World Hospice and Palliative Care Day 2020 in South Africa: Caring and Learning

The Hospice Palliative Care Association (HPCA) of South Africa is a sub-grantee of the WHPCA’s Patient Power project.

One of our goals within this project is to have 300 people attend an online community sensitisation meeting(s) around World Hospice and Palliative Care Day. In this light, and the severe fundraising challenges that hospices have encountered during the COVID pandemic, HPCA elected to offer our members a free webinar series aimed at helping them to hone a digital fundraising campaign around World Day. Our secondary aim was to foster a peer learning community that provides mutual support between hospices.

Part 1 in our three-part series launched on the 20^th of August and, in addition to HPCA and our speakers, we have 35 dial-ins and well over 50 people from 30 of our 103 member hospices join.

This first session on ‘Digital Fundraising for Hospices’ aimed to give inspiration and share learnings. Kate Jackson from the WHPCA kicked us off with an overview of the theme for World Day 2020 and the various creative ways in which hospices could raise money online. She was followed by Patrick Schofield, the founder of two successful crowdfunding platforms, who shared more with us about the digital fundraising landscape in South Africa. After this Jacqui Kaye and Marchel Brown from HospiceWits and St. Bernard’s Hospice respectively shared two very different and helpful case studies with us and, to round it out Andrew Patterson, a fundraiser and extreme athlete shared his learnings on how to leverage individual champions which he gained when he set out to climb Table Mountain every day for a year.

Our second session in a month’s time will create a space for hospices to return and share and get peer input into the digital fundraising campaigns that they are planning for World Hospice Day. Then we will move to implementation and gather one more time in mid-October to debrief our campaigns and learnings. So far a online resources portal has been created and some participants expressed an interest in joining a WhatsApp group where they can continue the sharing.

We are excited about World Hospice Day and the opportunity that it provides all of us to ‘build back better’ and we are grateful to WHPCA and the Joffe Charitable Trust for their support.