The Brief

Studies conducted by the Indian Red Cross Society revealed that a huge number of patients lose their lives owing to the lack of prompt response from blood donors. The brief given by the NGO was to find a cost-effective solution to this problem, a solution that would help save precious lives.

Describe how the promotion developed from concept to implementation

The solution we came up with was simple - we asked people to add their blood group to their Facebook name. Now when someone needed blood, all they had to do was type in the required blood group in the Facebook search bar. And they would instantly get a list of people with the matching blood group. Allowing them to contact only the right donor, without wasting precious time needed to save a life. As desired by the client, finding a donor became easy and 300 times faster. And all this, with ‘zero budget’.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

This simple idea has increased the number of blood donors exponentially. With ‘Blood Search made Easy’, finding a blood donor has now become nearly 300 times faster. Also, the number of blood donors available per blood group has increased manifold. Along with thousands of shares and likes online, the idea also got covered in 22 national publications. Celebrities tweeted and urged people to change their Facebook names. Blood search has become easy all over India with absolutely ‘zero budget’. And above all this, we can’t put a number to the lives saved.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

Typically, finding a donor with the patients’ matching blood group involves bulk phone calls, SMSs and status updates - hoping that someone will reply with a perfect match. Since a lot of time was wasted in that process, we thought of searching a donor on Facebook – the most widely used social media platform and also the best place for finding people. Facebook has 1.2 million people with the potential to do good, so we asked all of them to change their Facebook name and help save lives.