ABOUT

Local Hospice Lottery Ltd originally started in 1996, as Farleigh Hospice’s own lottery and way of generating a regular and reliable income to help fund hospice care for the people of mid Essex. After eleven years of running the weekly draw and seeing membership start to plateau at around 11,000 players, the decision was made to develop the Lottery for the benefit of hospice care in other areas across Great Britain. Local Hospice Lottery is now the country’s largest lottery for hospices, working with 32 adults’ and children’s hospices (28 at the time of briefing in 2021). The Local Hospice Lottery brand hadn’t changed much (apart from jazzing up its logo colours very slightly) since the business was developed in 2007/2008, and at that time its primary focus was mainly B2B/corporate facing.Its collaborative model has been built with a thorough understanding of the needs of hospice care. By sharing one prize fund and costs, huge expenditure can be saved and hospices can receive more income. This model means that people need to play regularly in support of one of its partnering hospices. It promotes the lottery inside each hospice’s catchment area using its own logo alongside the LHL logo. As Local Hospice Lottery entered its next phase of growth, it needed to ensure that it delivered the greatest benefits for its growing hospice partners, so it looked to strengthen its brand. The brand was in need of an overall overhaul and update, but there was a particular focus on balancing the Local Hospice Lottery master brand and the individual hospices, how they work together and creating a flexible system that allowed us to bring one or the other to the fore in communications.The brands of their partnering hospices took precedence in most player facing marketing activity; LHL recognised that they needed a more widely recognisable, future facing brand if they were to meet their longer-term objectives and strive to reach more people, through a wider range of channels, and raise even more for hospice care in the future. LHL’s goals for this rebrand were to infuse their unique personality into the visual identity in a more meaningful way, highlight LHL’s core values (Supportive, Fair, Professional and Ambitious), to set up both LHL and its partners for success, and build equity and ownability so LHL can be a recognisable entity on its own AND when paired with partners.

In order to get to their heart of the brand essence, we carried out an in-depth audit, which included an analysis of the LHL company, an analysis of the category, target audience, a brand and design deep dive, culminating in the identification of key opportunities for the business and brand. Once we established that LHL"s current brand values resonated well with partners and employees, we understood that LHL"s charismatic personality could shine through more. We understood that we need to shift the overall perception of Local Hospice Charity from small newcomer, quiet co-driver and a rather gimmicky, prize-focused lottery to a stronger, masterbrand-driven organisation, a fair and ambitious leader which is cause-focused, professional and supportive.At the heart of the new brand is the controlling idea of "Inspiring Commitment", which encapsulates the brand purpose, values and reasons to believe, all based on customer insights. We established the personality, tone of voice and experience principles for the brand.Central to LHL’s new identity is the design idea of ‘Magnified Impact’, as the warping of the letters in the logo give it the appearance of being viewed under a magnifying glass. This is a subtle nod to the positive impact LHL has on the fundraising and outreach efforts of its partnering hospices. The logo is the cornerstone of the design system and its soft, unicase letterforms create the shape of a lottery ball - a nod to the product and previous identity. The new dynamic logo also illustrates the excitement and energy around playing. A new grid system enables flexibility between Masterbrand and local hospices across physical and digital communication materials. It can easily be flipped to prioritise one or the other. The identity was then applied to further brand world touch points and documented in brand guidelines.

Stakeholder involvement and management was key throughout the process. Including LHL’s numerous stakeholders in the process effectively was always going to be the main challenge, as well key to our success. For this reason, focus groups were held with staff and board members, hospice partners, and players during Phase 1. This enabled us to better explain the reasoning and long-term benefits, alongside obtaining their views and wishes for the final identity. During the ‘Refinement’ stage we invited stakeholders to attend presentations, so that they could see the direction we were headed in and have input before finalisation.

LHL"s membership (currently 225,000) has increased faster than any other hospice lottery through its expertise in warm and cold acquisition and face-to-face fundraising. Over our 25 years of operating we have now raised over £50 million for hospice care (as of Apr 23!), with over £15,000,000 of this being in the last two years alone. To say that we are proud of the work we do would be an understatement! Internally, the careful inclusion of stakeholders and consultation throughout the process definitely positively impacted the outcome and feedback throughout, and afterwards, has surprisingly been nothing but positive!