Did you know that today is World Kidney Day? We're no strangers to commemorating this impactful international holiday thanks to our recent experience with non-profit organization, The Living Bank. In fact, our team was lucky enough to collaborate with LIMB in support of The Living Bank and its 50th anniversary "Living Proof" campaign.
Case Study: The Living Bank
CHALLENGE
The Living Bank's mission is to eliminate the shortage of organs for lifesaving transplants by being a trusted education resource for living organ donation and the leading provider of advocacy services for living donors. While an incredible mission, because The Living Bank helps educate about the need for living organ donation, while advocating for those involved in the living organ donation process (meaning someone donating an organ or receiving an organ). it is not a direct service provider and often doesn't have as immediate or direct access to those involved in the process the way a hospital or transplant center would. As such, it was often difficult to connect with and raise funds from potential donors and brand ambassadors.
Our goal was to ultimately raise awareness for The Living Bank and the critical role it plays in helping living organ donors and recipients find each other and the resources they need, helping service providers including social workers provide the best resources to patients and advocating for the advancement of living organ donation services nationwide. In raising awareness, we hoped to begin to connect with and build a reliable group of digital brand ambassadors.
STRATEGY
The LIMB team developed a phenomenal 50th anniversary branding campaign celebrating "Living Proof," individuals who are just that...the epitome of why and how others should take part in the living organ donation process. Through graphic design collateral, a website, email marketing and a documentary-style video celebrating the organization's anniversary year, LIMB set The Living Bank and our team up with the building blocks to develop a larger strategy all about building and engaging an audience.
As such, our team developed an integrated media relations and social media campaign with the ultimate goal of reaching as many living organ donors and recipients as possible, building up The Living Bank's owned database and raising awareness for the organization as a whole. While we worked with local TV stations to consistently share stories of living organ donation, it was our digital campaign that truly ushered in meaningful results.
50 Questions Campaign
In order to highlight the stories behind living organ donation, we developed a "50 questions" initiative, in which we created branded videos where we would ask 50 living organ donors or recipients a different question about their experience. We were able to start with a few key contacts from The Living Bank (past donors or Board Members), but ultimately found the bulk of our participants through Instagram hashtag searches. We reached out to these individuals through direct message and asked if they would be interested in participating. We then provided all participants with instructions (how to film, how long answers should be, etc.) and, once we received their responses, edited their answers down and input them into the same branded video template.
We shared each video on the organization's Facebook and Instagram channels, as well as in a new Facebook Group we created for donors, recipients and healthcare providers to share resources and connect with one another. We also uploaded each video to YouTube with relevant keywords in order to drive traffic to the organization's website.
50th Anniversary Gala Contest
As part of The Living Bank's 50th anniversary gala celebration, recent "America's Got Talent" runner-up and living kidney transplant recipient, Angelica Hale, would be performing. The gala would take place at Hotel Zaza. Knowing that both Angelica and the hotel would be a draw, we created a "Celebrate Life" giveaway valued at over $3,000. In order to enter, living organ donors or recipients could fill out a form we created and upload their own story (using photos, video or text) about why they Celebrate Life using the app WooBox or by using the hashtag #TLBCelebrates50.
We reached out to and successfully secured donated prizes from local restaurant, Benjy's, 8th Wonder Brewery and The Upper Hand Salons and included airfare for two for the winner. We then worked with each partner to help us spread the word to their own email lists and social media networks. We developed rules and ensured we collected email addresses for all participants.
Once we closed the entry period, we then selected our winner based on fan/follower votes and which content received the most "likes."
RESULTS
Over the course of our year-long Living Proof campaign, we garnered fantastic results for the non-profit. Of course, we couldn't have done it without the top-notch branding collateral the LIMB team developed!
- We received 28 entries in our contest and more than 2,600 votes on entry fees (over 6,000 visits to our contest website)!
- Instagram followers increased by 1,316% year-over-year!
- Website traffic increased by 38% year-over-year!
- Facebook engagement increased by 250% and reach increased by 1,860% and...an unexpected but much appreciated result of our Facebook efforts was that many of the new brand ambassadors created birthday fundraisers for The Living Bank, resulting in over $3,300 raised for the organization (or 16% of the organization's annual individual giving contributions)
More than anything, for the first time, the organization had a strong nationwide following across social media channels from those involved in the living organ donation process.