"Chris has worked with almost everyone in the fundraising team at Helen & Douglas House. Over the past couple of years, he has consistently produced great designs for a wide range of printed materials. He’s very good at interpreting a brief, and always manages to do something eye-catching, whilst retaining our overall ‘brand’ identity. As well as being highly creative, Chris’ work is always on time and on budget. No wonder we keep coming back for more!" Joanna Mitchell, Head of Fundraising, Helen & Douglas House
For this virtual gifts catalogue, to help raise funds for the world's first children's hospice, I used a different colour to represent each of the 7 gifts of care available. When you buy a gift you receive a certificate in the corresponding colour scheme. The idea was that although some gifts are more expensive than others (from £5 to £1,000) they are all as important as each other and therefore deserve equal prominence in the catalogue.
Helen & Douglas House have a number of retail outlets in Oxfordshire to help raise funds for the two children's hospices. This collection of jokes, available to buy in the shops, was written by the children and the siblings that use Helen House. I decided upon the concept of a school exercise book to give the feeling of anarchy, as if the children had taken over. Although I supplied the customary ink splats the illustrations were provided by some very promising young artists; the children themselves.
Being a well-connected hospice, the foreword was written by Mr. Bean himself (although I much prefer Edmund Blackadder), Rowan Atkinson. The resulting book continues to be a good seller in the retail outlets.
In 2007, Helen House marked it's 25th year of providing respite care to children with life-limiting conditions. To continue providing support to children and their families they needed to raise funds to pay for various items of care.
The brief was to make the request for donations, and their subsequent spending, as tangible as possible so that people knew what their money was being spent on. I came up with the idea of a giant price tag for the format which represented the only physical part of the item for sale. The non-physical part being the mutually beneficial and rewarding relationship which is able to develop between patient and carer through continued funding. This special relationship was summed up in the slogan I produced for the campaign 'Buy something priceless'. The resulting direct mail campaign successfully raised the profile of the hospice in it's 25th year and attracted a vast amount of donations.
© chris woodrow 2008