Freeing up marketing capacity with Sue Ryder
How a national palliative and bereavement charity cleared a backlog of 1,000+ design requests a year by empowering staff, volunteers and supporters to create their own on-brand marketing.
Watch the Sue Ryder Story
Hear directly from David Gledhill, Design & Production Manager at Sue Ryder, about how RightMarket freed up his team's time while keeping every design firmly on-brand.
Unmanageable demand for design
Every Sue Ryder hospice, care centre and retail store needs collateral to raise awareness and promote events. Fundraisers need it too, to help raise the £37 millionthe charity needs each year — far more than the Design & Production Team had the capacity to deliver.
For the Design & Production Team, demand amounted to over a thousand design requests each year. The briefs were vitally important to the charity but, despite the team's best efforts, they simply couldn't keep up.
The backlog created a cascade of problems:
- 1Over 1,000 design requests were landing on the team every single year
- 2The volume overwhelmed the team and created a long wait for finished designs
- 3People found their own workarounds, creating rogue, off-brand items
- 4Wrong colours, stretched logos and inconsistency crept into the brand
Long waits
Vital briefs sat in a queue the team simply couldn't clear
Off-brand output
Rogue artwork with the wrong colours and stretched logos
Lost capacity
Design time swallowed by demand the team couldn't scale to meet
When brand is a low priority, off-brand wins
A fundraiser's priority is raising essential funds — brand is a low-priority consideration. So when designs took too long, people found alternatives and the brand suffered.
It led to people creating rogue items and going off-brand.
Brand recognition matters to Sue Ryder — consistent designs grow familiarity so every event poster and invitation is immediately recognisable. David and his team didn't need to educate people on the brand; they needed a way to deliver briefs on time, on-brand and flexible to demand — all without draining the team's valuable time.
An Online Design Centre for the whole charity
RightMarket's platform aligned perfectly with David's requirements — cutting the number of briefs the Design Team receives by letting everyone create their own on-brand assets.
Everyone becomes a designer
The Online Design Centre empowers staff, volunteers and supporters to create their own artwork — minimising the briefs that reach the Design Team.
Popular designs as templates
Sue Ryder's most-requested designs became responsive templates, available to everyone on the RightMarket platform.
Controlled editing
The Design Team choose exactly which elements are editable, so David and Suzanne stay confident everything is on-brand and consistent.
For those needing artwork, the advantage is simple: they no longer have to request it and wait. They log in, create what they need themselves, and put it to good use faster.
720% more design, without more design time
Sue Ryder's Online Design Centre now produces over 600 designs a month — fulfilling the majority of briefs that used to overwhelm the team, plus a whole tier of designs it never used to see.
- 720%
- more designs producedthan the team could at capacity
- 600+
- designs a monthnow created through the platform
- £100
- saved per designequal to funding a clinical nurse
As David puts it, all that saved time is equal to £100 per design produced — funding that can go towards paying for a clinical nurse. For Sue Ryder, “this all adds up to incredible care”.
A big win for the whole charity
The benefits reach far beyond simply clearing the design backlog:
Oversight
David has visibility of what's being created, giving him control that simply wasn't possible before.
On-brand by default
Minimised off-brand design means every asset builds familiarity with the Sue Ryder brand.
Faster turnaround
Staff, volunteers and supporters get instant access to designs, and the briefs that do come in are turned around faster.
Incredible care
Saved management and design time frees up funding equal to £100 per design — money that goes towards clinical care.
From an overwhelmed team to a self-serving charity
Sue Ryder has gone from a Design Team drowning in over a thousand briefs a year to a platform where everyone can create the on-brand marketing they need.
- The majority of briefs are now self-served by the people who need them
- The Design Team reclaimed time for higher-value, strategic work
- Last-minute requests still come in, but they're now completely manageable