What we heard when we asked UK hospices about their data

Over the last few months we sat down with people working in fundraising and data roles at eight UK hospices. Nine conversations in total, with people whose job titles ranged from Database Manager to Head of Fundraising to Digital Engagement Manager. The hospices ranged from around £5m to £20m in annual income.

We went in with a simple aim: to understand how hospices actually move data around. Not the theory of it, but the real workflows, the bits that go wrong and the things that eat up people's weeks. We borrowed loosely from The Mom Test, which means we tried to ask about specific recent examples rather than opinions or hypotheticals. The point was to hear what people do, not what they think they should do.

What follows is a light write-up of what we heard, with quotes attributed to job titles rather than names and the hospices left anonymous.

1. Manual data work is everywhere, and it has been normalised

Every hospice we spoke to is doing significant manual work to get data from fundraising platforms into their CRM. JustGiving, Enthuse, MuchLoved, GoFundMe, Givestar, Facebook, website forms: the money arrives from everywhere, and in most cases someone is exporting it, reshaping it in a spreadsheet and importing it by hand.

The striking thing was not that this happens. It was how many people described it as normal before they described it as a problem. When we asked a CRM and Supporter Care Lead at one hospice what her biggest pain point was, her first answer was that it was not really a pain point at all:

"It's not a pain point for me massively. But for the team processing it all, we do everything manually. We don't use any integrations for any of them, not even like JustGiving."

A Database Manager at another hospice was similarly hesitant to call it a pain, even while describing a weekly import process built on copying and pasting between spreadsheets:

"I don't have time to invest to make the process better, so I'll just quickly do it."

The manual work has been absorbed into the rhythm of the job. People know it is not the best way. Several said as much. But it works, the money gets where it needs to go, and so it continues.

2. Each task seems manageable. Added up, they are not

This was the pattern that came up most often, and it is the one we think matters most.

Taken on its own, almost every manual data task looks small. Half an hour a week for MuchLoved here. Two to four hours a month for another platform there. A weekly lottery upload. A monthly volunteer sync. None of it feels urgent. Each individual job is small enough to keep getting done by hand, which is exactly why it never gets automated.

A Database Manager at one hospice put the trade-off plainly when describing a process she knows could be streamlined with a macro:

"I know it's not ideal and it will take longer in the long run, but it's better to just at the moment keep going with it."

The cost is real but distributed. It is spread across different people, different platforms and different weeks, so nobody ever sees the full bill in one place. When you add up every manual transfer across a fundraising team, you are often looking at most of a person's week. At one hospice it was more concrete than that. A Supporter Care and Database Manager estimated that a single colleague spends 80% of their full-time role on import-related tasks, and described one issue that took a full week to unpick, at three to four hours a day.

3. The data does not live in one place, and the gaps are where the pain is

Most hospices do not have one database. They have several. Alongside the main fundraising CRM there is often a separate system for the lottery, another for volunteers, another for retail Gift Aid, sometimes an EPOS system in the shops and a separate email marketing platform on top.

For one CRM Lead, this internal fragmentation was her real headache, and it only surfaced once we got past the fundraising platforms:

"The one thing that's my burden is trying to get the data from all of those systems into Raiser's Edge and sharing amendments back out, so that the data is correct on every single system, consents align on every system."

The hardest problems were consistently at the joins. Not inside any one system, but in the space between them, where consent has to stay aligned, duplicates have to be caught and amendments have to be passed back and forth by hand. A Supporter Care and Database Manager at one hospice described the knock-on effect of a platform that does not notify them when a new fundraising page goes live, only when money arrives, which means supporter relationships get managed after the fact rather than during the event.

4. The capacity paradox: knowing the fix but never reaching it

A theme sitting underneath all of this is that the people doing this work are not unaware of the solutions. Often they can name the exact tool or technique that would help. What they lack is the time to stop and implement it, because the manual version is what keeps the lights on this week.

One Database Manager was clear that the unlock, when it came, was a person rather than a piece of software:

"When I had that person, they were able to investigate and build something and then I could take on more of the daily stuff."

This is a structural problem more than a technical one. Process improvement competes with the daily processing for the same hours, and the daily processing always wins because the money is already in the bank and the supporters are already waiting. The better process stays on the "nice to have" list, which several people referenced by name, indefinitely.

A few things worth saying about all this

A handful of smaller observations that came up more than once:

People often underestimate their own sophistication. More than one person who described themselves as doing "everything manually" was in fact using import plugins, Power Query, macros or automation tools like Make and Zapier. The gap between where they are and best practice is usually smaller than they think, even if the gap between where they are and where they want to be still feels large.

CRM changes are a common trigger for rethinking data flows. Several hospices were mid-migration or had recently moved, often citing cost and a wish to leave behind years of accumulated bad habits. A migration is one of the few moments when there is organisational appetite to fix the plumbing.

The motivation is almost always about supporters, not efficiency for its own sake. Again and again, the reason people wanted to cut the admin was so the team could spend more time on the human side: stewardship, saying thank you properly, making sure an in-memory tribute has the right name on it. The data work matters because getting it wrong is felt by a grieving family, not just by a spreadsheet.

Where this leaves us

None of these problems are exotic. They are the ordinary, accumulated friction of running a modern fundraising operation with more incoming platforms than anyone designed for. The data has to come from a growing number of places and land cleanly in systems that were not built to talk to each other, and the work of bridging that gap falls on a small number of people who are already stretched.

That gap, the messy space between where the money comes in and where it needs to live, is the problem we spend our days thinking about at Bridgit. We did not run these conversations to pitch anything, and we hope the write-up is useful on its own terms to anyone who recognises their own week in it. But if reading this made you nod a little too hard, we are always happy to talk.

If you took part in one of these conversations, thank you. This would not exist without you.