OBJECTIVE/BRIEF

The UK’s NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) is a Special Health Authority, which provides a wide range of services to the NHS that save and improve lives. The authority encourages people to donate organs, blood, stem cells and tissues. It also ensures that a safe and adequate supply of blood and blood components is delivered to hospitals across England and North Wales. Each year, donors give around 3,500 organs and two million blood donations. These contributions save and transform countless lives. Research shows that:

• On average, three people a day die in need of an organ donor
• One organ donor can help as many as nine people
• Every blood donation can help up to three people

Each year, NHSBT’s communications team run a series of campaigns to raise public awareness of blood and organ donation. In June 2015, as part of National Blood Week, NHSBT launched the ‘Missing Type’ campaign. This was in response to the following facts:

• There has been a 40 percent reduction in new donors coming forward over the last decade.
• 204,000 new volunteers needed to come forward in 2015 to help meet patient needs.
• Half of NHSBT’s current donors are over the age of 45.
• Black, Asian and minority ethnic people (BAME) make up 14 percent of the eligible donor population in

England and North Wales, but only 5 percent of them have given blood in the past 12 months.
The main objective for the ‘Missing Type’ campaign was for 40,000 new volunteers to register as blood donors during June 2015. There was also a special focus on trying to get more blood donors from two key target audiences: young adults and ethnic minorities.

To achieve this target, NHSBT created a PR strategy to raise public awareness of their research findings, and to reveal the decline in new donor numbers. Central to this strategy was a social media campaign which won Engine, the PR agency responsible, a Masters of Marketing award. The idea was to remove the letters ‘A’, ‘O’ and ‘B’ (all blood types) from recognisable names, places and brands, and encourage both individuals and organisations to create social media content in response to this.

The campaign involved a number of partner brands including Odeon Leicester Square, Waterstones in Trafalgar Square and the street sign on Downing Street. These high-profile organisations helped launch the campaign by removing letters from their signs in the run-up to National Blood Week. In addition, NHSBT issued a series of press releases to promote hard-hitting facts about blood donation and promoted patient stories through case studies.

STRATEGY

The measurement programme needed to gauge success in the three key areas below:
Pre Campaign:
1) Raising awareness about the decline in new blood donors coming forward to donate
The research NHSBT did before the campaign determined the messages they wanted to be picked up. This included the hard-hitting fact that if not enough new people donate blood and these types go missing in years to come, there won’t be enough blood available when patients need it. Case studies were also promoted with a focus on patient survival stories. These patients came forward to raise awareness about the decline in the number of new blood donors and to urge people to register.

What we helped the client to measure:

• Were the PR tactics used (eg press releases and case studies) working?
• Were the messages being picked up by key journalists and reported in the right way?

2) Prompting people to donate and getting people to encourage others to donate
An important metric for NHSBT was to make sure that once people were aware of the need for new donors, they knew where to go to register. NHSBT set up a series of calls to action including their website, telephone number, YouTube and Facebook pages in order to get people to register as a blood donor. They also encouraged the public to take the discussion online and encourage others to register.

What we helped the client to measure:

• What percentage of articles featured a call to action?
• Which calls to actions achieved the highest success?

Post Campaign:
3) The effect on their target audience groups
During National Blood Week, NHSBT monitored the number of people that registered to donate blood and released statistics on the results of the campaign. These results were used to formulate a second set of messages (post National Blood Week). Gorkana also received internal blood registration figures for all UK adults, young adults and ethnic minorities throughout June and compared these results with the volume of mainstream and social media coverage over time, so we could see what coverage was driving registrations. Social media spaces were also monitored throughout the campaign to find out what conversations were happening outside of the campaign and who the key influencers were.

What we helped the client to measure:

• Was the success of the campaign reported on?
• Was there any direct relationship with registration figures and mainstream/social coverage?
• How many people were talking about the campaign on social media?

EXECUTION/IMPLEMENTATION

We created a programme which measured both media outputs and audience outcome that were aligned to the campaign’s objectives.
All mainstream coverage was coded by experienced analysts to ensure metrics such as message delivery and favourability were tracked accurately and effectively. Social media coverage was monitored by Gorkana’s social media tools, capturing mentions across multiple channels. The analysis focused on overall outcomes as well as specific PR tactics which enabled us to evaluate which parts of the campaign worked well and which could be improved on.

Before the campaign launched, NHSBT formed relationships with journalists from different regions in order to gain a wide range of local coverage. Our report showed NHSBT the volume of coverage achieved in each region and which key journalists were driving coverage for that region. This allowed them to work out which areas of England and North Wales were underperforming and which media contacts they should target going forwards.

Another section of the report focused understanding the relationship between the media coverage aimed at key audiences and the resulting blood registration figures for those audiences. To understand whether audiences had been targeted effectively, we integrated market research that we had conducted with YouGov (a survey of 10,000 people, representative of the UK population) which enabled us to identify specific audiences such as ethnic groups and young adults and the media they were exposed to. This enabled us to calculate the reach of the coverage to these audiences. We were then able to correlate this with the resulting number of registrations for each audience day by day as the campaign developed (see Appendix 3).

To work out the effect that social media played in influencing people to register and donate, we also evaluated key conversations that were being discussed across social media spaces and identified key influencers driving social content. We also compared the relationship between mainstream and social coverage to understand if a rise or dip in social activity was in anyway related to the cause and effect that PR activity was having on the public.