National, independent charity, NHS Charities Together, cares for the NHS by providing the extra support needed to care for staff and patients and improve health in the community. Working with over 230 NHS charities across the UK, representing hospitals, ambulance trusts, mental health trusts, and community health services - NHS Charities Together ensures that money raised reaches the people that need support the most.
The organisation also helps strengthen the NHS charity sector, providing support for member charities through nationwide fundraising, networking opportunities, and training, as well as showcasing the role of the NHS charity sector nationally. Collectively, these charities give more than £1 million every single day to the NHS so that people can stay well for longer and get better faster, helping to take pressure off an overstretched health service.
Although these charities span across health causes and sizes, the people who support them share common goals and challenges when it comes to fundraising, grant-making, communications and getting the community involved with their local NHS Trusts.
Operating with a corporate membership structure, individual charities are members of NHS Charities Together, with staff supported through training, guidance, sharing best practices, access to resources, and peer support.
Our executives recognised that the benefits delivered to our members could be improved and modernised. I was tasked with ensuring enhancement there, and while part of that was acquiring new technology, we also wanted to skill up. We had the budget to increase our staff talents, both through training and hiring, so we built a team with an expectation of technology adoption. With the team in place, we looked at the best benefit-to-cost ratio. With Cantarus’ help, we identified adopting a full-featured online community platform as uniquely powerful and affordable.
We were tasked with building an online community for NHS Charities Together where people could easily access knowledge, thought leadership, and engage and interact under one roof. We worked closely with the charity to find a concept that would address all their needs.
I loved joining NHS Charities Together and launching Member Connect! We had a great team doing such impactful work, and I was confident the community project would be a success. While online communities can look engaging and appear to offer strong social/emotional components, the proof of the pudding is in the data. We had the right tools and strategies to focus on specific areas.
Community launch and sign-up promotion yielded tons of contact records of eligible staff previously unknown to NHS Charities Together, while confirming they are legitimate staff of individual member companies. Another important goal was to see how individual member companies were engaging with NHS Charities Together.
The data has helped inform the work across teams including marketing and events, and trends were impressive – there was an uptick in utilisation and the percentage of members served had increased steadily over time.
Because we were using the community as a central member benefit, non-utilisation identified member companies where more direct intervention was required. We asked Cantarus to create some custom reporting, and this allowed us to target our outreach and understand our successes and gaps, both in terms of engagement and content strategy.
Since launch, the community has consistently maintained its daily engaged user base each year, demonstrating sustained member interest. It continues to see a strong volume of new topics and posts, reflecting active participation. Additionally, a high number of likes shows that even when members aren't commenting, they remain actively engaged with the content.
The charity is now focusing on and highlighting quality peer support to help enable peer support and spotlight key contributors in their monthly community highlights.
Member feedback so far has also been overwhelmingly positive.
“I enjoy supporting others and have also found this forum helpful and an open/welcoming place to sense check stuff.”
“It’s really helpful to pick other people’s brains, and I’m always happy to help/comment if I think it will be helpful. Thank you everyone.”
“I really enjoy contributing and this is a valuable source of information and support!”
The online community has paid so many dividends for us in terms of member value and actionable data. Our people across NHS Charities Together staff teams are seeing the benefit of this approach. With the peer support provided in Member Connect, it is really helping us make a positive impact for our charity members and by extension, the NHS itself. The online community has been a game-changer in terms of the support it enables and the relationships that have been built.
