We have got some news we are chuffed to bits about. At the 2026 PRCA DARE Awards for the North of England and Midlands, our campaign for Martin House Children’s Hospice won Charity/Not-for-Profit Campaign of the Year. The campaign was called The Build, and it is one that means a great deal to everyone here.
Who Martin House is
Martin House Children’s Hospice has cared for babies, children and young people with life-shortening conditions since 1987. It supports more than 550 children every year, plus bereavement support for over 200 family members across West, North and East Yorkshire. It is also one of only seven UK centres accredited to train consultants in paediatric palliative medicine, so its reach goes well beyond the region.
The challenge behind The Build
In 2023 the hospice launched The Build, a £21.9 million redevelopment to meet the more complex needs of the families it now looks after. Our brief for 2025 was to run the press office behind the public appeal, land the big milestones in print and broadcast, and give Yorkshire good reasons to give.
Here is the tricky bit. Charity PR that leads with a giant number rarely converts. £21.9 million is a figure people file away, not one that has them reaching for their wallet. Regional press wanted families and events, while national press kept telling us hospice stories were too regional. So we stopped leading with the total. We put the families first instead.
How we did it
We built the year around three pillars, each with a human moment at its centre. Gareth Southgate broke ground on the project and anchored the public appeal, which helped lift regional stories into national broadcast on ITV Calendar and BBC Look North. Milestones like the children’s wing opening, a 240-metre zipline and the Phase 2 launch gave us events that were well worth covering.
The third pillar was the one that mattered most. Family stories went at the top of every release rather than buried at the bottom, and named clinical staff spoke on the record. The pieces that opened with a real family had the strongest pick-up every single time, in both regional and national media.
The results
The 2025 numbers tell the story better than we can. The press office delivered 219 pieces of coverage, 161.4 million combined reach and 21 national hits, with 77% of all coverage carrying a link back to the Martin House website. The public appeal passed £1 million in just ten months, and The Build as a whole reached £11 million of its £21.9 million target by the midway point. One 36-hour fundraising burst landed 25 pieces and 41.2 million reach on its own.
Why this one means a lot
Plenty of awards are nice to win. This one is different, mostly because of who it was for. Our thanks go to the brilliant team at Martin House, to Gareth Southgate for showing up time and again, and above all to the families who trusted us with their stories. If you would like to support The Build, you can donate through the Martin House website.
And if your team needs to turn a difficult subject into coverage that actually moves people, do get in touch. It is the sort of work we love most.
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
