About Project

Margaret Mary Health was building a new hospital, and had planned a permanent donor wall for the capital campaign. Annual givers had nowhere to go.

The Foundation had been recognising them on printed inserts behind glass — expensive to produce, and expensive again every time a name was misspelled.

There was a further complication. The new hospital had been designed almost entirely without screens.

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Recognition Challenges

This is the only public screen in the building. Everything about the brief followed from that.

Key challenges included:

  • A hospital designed deliberately without screens, into which one had to be introduced without jarring

  • A permanent capital campaign donor wall nearby that the new display must not compete with

  • A firewall and plumbing behind the chosen wall, ruling out the recess the team had wanted

  • ADA limits capping anything mounted in the corridor at four inches of protrusion

  • Hospital IT requirements: a segmented network, their own machine image, their own endpoint security

  • Annual giving that changes every year, with team member donors recognised separately

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The Quieter Sister

Our first round of concepts was wrong, and the client told us so. They were too loud for the space — competing with the capital campaign wall rather than complementing it.

The feedback was unusually clear: this should take a backseat. The permanent wall honours the people who made the building happen. This one recognises the people who keep it running, and it should feel like a quieter sister to it rather than a rival.

So we started again. The second direction stripped the hardscape back to a tone-on-tone treatment that sits with the corridor's palette instead of announcing itself, and put the warmth into a single engraved plaque beneath the screen.

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Our Solution

A single 65-inch commercial display rated for continuous operation, in a custom hardscape finished flush with the face of the screen. Recessing into the wall wasn't possible, so we built the enclosure to sit level with the panel instead — the same visual effect, within the four inches ADA allows.

The machine behind it runs on the hospital's own terms. Margaret Mary's IT team supplied the computer, their own image, their own endpoint protection, on a segmented network. The display doesn't depend on that network to keep running: content downloads locally, so an outage doesn't take the wall down with it.

Hardscape design began while the hospital was still being framed, which meant power and data could be specified into the build rather than cut in afterwards.

One Screen, Three Jobs

With only one display in the entire building, every inch of it had to earn its place.

Two thirds carries the annual giving list, which rotates through the year's supporters and then through the capital campaign and team member donors — the staff who give to their own hospital, recognised on the same wall as everyone else.

The remaining third carries Why I Give. A nurse practitioner, a team member, in their own words, next to their own photograph.

Along the bottom runs a rotating footer: matching gifts, honour and memorial giving, a QR code for anyone who wants to act on what they've just read.

Full-screen takeovers are triggered at the end of a donor list rather than on a timer, so nobody is ever standing in front of the wall waiting for a name that has just been interrupted.

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Donor List alongside a Why I Give story and a QR code for giving.

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Special Event Footer.

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Full-Screen Donate Today call to action.

Their Design, Our System

Margaret Mary's Foundation team designs its own materials and wanted to design this too. So they did.

Their marketing coordinator built the screen graphics — the storytelling panels, the footers, the full-screen takeovers — and we built the canvas underneath, wiring her artwork to the live donor lists and setting the timings.

That split works better than either extreme. The organisation keeps full creative control and its own voice, and nobody has to learn a content management system to change a photograph.

What Changed

Annual givers have somewhere to be. The capital campaign has its permanent wall. Everyone who gives in the years after it has this one, and the list changes as often as the giving does.

A misspelling costs nothing. On printed inserts it meant a reprint. Here it's a correction and a save.

Staff giving is visible. Team member donors appear on the same wall as every other supporter, which is a quiet argument for the employee giving campaign in itself.

The screen fits the building. In a hospital built on purpose without them, this one doesn't fight the room it's in.