Every month, 284 people in Swindon and Wiltshire are given a diagnosis of cancer at Great Western Hospital. The National Radiotherapy Advisory Group recommends 45 minutes as the maximum time that patients should travel to places providing radiotherapy treatment, but Swindon and many areas within Wiltshire are among parts of the UK which exceed this time limit for many patients. Brighter Futures (the registered charity of Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust) wanted to raise money for a satellite radiotherapy centre in Swindon to cut travel time.
To do this, the Brighter Futures team needed to look for new ways to raise money. They had heard how grant-giver Greenham Trust was using The Good Exchange’s on-line matching platform to find suitable charities and good causes to fund and to manage and distribute their grants and how The Good Exchange also helped charities to raise awareness of their fundraising appeals and drive fundraising and donations through grant-makers’ match funding (where every one pound raised through fundraising or donations is matched to double the amount raised).
“The support of Greenham Trust via The Good Exchange has been instrumental in helping us to gather momentum for the Radiotherapy Appeal and we are so grateful for the matched funding support that the Trustees granted earlier in the year. It has been a great pleasure to work with Greenham Trust and The Good Exchange and we can’t thank them enough for all the support given to Brighter Futures. It has been a fantastic experience to be a partner on The Good Exchange platform and to work with its passionate team, who I know work hard to champion the campaign to bring radiotherapy services to Swindon.” Catherine Newman, head of fundraising at Brighter Futures
The Good Exchange is a not-for-profit, on-line matching platform that has been designed to address one of today’s biggest charitable fundraising challenges – how to best match those organisations and individuals who have money to give to good causes to those who need it most.