How our NHS heroes download site helped pave the way for our fundraising pack software

2021-02-26 | NHS Heroes

In lockdown one the enthusiasm and the appreciation for our wonderful NHS Heroes was a weekly occurrence as we clapped every Thursday. All across the country in offices, shops and homes people showed their support by displaying banners, posters and drawings in their windows.

Wanting to do the same we searched online for a poster to download and print and were shocked to find the number of people selling digital downloads, some stated that they were donating some of the proceeds to the NHS charities, but most were for their own gain. This didn’t sit right with us, so we set out to create a set of digital downloads completely free.

Another issue we found was a lot of these digital downloads were full coloured pages. If you have a home printer, chances are it’s a common inkjet printer that has expensive ink cartridges and can’t print to the edge of the page. So printing a full coloured poster is going to drain your ink, leave you with a soggy sheet of paper and once it’s dry you will need to cut off the white border left around the edge where the printer can’t reach. Sounds like a lot of effort and quite expensive.

So, we took this into account when designing our NHS heroes poster...

We created our design so that it could be easily printed at home by ensuring the design featured a white background to save on ink, was A4 in size so there would be no need to fiddle with printing settings and also made sure the areas of the page the printer couldn't reach were left blank so there would be no need for trimming.

We started by initially designing our ‘Thank you’ NHS heroes’ poster, but we didn’t stop there we created bunting, a selfie prop, cake flags, a back sign and a DIY collection box, all following our home printing method.

NHS download materials created

We launched the site for people to download these materials in May 2020 and by June 2020 we were astonished to see we had reached over 1000 downloads.

For the rest of 2020 we saw daily downloads of these materials, the bunting and poster being the most successful followed by the cake flags.

A couple of window displays with the bunting and poster

At the point of launching this NHS download site our fundraising pack software (FundraizingHero) was in its conceptual stage, we knew what we wanted it to do but had many questions such as 'Would members of the public be willing and able to download and print their own fundraising pack?'

The success of our NHS download site is proof that they would.

Armed with this confirmation this helped pave the way to start the development and design of our fundraising pack software and materials following the same principles to make these as home print friendly as possible.

We launched FundraizingHero in December 2020 with over 25 different fundraising pack designs all ready for home printing.

NHS Heroes, Downloads

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