How your money is spent

In 2023, every pound we spent on fundraising, turned into £5.40. This is calculated by dividing our voluntary income by how much it costs us to raise money. As we get very little statutory funding or legacy income, we need to spend money on our fundraising to raise the remaining 97% of our income.

Trustees and Directors meet quarterly; regular updates from these meetings are shared with all employees. The Board of Trustees is chaired by Mark Cunningham, Managing Partner of Holbein Partners LLP and consists of eight senior professionals representing the health, business and finance communities. You can see a full list of all our Trustees here. We also have Finance, Audit, Fundraising and Care committees that meet quarterly. Business plan objectives are incorporated into Performance Development Reviews from CEO to Family Support Worker, ensuring the whole organisation is working towards the same goal.

We are regulated by the Care Quality Commission which monitors, inspects and regulates services to make sure that organisations working in health and social care (charities) meet fundamental standards of quality and safety. Its findings are published and include performance ratings to help people choose care. We are inspected on a regular basis and under the new inspection regime all recent inspections have resulted in a rating of ‘Good’. You can read all our inspection reports here.

Rainbow Trust is registered with the Charity Commission. We adhere to the Institute of Fundraising Codes of Practice and we will be members of the Fundraising Regulator. We are also audited annually by independent auditors. Their audit ensures that Rainbow Trust’s accounts are a true and fair view of the state of the charity’s affairs. You can see our audited accounts on the Charity Commission’s website

In 2023, four employees earned over £60,000 which is in line with other charities of a similar size providing palliative care. Staff are paid according to industry baselines and on merit of their professional experience. Pay is assessed annually by Trustees and increases are awarded according to performance.

In 2023, the number of hours our volunteers gave increased by 44%. 2023 saw 2,546 hours of volunteering support to help sick children and their families with 95% recommending volunteering with us to others. We piloted some great volunteering opportunities for our corporate supporters and the return of drop-in groups meant that we successfully recruited new volunteers and welcomed many back. Support at our Surrey office continued to recover, and the return of many large scale events saw event volunteering increase. Read more about our amazing volunteers.

We promise to protect our supporters and donors, (read out Supporter Promise) and assure you that we will make it clear and easy for you to choose how you hear from us, including how to opt out from future communications. We will never share your details with other organisations or charities. We will also keep you updated on what we have achieved with your donation so you can see how much we value your support.

Rainbow Trust is a national charity with teams of Family Support Workers around the country. Each family is allocated one Family Support Worker who goes wherever they are needed, helping in any way the family needs, to make life just a little bit easier. Our service encompasses all the non-medical care that is needed to support the child, their parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents and other close family members. We are entirely flexible and support can include transport for parents and children to hospital appointments and support in the hospital for all the family.

Children’s hospices are local or regional charities. They tend to have a purpose-built building and support children and young people with life-shortening conditions and their families through a multi-disciplinary team which includes nursing and medical care. Support can also include specialist services such as short break care, therapies, including physiotherapy, play and music therapy. (Read more from Together for Short Lives)

In 2023, 79 pence of every pound raised was spent on supporting families with a Family Support Worker. This reflects the increase in our frontline care activities, and a reduction in our fundraising costs, driven by staff vacancies, this year.

Your generous donation will help pay to support families who face immense stress and upheaval as they care for a child who has a life threatening or terminal illness. Your donation will fund a Family Support Worker to provide emotional and practical support to up to 25 families at any one time. This can be in or out of the home and it is focused on enhancing the quality of life for the child and their family, building the ability of the family to manage its stress and to keep communicating through loss and bereavement. Your donation will also help fund drop-in groups for families; groups for the brothers and sisters of sick children; bereavement groups for bereaved parents and remembrance days for families whose child has died. Learn more about how your donation will be spent.

We regularly survey the families we support on the difference that their Family Support Worker makes to their lives. We will publish a report on our outcomes annually and you can also read more about our impact in our latest Impact Report here.

In 2023, we spent £4.2M and we supported 1,185 families. It costs us £1,780 to support one family for a year. Rainbow Trust provides a service which saves the NHS, local authorities and wider society far more than our services cost since our support can help families to avoid reaching a breaking point.

For instance, we can:

• maintain some normality for brothers and sisters whose emotional wellbeing and educational attainment might otherwise suffer
• make sure parents receive practical and emotional support over many months or years at a highly stressful time in their lives, when one parent is often still holding down a job.

Last year 79 pence in every pound was spent on our support for families which equated to £4.8M. This is the core of our organisation and we work hard to ensure that our Family Support Workers provide families with the best possible support. The amount we spend directly on support for families is impacted by how much we need to spend to raise money. As we get very little statutory funding, we need to spend money on our fundraising in order to raise the remaining 97% of our income. Many charities reporting a better pence in the pound, get a bigger percentage of their income from statutory sources and therefore don’t need to spend so much money on fundraising.

Our staff are all skilled and specialised in what they do and are paid. Our Family Support Workers have a wealth of experience and come from a number of different backgrounds that adds to their expert knowledge. They all tend to have some experience of working with children.

We receive less than three per cent of our funding from government each year. In comparison, children’s hospices receive an average of 22 per cent from statutory funding sources. Read more in Together for Short Lives new report.

We rely on the generosity of the public for almost all of our funding.

In 2023 our turnover was £4.8M.