In short and in plain language
This article shows how a hospice service can build its website. A hospice service supports people at the end of life. Volunteers do much of this work.
The site speaks to very different people. Relatives need calm and a number to call. Volunteers look for courses. Donors want to know where their money goes.
Each group gets its own route on the site. This can work better than a home page that says it all.
The article also explains how to show your funding openly. And it shows what belongs on a good page for volunteers.
We build these routes for your hospice service.
A community hospice service does not compete for occupancy. It accompanies people at the end of their lives, largely through volunteers, and pays for that work from a statutory health insurance contribution and from donations. Its website therefore has to carry three very different needs at the same time: relatives in an exceptional situation, people interested in the next volunteer training course, and supporters who want to know where their money goes. Around 1,500 community hospice services operate in Germany (DHPV), and many of them explain at length what hospice work is — far less often how to take part or how to help. This article shows how to separate the three routes cleanly, which statements about funding build trust, and what a volunteer page looks like that actually produces sign-ups.
Key takeaways
- A hospice website serves three audiences with opposing needs: those affected need calm and a phone number, volunteers need course dates and hours, supporters need traceability. Three separated routes work better than a home page that says everything at once.
- The statutory contribution is 13 per cent of the monthly reference figure under Section 18 (1) SGB IV per service unit (Section 39a (2) SGB V). The number of service units rises with the number of volunteers on call, which enters the formula with a factor of 2.
- The contribution covers material costs and the staff costs of coordination, but not the whole operation. Public relations, bereavement support, rooms and training are as a rule paid from donations. Explaining this turns a request for money into a comprehensible calculation.
- More than 140,000 people are involved in hospice and palliative care in Germany in voluntary, civic and paid roles (DHPV). They are won through a dedicated volunteer page with course dates, weekly hours, expense allowances and a short form.
- 74 per cent of people aged 65 and over use the internet (Bitkom). Accessibility under the German accessibility act and WCAG 2.2 AA is therefore not a formal exercise but the precondition for the main audience being able to use the site at all.
Three audiences, one website
Around 1,500 community hospice services accompany people at the end of life in Germany (DHPV), and roughly 900 of the adult hospice services are funded by the health insurance funds (DHPV, as at 2025). On top of that there are about 270 inpatient hospices for adults and some 340 palliative care units in hospitals (DHPV). Anyone planning a website for hospice and palliative care services can only partly reuse the pattern of a conventional home care website: there are no vacancies to fill and no catalogue of services under SGB XI to display. Instead, the same home page is visited both by people who have just received a diagnosis with no prospect of a cure and by people weighing up whether to spend six months of Tuesday evenings in a preparatory course. The two groups need different things. Both should be two clicks away from the page that answers their question.
A good 1 million people die in Germany every year (Federal Statistical Office), and a large share of those final phases takes place at home or in a nursing home rather than in an inpatient hospice. For relatives the website is frequently the very first contact — before the phone call, before the conversation at the family doctor's practice, often late in the evening. The rules that apply to content for relatives on a care website apply here with added force: short sentences, no forms with fourteen mandatory fields, a phone number visible without scrolling. As with apartments and services in assisted living, the principle holds: if you do not know the decision your readers are facing, you write past their needs. The difference is that here the decision is not about moving house but about the last weeks of a life.
Key figures at a glance
Language that glosses over nothing
The most common flaw on hospice websites is not missing information but language that swings between two poles: clinically detached on one side, transfiguring on the other. Neither carries. Writing about the "final journey" imposes an image that readers may not share. Writing about "palliative care structures in the outpatient setting" loses them just as reliably. What helps is plain, naming language: dying, death, grief, farewell. For those affected these words are not an imposition but a relief, because they show that someone here can bear the subject. Then comes the technical side: 74 per cent of people aged 65 and over use the internet (Bitkom); in our experience a share of them work with enlarged text or a screen reader. An accessible care website under the German accessibility act makes sure that contrast, font size and keyboard operation do not shut those readers out.
Name it, do not paraphrase
"Accompanying people through their final phase of life" is understandable. "On the way into a new light" is an interpretation that not every family shares. Faith-based providers can state their position, but should not place it in every line.
Speak directly
"You can call us even if you do not yet know what you want to ask." This sentence lowers the barrier more than any description of services, because it anticipates the most common worry before a first phone call.
Time frames instead of vagueness
"We usually respond on the same working day" is a verifiable statement. "As quickly as possible" is not. Commitments a service can keep build more trust than large promises.
Settle the cost question early
Support by a community hospice service is free of charge for patients and relatives. That sentence belongs in the opening lines, not on a subpage. It answers the question many people are too embarrassed to ask.
