A specialist palliative care hospice in Edinburgh, providing compassionate end-of-life care to patients and families across the Lothians.
We wanted to support the communications team at St Columba's Hospice in building the confidence and practical skills to create video content independently. Like many small charity teams, film kept sliding to the bottom of the to-do list. This is not for lack of wanting, but because the competing demands of day-to-day communications work left little space to prioritise it. The team came with varying skill sets and a shared ambition: to move beyond static posts and start telling their stories in ways that felt genuine, accessible, and sustainable.
The programme was structured across two online training sessions followed by access to a suite of practical resources the team could return to in their own time. The first session focused on story-finding and the planning process, while the second moved into the practical and technical side of filming. Rather than delivering content to individuals in isolation, the format brought the whole St Columba's comms team into the room together — which, as it turned out, was one of the things participants valued most. Having dedicated, shared time to focus on a single goal created the conditions for real internal conversation: not the usual "we should get around to this" exchanges, but structured thinking about how video could actually work for them. An editing guide was shared following the sessions, meaning team members who couldn't attend in person still had access to the core resources.
Each member of the team took something different from the programme, reflecting the breadth of experience in the room. One participant applied her learning at home, mapping out a short film with her children from script to edit. Another used the training as a prompt to film a piece with one of St Columba's counselors — putting her new skills straight into the hospice context. A third found the training helped him carve out the time and intention that his existing technical skills hadn't always translated into. Beyond individual takeaways, the training shifted how the team thought about video as part of their wider communications mix, opening up conversations about how their fundraising colleagues might use simple, to-camera content to animate events and community moments that would previously have been shared as an image and a caption.