Feb 2025
Smarter routes. More trees. More care.
St Cuthbert's Hospice runs a Christmas Tree Recycling scheme every January. It's one of their most important fundraisers. It was also one of the most painful to organise. In 2025, we helped them fix that. And what used to take a full day now takes a few hours.
The Challenge
Every year, the team faced the same crunch: donations closed, a handful of days remained, someone had to manually plot routes across dozens of postcodes, juggle volunteer availability, and figure out how to distribute the work fairly. All without overburdening anyone.
Christmas trees aren't uniform. Some are small. Some are enormous. Balancing that across volunteer pairs, with no dedicated tool and a tight timeline, was a headache that got worse every year.
If a volunteer dropped out, redistributing their round wasn't straightforward. And the whole thing had to be done on a shoestring, without the kind of budget a large enterprise would throw at the problem.
What we did
As part of our 30th anniversary charity challenge, we gave St Cuthbert's some focused, practical support, plus:
- A documented process so future years aren't starting from scratch.
- A skeleton document to keep all addresses in one place.
- Route XL, a route planning tool that transformed how collections were managed.
- Remote support throughout, to make sure it all ran smoothly.
Once donations closed, we imported the addresses into Route XL. It generated efficient routes for each volunteer group in minutes, breaking collections into rounds of around 40 trees per pair. Volunteers received clear instructions with QR codes linking to their map app of choice, plus any notes left by the customer.
Routes could be built weeks in advance. Last-minute tweaks were easy. If someone dropped out, reassigning their round was simple.
The result
This was a record year for the scheme.
- 769 trees collected, up 23% from 2024.
- Approximately £12,000 raised, funding three days of hospice care.
- Average donation per tree up by over £2.
- An estimated £4,800 more raised than the previous year, the equivalent of more than a full day of hospice services.
And the team managed all of it with fewer staff than before, after a difficult year that included redundancies. The time saved went straight back into supporting volunteers and running other campaigns.
What the hospice said
"It was such a weight off our mind knowing that we had your support with the routing and it saved us so much time compared to previous years. Overall, the volunteers found the routes really easy to use, which was a big bonus."
Erin Wright, Community Fundraiser, St Cuthbert's Hospice
What's next
A few small tweaks for 2026, larger text on printed sheets, a couple of missing phone numbers, and some minor routing refinements. Nothing major. The hard work is done.
We're proud to have made a real difference to a campaign that funds something that genuinely matters.
If you've got a process that's eating time it shouldn't, we'd like to hear about it. Get in touch at info@waterstons.com