Explain the roles
Coordinating professional, volunteer companion, palliative care nursing service, specialised outpatient palliative care under Section 37b SGB V: outsiders cannot work out who does what. Two sentences per role are enough.
No promises of salvation
Phrases such as "pain-free" or "dignified to the last" read like assurances that cannot be kept. It is better to describe the approach: what the team does, how often it comes, whom it brings in.
Patients and relatives: the first contact
86 per cent of the 5.69 million people in need of long-term care in Germany are looked after at home (Federal Statistical Office) — and that is where the need for hospice support mostly arises. The route there runs through a page that gives relatives three things in this order: what the service does, what it costs, how to reach it. A phone call is the most likely first step, but not the only one. People reading at night rarely want to telephone. Online appointment booking for care consultations replaces the form with a concrete slot for a first conversation, by phone or at home. Images carry this part too: as with authentic photos on a care website, a stock motif of a smiling elderly woman at a window stands out here as a foreign body particularly clearly. A photo of the coordination office and of the people who answer the phone works differently.
- Phone number and hours of availability in the header of every page, not only in the legal notice
- The sentence about support being free of charge within the first three lines of the home page
- A page titled "How support begins" with first conversation, getting to know each other and first visit as three named steps
- A short contact form with no more than four fields and no mandatory field for the diagnosis
- Bereavement support and offers for the bereaved as a section of their own, not as a footnote
- Service area stated with place names so that visitors can see whether they are in the right place
- A note that relatives themselves are contacts too, not only the person who is ill
- A reference to specialised outpatient palliative care under Section 37b SGB V, explaining when it applies
Disclose the funding
The most effective trust page a hospice service has is the one that explains its own funding — and on many sites it is missing entirely. Community hospice services receive a contribution from the health insurance funds towards the staff costs of coordination and towards material costs. It is measured in service units: each service unit is valued at 13 per cent of the monthly reference figure under Section 18 (1) SGB IV (Section 39a (2) SGB V). How many service units a service reaches follows from the framework agreement under Section 39a (2) sentence 8 SGB V: the number of volunteer end-of-life companions ready for assignment enters with a factor of 2, the number of accompaniments completed in the previous year with a factor of 4 (framework agreement under Section 39a (2) SGB V). One insight follows from this formula that shapes the structure of the whole website: every person who finds the training course through the volunteer page and is then ready for assignment improves the funding basis with double weight. What the contribution does not cover is paid for from donations and membership fees: public relations, bereavement support, rooms, further training and the supervision of the volunteers themselves. A paragraph with exactly this split, without invented percentages, explains to a donor in thirty seconds why the contribution is needed. A care website with a clear structure turns that into a page of its own instead of a line in the legal notice.
The volunteer page and the next course
Volunteering is recruiting without employment — and it fails at the same points. As with addressing career changers for care roles, what decides an application is not the question of purpose but the answers to the practical questions: when does the next course start, how many evenings is that, what does it cost me, and what happens afterwards. Interested people calculate in hours, not in idealism. So course dates with an actual date belong on the page, together with the weekly hours after the course and the expense allowance in figures: travel costs are frequently reimbursed at 0.30 euros per kilometre (Section 9 EStG in conjunction with Section 5 BRKG), and a flat-rate allowance stays tax-free up to 960 euros per year (Section 3 no. 26a EStG). Technically the volunteer page is nothing other than a careers page with recruiting functions: its own URL, its own short form, its own call to action. The difference lies in the outcome — instead of an application it produces a registration for an information evening.
Course dates with a date
"The next training course starts on 14 January, ten evenings on Tuesdays from 6 to 9 pm, plus two Saturdays." This is the single most important item on the page. Without it, interest stays without consequence.
Hours required afterwards
After the course, volunteers as a rule accompany one family, usually with two to four hours a week plus a monthly group meeting. Stating that figure loses the undecided — and wins the people who actually turn up.
Costs and allowances
The course is customarily free of charge for participants. Travel costs are frequently reimbursed at 0.30 euros per kilometre (Section 9 EStG in conjunction with Section 5 BRKG), and a flat rate stays tax-free up to 960 euros a year (Section 3 no. 26a EStG).
A short enquiry form
Name, phone number or email, one free-text field and a selection field for the preferred course date. The first step needs no more than that. CV and criminal record certificate come later, in the personal conversation.
Voices from the team
A paragraph by a long-standing volunteer companion about her first assignment answers the anxious question hardly anyone asks out loud: can I cope with this. Real names with consent, no invented people.
