YoungShand

Client: New Zealand Blood Service
Product: New Zealand Blood Service
Title: The Life Saving Edition Of The Sunday News
Media: Newspaper
Country: New Zealand
Date Of Campaign: 1st December 2019

Background: It’s hard to get people to donate. Especially when the donation you need can’t be given by half the population, can’t be incentivised, only lasts 35 days before it expires, takes at least an hour to give, and you have to wait three months to donate again. That’s the challenge faced by NZ Blood Service, the sole provider of blood and blood products. Every 18 minutes, someone needs lifesaving blood, but only 3.7% of Kiwis are donors. We needed to appeal for help, but because of the limited lifespan of blood, we had to ensure we didn’t create an influx of immediate donations.There’s a language that almost all Kiwi men understand – rugby. And the backbone of any great sports team? The reserve bench. With this in mind, we created a completely new way to recruit blood donors – The World’s Biggest Reserve Bench. With a little help from the Godfather of reserve benches, Sir Graham Henry we asked Kiwis to step up and join the Bench, committing to donating blood when the country needs them.

Idea: After the initial campaign concluded, we needed to keep driving Kiwis to join the Bench by demonstrating the scale of the problem. So, we used a medium that’s full of hundreds of names – the paper. By highlighting each name in red, we turned an entire newspaper into one big recruitment ad for the World’s Biggest Reserve Bench.

Results: 241% increase in website sessions, 341% Increase in new users 166% increase in people joining the bench