year.
They work in partnership with the hospital and other local charities.
The challenge
The team wanted to ensure they were complying with the law on holding data and what they could use for fundraising or marketing especially.
With changes to data protection laws, charity law and guidance produced by regulators, the team needed to have up-to-date knowledge.
It was also useful to learn ideas of ways forward to remain compliant and how they could work with the other local charities.
The solution
A tailored training course and handbook that covered relevant topics for a charity and gave an overview of GDPR and information governance.
Discussing this with the Head of Charity, Debbie from DTIG was able to devise a bespoke half-day interactive course that was answered the questions raised by the team and their charity partners. It needed to be delivered in a timely manner, face-to-face and had to meet their budget.
Although a specific business case was not required, the course did need to cover the key aspects and questions raised to “ensure that we meet our obligations and don’t run into problems or generate complaints.”.
Strategically
The team are governed by laws that apply to HNS Foundation Trusts as the hospital is the Corporate Trustee. This means that they are obliged to “ensure that all of our fundraising is adequate to support the work we do but ensure that we do this correctly.” as they report to the Trustees.
Performance is reported on a quarterly basis to the board of trustees. The board of trustees ensure that the funds raised must be spent in line with the objectives of the fund and ensuring that designated funds are allocated for specific research grants.
The results
As we were able to gather all of the team and some of our local charities together, we all learnt the same information at the same time. This supports consistency in our approach, especially as we could ask questions linked to charity that helped clarify using someone’s data for fundraising events.
As a result of the training, the team are:
- More confident in their tasks.
- Understand when and how to gain consent.
- Understand how they can use data linked to legacies or donors.
- Able to refer to the course handbook.
- Have been able to review tasks and processes for compliance.
Why did you choose DTIG?
“We’d met Deborah previously and joined a couple of webinars that she ran for a local business network. Having learnt about the steps she took to provide interactive and tailored training courses and a handbook for us to use afterwards. We were confident that she could provide a course that was cost-effective and that would meet our needs.”
It was a great training course that covered everything our charity needed and more.
Kila Redfern, Head of Charity