State the requirements
Being of full age, a certain distance from one's own bereavements, willingness to attend supervision and confidentiality. Showing these hurdles deters less than expected — they signal that the task is taken seriously.
The donation page without fog
| Element of the donation page | What costs trust | What builds trust |
|---|---|---|
| Use of funds | "Your donation arrives where it is needed" | Four named items: bereavement support, volunteer training, rooms, public relations |
| Suggested amounts | An empty input field with no orientation | Three amounts with a reference: what an hour of the course, a supervision session, an afternoon at the bereavement café costs |
| Donation receipt | No information, a phone call needed to ask | An explanation of when it arrives, to which address and how it works for collective donations |
| Small amounts | Handled like large sums | A note on the simplified proof of donation up to 300 euros (Section 50 (4) EStDV) |
| Occasion-based giving | Only an account number and a payment reference | A dedicated section for memorial giving, birthdays and anniversaries with wording for the obituary notice |
| Ongoing support | Only a one-off donation possible | Supporting membership with a monthly amount, a way to cancel and a statement of what the membership actually funds |
Two legal points belong visibly on this page because they are looked up regularly. Donations to tax-privileged bodies are deductible as special expenses up to 20 per cent of the total amount of income (Section 10b (1) EStG), and up to an amount of 300 euros the bank record together with a simplified proof of donation is sufficient (Section 50 (4) EStDV). Pointing additionally to the entry in the register of donation recipients under Section 60b AO makes charitable status verifiable without a PDF attachment. Technically more hangs on the donation page than it first appears: anyone who does not hold control over domain, hosting and access credentials cannot change a bank account at short notice in an emergency. And as with a legally compliant imprint under the German advertising act for healthcare, complete details of the representatives and the association's register number are not decoration but part of building trust.
Referrers: practices, hospitals and social services
The third route addresses a professional audience and needs a different register from the other two. Unlike winning referral partners in intensive home care, where clinical handover, ventilation profiles and supply contracts are central, the issue here is simpler: family doctors' practices, oncology practices, hospital social services and nursing homes want to know from when they may call, what the service provides and how quickly someone comes. A page titled "For professionals" with the service area, the coordination phone number, a response time and a brief delineation from specialised outpatient palliative care under Section 37b SGB V — provided nationwide by more than 400 teams (National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians) — saves both sides the clarification call. This page is found almost exclusively locally, which is why local SEO for care providers carries more weight here than nationwide content. One point is not negotiable: no patient data may travel through forms. Details of illness and prognosis are health data in a special category (Article 9 GDPR) and belong in a phone call or a secured channel, not in a contact field.
These mistakes cost trust
Implementation in eight weeks
In hospice services a relaunch rarely fails over money and frequently over coordination: the board, the coordinating staff, the volunteer representatives and the sponsoring association all have a say, and all of them rightly hold a view on the subject. A schedule with named responsibilities holds that together. It helps to separate the technical part from the editorial part early: online appointment booking for care providers can be set up independently of the state of the texts and covers two occasions at once — the first conversation for relatives and the information evening for prospective volunteers. That the audience can handle this is well documented: 64 per cent of 75- to 79-year-olds are online (Bitkom); across the 65-and-over group as a whole the share has risen sharply within five years (Bitkom).
- Week 1 — Define audiences and routes: who should land on which page, which action follows, which phone number appears where. The result is a site map on a single sheet of paper.
- Week 2 — A language guide for the service: which terms are used, which are deliberately avoided, how the sponsoring body is named. Board and coordination agree this together.
- Week 3 — Write the content for patients and relatives, including the cost question, the course of a first accompaniment and the offers for the bereaved.
- Week 4 — Build the volunteer page: course dates, hours required, expense allowance, requirements, form and a date for the next information evening.
- Week 5 — Donation page with use of funds, suggested amounts, donation receipt, occasion-based giving and supporting membership, agreed with the finance team.
- Week 6 — Professionals page with service area, response time, delineation from palliative care and a named contact with a direct line.
- Week 7 — Check accessibility: contrasts, font sizes, keyboard operation, form labels and the accessibility statement required by the German accessibility act.
- Week 8 — Legal matters and launch: legal notice with details of the representatives, privacy policy referring to Article 9 GDPR, handover of the access credentials to the association, training the coordination team for later changes.
After the launch begins the part that carries over years: keeping course dates current, naming donation purposes afresh each year, publishing reports from the accompaniments. If you want to keep in touch with supporters and volunteers between occasions, a newsletter for relatives and supporters is the right tool — four issues a year are enough. If you would like to sort out the three routes for your own service, the way there runs through the page on the website for hospice and palliative care services or directly via an enquiry with your key details.
Sources and Studies
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