Your Hospice Lottery celebrates raising £8 million
Melanie May | 7 August 2017 | News
Your Hospice Lottery is celebrating having raised £8 million for hospice care since 2001.
Your Hospice Lottery is owned and run by St Helena Hospice in Colchester, and works with ten hospices around the UK including Arthur Rank Hospice Charity, Salisbury Hospice Charity, and Noah’s Ark Children’s Hospice. Players pay £1 per weekly draw, and the money raised after the running costs and the prize fund are taken out goes to the hospice of the player’s choice. Prizes range from £10-£1000. Currently over 50,000 numbers are played in the lottery draw each week, with over 15,000 of these recruited in the last year.
According to Your Hospice Lottery, the £8 million raised so far could pay for 80,000 visits by a community nurse to patients’ homes, over 260,000 counselling sessions or 16,000 days of inpatient care per patient.
Alex Howe, Head of Lottery at St Helena Hospice, said:
“We have developed a fantastic model where we can manage the lottery operation for other hospices on a national level, keeping set up and administrative costs to a minimum, so more money can be spent on patient care and all proceeds stay within the hospice world. We want to be able to share our success and experience with hospices that for whatever reason are not able to run their own lottery.
“We could not have reached this fantastic milestone without the valued support of our loyal players who have contributed to the lottery over the last 16 years. Your Hospice Lottery is going from strength to strength with the addition of two new hospice partners in the last year, reaching out to more people in more communities. It’s amazing to think how much can be raised by people simply paying £1 per week to play the lottery.”
The lottery started out in 2001 as the St Helena Hospice Lottery, and became Your Hospice Lottery after extending its reach into Cambridgeshire in association with Arthur Rank Hospice Charity.
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About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.