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Success Story
Florence Nightingale Hospice Charity Captures 66% More Gift Aid with Zebra EPOS Technology
Florence Nightingale Hospice Charity’s retail shops play a vital role in funding hospice care, but its paper-based Gift Aid system posed significant challenges. Donor details were tracked manually with sticky notes and handwritten entries, leading to errors, inefficiencies, and lost Gift Aid opportunities.
Zebra Success Story: Florence Nightingale Hospice Charity
Overview: Retail Challenge
Florence Nightingale Hospice Charity wanted to move from a slow, paper-based Gift Aid process to a reliable, digital EPOS system that would capture every eligible donation, streamline operations for 15 charity shops, and be easy for staff and volunteers to adopt.
Benefits / Outcomes
- Gift Aid sales conversion up from 32% to 53% of items sold
- 43,000+ new Gift Aid sign-ups in 5 months (65% donor conversion)
- Faster, smoother stock processing with barcode scanning
- Volunteers reporting unprecedented positive feedback and ease of use
Customer
Florence Nightingale Hospice Charity
Aylesbury, UK
Partner
Industry
Retail
Solutions
About Florence Nightingale Hospice Charity
Charity shops generate about £350 million annually for UK hospices, according to Hospice UK. Behind the racks of donated clothes and bric-a-brac, these stores are a lifeline for funding essential end-of-life care. Florence Nightingale Hospice Charity is one of those lifelines. It exists to support Florence Nightingale Hospice in Buckinghamshire, funding and commissioning high-quality care for people with life-limiting illnesses—wherever and whenever they need it.
Alongside direct fundraising and community events, the charity runs 15 shops across Buckinghamshire and its borders. People donate goods, the charity sells them, and 100% of the profits go straight back to support hospice care. “Quite simply, we couldn’t do it without raising vital funds,” says Lily Caswell, Head of Retail at Florence Nightingale Hospice Charity.
The Challenge
In the UK, Gift Aid allows charities to claim an extra 25p from HM Revenue and Customs for every £1 raised from donations made by taxpayers, increasing the charity’s income further—but only if each donation is correctly linked to a registered donor. At Florence Nightingale Hospice Charity’s shops, that process used to be entirely paper-based: donors filled out a paper form, staff attached their donor number to the bag with a sticky note or tape, then hand-wrote or tagged the number onto price tickets. At the till, volunteers typed the number in manually. “While our old system technically worked, it looked complicated and time-consuming. It was time for a change,” says Lily.
Gift Aid is tightly regulated, meaning you can’t guess or apply the wrong donor number—and if a number is lost, the charity simply can’t claim it. With items sometimes stored for a few weeks, the process depended on the “stickiness” of a Post-it note. “People donate to the shops hoping every pound will go as far as possible for hospice care,” says Lily. The risk of losing Gift Aid claims meant losing a crucial 25% boost on donations—so modernising the system was essential to protect income and honour donors’ intentions.
To improve its till setup—especially the way Gift Aid on donated goods was processed—Florence Nightingale Hospice Charity needed a solution that was digital, easy to use, reliable, and that would enable strong reporting and secure financial monitoring. This is where Zebra technology comes in.
Before, our sales conversion was 32%, meaning for every 10 donations sold, three were valid for Gift Aid. We now have a Gift Aid sales conversion of 53% in our shops, and the potential is even higher, which is incredible.
The Solution
In autumn 2024, Florence Nightingale Hospice Charity rolled out a new till system provided by Eproductive that was paired with Zebra hardware. “Before making a final decision, I visited and spoke to many other charity retailers and didn’t hear a single bad word about Eproductive or Zebra,” recalls Lily. “It was clear that the system really worked.”
The new setup combines Eproductive tills and hubs with a suite of Zebra technology. It includes ZD411 desktop printers, which are compact and easy to manage. Alongside these are DS2200 Series 1D/2D scanners, providing affordable and reliable barcode capture. Finally, the system uses Z-Select 2000D labels, ensuring durable, high-quality print results.
Donors now sign up to Gift Aid digitally on a tablet—no more paper forms—and receive a sticky barcode label for their donation bag. Staff scan the bag’s barcode to print smaller Gift Aid labels for individual price tickets, keeping each item linked to its donor. At the till, every product must be scanned, including dummy barcodes for non-Gift Aid items, so no Gift Aid claim is ever missed. Bag-label printers use extra-sticky Z-Select 2000D labels to withstand storage, while product labels are easily removable for customers. These small details make the process seamless, professional, and much more efficient.
The Zebra Difference: Outcome and Benefits
Rolling out the new system was straightforward. Eproductive ran training sessions for shop teams, supported the Charity during implementation, and provided clear information packs so every shop knew what to do. With 70 retail staff and over 600 volunteers, virtually everyone now uses the system to take donations, price products, and process sales. “It’s far simpler to say, ‘Press this button and a label comes out,’ than to teach them forms, slips and tape. The simplicity made the transition much smoother,” says Lily.
And, perhaps most tellingly, employee satisfaction has improved. Lily has spent years in charity retail and seen many till changes, and she says new systems can unsettle volunteers. “But this time, volunteers have openly said how much they love it and how easy they find it to use. That’s never happened before. Running a charity shop is hard work; our job is to make it as easy as possible, so having a system that works efficiently is incredibly important.”
What once took multiple steps now happens with a single scan. “Stock processing is now so much smoother, quicker and more efficient,” says Lily. Donors are seeing the difference too. They can tell their contributions are handled more efficiently and professionally.
“With the new system, we’ve completely eliminated the risk of losing Gift Aid at the till point,” Lily notes. Staff and volunteers still need to attach the barcode label, but once it’s on, it won’t fall off—and the till won’t process a sale without having it scanned.
“Before, our sales conversion was 32%, meaning for every 10 donations sold, three were valid for Gift Aid. We now have a Gift Aid sales conversion of 53% in our shops, and the potential is even higher, which is incredible,” says Lily. So far in 2025, the shops have received over 150,000 bags or boxes of donations from almost 67,000 donors—more than 43,000 of them signed up for Gift Aid, a 65% donor conversion. Just five months into this financial year, the Charity has already exceeded the Gift Aid income raised in the whole of 2024/25 and expects to more than double it by year-end. Before, the Charity couldn’t track donor and donation data—now, they have a full picture in real time.
As Florence Nightingale Hospice Charity’s shops grow busier, and following the charity’s merger with South Bucks Hospice which takes their shop numbers to 20, Lily sees technology as central to scaling its work. “I see us teaming with Eproductive and Zebra for many years to come,” she says. “It’s been a complete game-changer, transforming our process end to end. As a charity retailer, you need great suppliers and relationships you can trust—a system that works, people you can talk to, and support when it’s needed. I genuinely couldn’t recommend them more highly.”
You can learn more about the fantastic work of the Florence Nightingale Hospice Charity at: https://fnhospice.org.uk
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