Challenge
Christmas is a crucial time of year for blood donation. Competing with the usual planning, shopping and revelling, donations drop off and blood stocks dip from mid-December to early January. The Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service traditionally counters this with attention-grabbing, emotional stories about real patients and how their lives were saved by receiving a blood transfusion.
But this time things were very different. During the pandemic, lots of regular donors stayed away. And donation just wasn’t on the radar for newcomers. By early December 2021, Scottish hospitals were supplied by the smallest pool of blood donors this century.
Overall, active blood donors in Scotland fell by 13%, meaning 13,000 fewer people gave blood last year. The lowest level since records began.
We needed to recruit new donors right away and persuade lapsed donors to get back to donating again regularly.
Solution
After the previous lockdown Christmas, people were ecstatic about seeing family and friends properly. We didn’t want to be the ones to kill the mood... It was safe to assume that people had more than enough of intensive care wards and hospital beds.
We knew we’d have to take a different approach to gently, but persuasively, interrupt their long awaited festivities. No finger wagging, no guilt tripping, no crying.
Instead we went for all out positivity. We acknowledged people were busy. We recognised it was hard to find the time. We empathised that there was loads going on.
That let us highlight our key campaign message at every touchpoint - that if you can find just one hour to donate blood, you can save someone’s life. Making donating seem quick and easy, so we could drive people to the website for the first time, or for the first time in ages.
We created two radio ads that used humour to stand out amongst all the festive noise. We spoke to lapsed and potential new donors in a different way. We talked about lycra and cheesecake. We created a social media campaign which made our ask a rallying call to arms, to welcome people into donor centres.
And after almost 2 years of grim news? All that positivity worked a treat.
Results
Our new brand tone that really resonated with people, and we put blood donation back onto their radar.
- 70,487 users completed 99,768 sessions on the SNBTS website. The homepage was visited 10,000 more times than in 2020.
- The booking portal was accessed by 10,000 more people than in 2020.
- Between October and January, 53,059 people made an appointment to donate blood.
That means in just over 3 months, we were able to recruit more than 4 times the number of donors who had dropped off in the previous year. Helping to create a great foundation to build on for the year ahead.
As well with helping blood donations rise, it also picked up a cheeky bronze award at the Market Society Star awards in 2022.