2024 Bronze Innovation for Good

Agency: MG OMD and OmniGOV

Client: NHS Blood & Transplant

Entry Title: From Data To Donation

Executive Summary

The NHS urgently needs 4,300 blood donations every day to meet escalating needs of hospitals. But with other pressing issues hitting the media headlines, it’s easy for blood donation to fall off the nation’s radar.

Strategy

Complex operational factors, such as capacity issues, limited the number of people who register actually going on to book donation appointments (48%). This led to the insight that prospective donors were being recruited in the wrong catchment areas, struggling to book appointments, giving up and wasting ad spend.

Historically, NHSBT’s appointment grid was an internal closed system, but what if a solution that harnessed the data to power automated advertising, targeting areas with the greatest need, could be developed?

The team developed an agile data solution that categorised their donor centre locations into three availability buckets: high, medium and low. Data was pushed into corresponding campaigns within Meta, the most efficient econometric driver of new donors, automatically prioritising investment towards high availability centres, with low availability centres being assigned lower budgets.

Creativity

It was important that creative also clearly communicated the urgency with which donors were needed on a local basis. Work was adapted with location-specific assets to highlight the local need and maximise consumer relevance, showcasing an ‘urgent’ conversion message in high availability areas and a softer brand creative in low availability areas.

The media buying and creative dovetail helped spur altruistic people into action when required, and also manage the expectations of prospective donors in lower availability areas. This helped to reassure them that if they could not book an appointment now, their donation was still needed and to book one in future.

Results

As this was a first-of-its-kind Government innovation, a unique A/B test was conducted from 13th June to 31st August 2023. It split centres into test and control groups, and divided locations into large or small city classifications.

The test areas we saw an immediate and sustained 7.3% increase in new donor appointment bookings at donor centres in smaller cities, and an impressive 11.1% increase in larger city donor centres. These outcomes proved the hypothesis that by using data to upweight paid media investment in donor centre cities, when there was higher appointment availability, the campaign could meet the primary objective of boosting new donor appointment bookings to reduce the drop-off between registrations and donations.

Meta saw a significant 12.5% decrease in cost per new donor, meaning more donations and lives saved per pound of taxpayers’ money spent. Most importantly, the work saved lives: the uplift in donations driven by a data-led approach in test donor centres resulted in an additional 6,684 life-saving transfusions.

The Team

MG OMD - Alexander Skitt, Strategic Planning Business Director - Emily Hooper, Strategic Planning Account Director - Tom Warren, Strategic Planning Senior Executive

OmniGOV - David Sandford, Biddable Account Director - Caroline Selby, Biddable Group Account Director - Social and Search - Claudia Barker, Client Lead - Cassie Burness, Client Account Manager

OMG Labs - Daniel Handley, Managing Partner - Janos Bali, Head of Product Engineer

NHS Blood & Transplant - Rebekah Lomax, Head of Marketing - Planning & Evaluation - Nadine Eaton, Head of Marketing - Transfusions - Donna Batty, Marketing Manager - Transfusions