It may sound like losing one kidney and requiring 12 weeks of recovery with no financial benefit, but this is a life-saving act. We take a look at The Good Agency's latest charity campaign to persuade people to donate their organs.
“I work in advertising. I've convinced people to buy things or sign up for memberships, but I've never donated body parts,” says Good Agency's Art. director Katie Howe-Dalgliesh told The Drum.
Six people die every week in the UK waiting for a kidney, and there are currently 5,500 people on the waiting list, 100 of whom are children. This is the longest list of donors in the UK.
The Good Agency is a purpose-driven creative agency with a history of working with charities and brands to influence behavior change. With donations desperately short, two charities, Give a Kidney and Kidney Research UK, have teamed up with philanthropist Robert Dangor to brief the Good Agency on launching a donation drive. .
The outline of the “Make Your Mark” campaign at the time was to get the public to consider donating a kidney to a stranger.
Most people who receive a kidney receive it from a deceased person or a living relative, but Pete Esola-Grant, head of strategy at The Good Agency, says “that's not enough.” Therefore, the campaign had to be about “altruistic kidney donation.” Donating a kidney to a stranger was only legalized in 2006, and so far only 1,000 people have done so in the UK. “Next he just needs to find 1,000,” says Grant.
In developing this strategy, The Good Agency needed to address the initial barriers to living donations. “One of the fundamental barriers is knowing that it's a thing and that it's possible to donate it altruistically. Most people don't even know they can give it to a stranger. You probably don't know that you can live well with just one kidney.”
The agency needed to research previous donors to understand why they chose to donate. “The deeper insight we gained from talking to people who had experienced it was this incredible sense of generosity. We named them the Generous Junkies,” says Esroa Grant. .
One person was a brain surgeon who spent his life saving people's lives, but when he retired he thought, “What else can I do?” The other was a serial blood donor who was wondering what else he could donate from his body. “This idea of hyper-generosity was the guiding insight.”
Do you have it in you to save a life?
Howe-Dalgliesh created a creative production that weaves together the stories of kidney donors. The selected stories convey the more rational aspects of donating a kidney. She explains: “We all know the conversation that if someone in the family needed a kidney, they would consider donating a kidney. But one of our donors said, 'I can donate my kidney to a family member. So I thought, why not give it to someone else? ”
The 60-second hero film will be released on May 8 and is supported by a series of powerful still images showing donors lifting their shirts to reveal their scars. “We wanted a motif that could be easily replicated,” says Howe-Dalgliesh. The Good Agency painted the words above the scar: “Do you have it within you to save a life?”
The Good Agency typically runs campaigns based on lived experience, and Howe-Dalgleish said that while the subjects are often “heart-breaking and difficult,” this campaign is “filled with joy and vibrancy.” “It was full,” he said.
The tone of the campaign changed midway through, she says, after the agency gathered kidney donors for the first photo shoot and saw how happy they were with them and their stories. She said: “The shoot was very positive. It was very infectious.”
needle in a haystack
The campaign will launch on social and PR as a 6-month trial period before considering other media options. On the PR side, Good Agency partnered with celebrities connected to kidney donation.
“We're trying to find this needle in the haystack,” Esola-Grant said. That's why this campaign needs to reach the masses. The target is pretty broad, but it's targeting the 35-60 year old demographic and healthy people. “They also need to be fairly financially stable, as they have to take three months off from work, so older, healthier and wealthier people tend to be chosen.”
The campaign has two KPIs, the first of which is to raise awareness that people can donate to strangers. The agency uses the YouGov tracker to benchmark the number of people who knew they could donate before the campaign and compared this to after the campaign. Another KPI is the number of leads generated.
“We also want to see a cultural change where this becomes the norm, but this is just the beginning,” Esroa-Grant added. “There's been a huge cultural shift in the last 10 years around post-mortem organ donation. So this is kind of the next step in normalizing living donation.”
