A Child of Mine provides emotional and practical support to bereaved parents and families. The charity works in partnership with health care professionals to help improve care and support available when a child dies.
Gayle Routledge, Founder and CEO, along with Charlotte Braund, Operations and Funds Coordinator at A Child of Mine, share their reflections on the impact of the Pilotlight Direction programme.
What motivated you to apply for Pilotlight Direction?
We were recommended Pilotlight as an amazing charity that helps other charities to grow and prosper. And we found that the Pilotlight Direction programme was perfect for us because we were struggling with how to generate a sustainable income. Since the cost-of-living crisis and COVID, the way that people give to charity has now changed. So, we wanted help with devising a plan to help us introduce corporate relationships as a new way of giving.
How did the project go?
We were really excited to be working with senior leaders at Auto Trader as our Pilotlighters! The experience amongst the team was incredibly inspiring. They cared so much about our charity, about miscarriage, baby loss, child loss and went over and above in what they could do for us.
The Pilotlighters helped us find relevant ethical businesses and developed a strategy for approaching them regarding our workplace support offering to achieve a long-term sustainable income.
They also introduced a passive income model to help us work smarter, not harder, which was crucial for us. Because being such a small team, we were trying to do everything ourselves and we found it invaluable that we had a new set of perspectives to tell us to take a step back and look at things differently.
For example, a great suggestion of the Pilotlighters was that we video record some of our workplace support sessions. So, we're currently in the process of starting to record those so that they can go on our website where people can purchase them for their staff.
The next steps
At the end of the programme, we had a detailed presentation from the Pilotlighters around what we could implement to introduce a corporate giving relationship. And the steps on how to achieve this, because that's really what we were missing.
We knew what we wanted to do, but we just didn't know how to start. We now have the building blocks to be able to implement a corporate giving relationship.
