When Ross Henderson joined Nottinghamshire Hospice as Director of Income Generation and Digital, he was starting from scratch: no major gifts programme, no team experience in the area, no roadmap.
Fast forward ten months — having completed Major Gifts Mastery — and Ross and his team are making fabulous progress, including a gift of £150,000 over three years from a single trust pitch, they have appointed their first ever philanthropy fundraiser, and built the foundations of a major gifts culture that is already paying off.
Starting from zero
Ross came to the programme as a director-level leader, not a frontline fundraiser. Neither he nor his head of fundraising had much experience in major gifts — so his question wasn’t just “how do I get better at this?” it was “should we be doing it at all, and if so, how do we build it right?”
What struck him most was how immediately applicable the content was — he could act on it straight away: trying out and sharing new tactics, sharpening messaging, updating materials.
The pitch that changed everything
Here’s one example of how the new approach helped their fundraising bottom line. It was a new request for funding that Ross and his team made to a trust they’d worked with for almost a decade. In the previous three-year cycle, the trust had funded them at £50,000 per year.
Inspired by what he’d learned in the first session of the training, Ross challenged his team to rethink how they talked about their impact. So where before they had said “we care for 2,500 people a year”, they changed it to “we care for one in four people across the county who die each year” or “we receive a new referral every five hours.” The same facts — translated so it’s much easier for a donor to feel the impact of funding these services.
Six months before the pitch, Ross’s colleague Beth began sharing these new impact stats with the funder and listening carefully to what they actually wanted to support — they had a particular interest in night-time care.
Then there was the story about Mark.
Mark had a terminal brain tumour. When he came into the hospice’s care, he had one wish: to live long enough to walk his daughter down the aisle. The care team stayed overnight the night before the wedding so his wife Jane could sleep. They accompanied him to the ceremony. He walked her down the aisle. When he couldn’t make the evening reception, the team sat with him on the pub veranda — doors wide open, music floating out — until eventually the party came to him.
Ross put Mark’s photo on the screen during the pitch meeting with the funder. He described what happened in the room: “That awed silence you get, when people think about the bravery and strength of the people in your hospice.”
The team pitched three funding levels, anchored around the night-time nursing the trust cared most about. Six weeks later, the call came: £96,000 a year. For three years. The team were delighted, rightly proud of what they’d achieved.
That’s £150,000 more than the previous cycle!
Built on a deeper understanding of what the funder actually cared about, clearer messaging and better storytelling.
Sharing it with the whole team
Ross found the ideas on how to find and structure stories to convey impact, really helpful. One of the things he put in place after the training was a monthly storytelling session — where every team member brings a new story they’ve come across during their work.
The stories are stored in a tagged archive. Type “wedding” and Mark’s story appears. Type a theme relevant to a particular funder, and the right story is there, ready.
“If we hear 96 stories a year across 8 people,” Ross said, “there have to be 5 or 10 that we can keep rolling out.” That’s not just helping a particular project. That’s building a culture that makes everyone’s fundraising easier.
The bigger picture
Having developed a clear written major gifts strategy, Ross presented it to the board — and has now recruited the charities’ first-ever philanthropy fundraiser, three days a week, dedicated to driving this forward. He shared that in terms of the bigger picture for their fundraising, this is a really exciting step forward.
Ross started from zero. What he had was curiosity, the willingness to learn, and the discipline to apply it.
Ask yourself: what’s one thing you could do this week to sharpen the way you or your team tells stories, or to better understand what your most important funders actually care about?
Want results like Ross’s?
If you’d like to take your existing major donor results to the next level — or build a programme from scratch — Major Gifts Mastery is the programme that has helped Ross and hundreds of other fundraisers do exactly that. Find out more and apply here.
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