Acorns Children’s Hospice partnered with TribyTV to implement digital signage across 20 of its charity shops. This user-friendly solution has helped the charity to cut down on the cost of print materials, allowing for quicker updates to screens in each store; improving shopper, donor and fundraiser experiences and helping to raise more money for the hospice.
Providing expert care for children with short lives
Acorns Children’s Hospice is a charity with a crucial mission: to provide expert care for children with short lives. The charity supports 800 children and 1,100 families per year across the West Midlands from its three hospices in Birmingham, Walsall and Worcester and in family homes.
To support their work, Acorns operates a network of charity shops throughout Birmingham and the West Midlands. As well as being packed with high quality, pre-loved items, the stores are hubs for the community, helping the charity to raise awareness of the charity, promote fundraising activities and support the recruitment of much needed volunteers.
With so much to share, clear and current communication is key. We spoke with Kate Butler, Marketing Manager, to find out how they share information with shoppers, staff, volunteers, and donors in a quick, easy and engaging way.
From paper displays to digital signage
In the past, Acorns had relied solely on printed materials to share information such as posters in shop windows and around the shop floor as well as promotional flyers at the tills. While these still have a place in-store, lead-times for the production of this type of printed resource can result in delays between creating and sharing messages. It also adds another level of coordination with shop teams having to manually replace out of date items.
Fortunately, a quicker and easier solution was available. In September 2023, Kate signed up for a free trial of TrilbyTV, a platform that makes it simple for busy people to share important updates on screens.
Later that year, they decided to roll out TrilbyTV across several of their stores. They now have 50” Sony Bravia Smart TV screens behind the tills at each of their seven charity superstores as well as iPads at the tillpoint at 13 of the smaller high street shops.
With now 22 screens in place across different sites, Kate said TrilbyTV, “enables us to more easily centrally manage the coordination of our messaging and promotional marketing across our network of shops.” She went on to explain the benefits of TrilbyTV’s Categories feature which allows them to tag content items to appear on different screens in different stores: “the ability to tailor what shows on each device is helpful as it allows it to personalise and add bespoke messaging where applicable.”
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The Marketing Team at Acorns leads the way on content creation, upload and management within TrilbyTV. However, it’s important to get other stakeholders involved so they regularly consult with colleagues in Fundraising, Retail and Volunteering.
Kate told us, “we meet monthly to plan out the next month’s worth of content, but bespoke content is also created as needed based on need.” Therefore content sharing can be both planned out and reactive as needed. Kate agreed, saying, “the speed and ease at which we can upload content and be responsive to the needs of retail and other teams is invaluable.”
The team uses TrilbyTV as part of their wider marketing strategy to “raise awareness of who we are and to boost sign-ups to events, encourage donations to fundraising appeals, and to bolster event volunteer recruitment numbers.”
Kate explained, “The promotions shown across TrilbyTV form part of a multi-touch point approach to the marketing of our campaigns and fundraising initiatives. Supporting and mirroring the messaging [our] supporters and cold audiences will already be seeing across social media channels, print and OOH advertising, printed promotional materials and face to face conversations with our fundraising teams.”
Boosting support for the hospice
The content of the campaigns supports several initiatives including volunteer recruitment, stock donation and seasonal retail campaigns. Some of this content is evergreen, such as signage with reminders about Gift Aid. With TrilbyTV, it’s also easy to keep screens up to date with the latest campaigns, including Secondhand First Choice which aims to, “help showcase the quality, variety and individuality of Acorns’ secondhand stock, and challenge perceptions about charity shopping and to help boost stock donations.”
Recently, Acorns has run a campaign focussing on donor education to encourage donors to carry out a few checks to make sure items can be sold and aren’t wasted, as well as retail initiatives like their Star Buys and Not New, Not Perfect range of clothing.
Kate also told us that, on the signage screens, they regularly run promotional campaigns to recruit volunteers for roles in shops, hospices, fundraising and central teams. This content runs across all of their stores, however Kate said that they have used TrilbyTV Categories, “to create more bespoke, role-specific promotion that only displays in locations within proximity of where the role is needed.” So that potential volunteers see content most relevant for them, making them more likely to engage.
These initiatives have been positively received. Kate told us, “the response from shop teams has been very positive and it has been a helpful channel for us to connect volunteers and staff to the cause.”
Digital signage for the charity sector
Communication in the charity sector presents unique challenges: encouraging multiple audiences to engage with different campaigns and initiatives while connecting them to your mission. It’s important, therefore, to have the right tools for the job.
Kate summed up their experience with TrilbyTV: “It is a cost-effective, flexible and easy-to-use mechanism for us to reach a wide (and mixed) audience with multiple marketing messages at one time. Raising vital awareness of who we are and what we do, supporting retail and fundraising initiatives and linking customers and donors to the charitable cause.”
If you’d like to find out more about using TrilbyTV to engage your audience, we’d love to hear from you. You can book a free demo with our digital signage experts or, if you’d like to try it out, sign up for a free 30-day trial. There’s no obligation and no card details needed, just an opportunity to see if TrilbyTV works in your setting.