ConnectLife Integrated Campaigns

ConnectLife – Blood & Organ Donor Network Buffalo, NY 
 

If you’ve ever lived near a firehouse or railroad tracks, you know it’s not long before you don’t even hear the noise. But when the interruption is an urgent plea to donate blood, allowing it to blend into the background could literally cost lives.

Keeping an ongoing appeal for blood donations fresh and engaging is a challenge ConnectLife, Western New York’s only community blood center, faces every day. Because saying the same thing—no matter how desperately voiced—will eventually fall on deaf ears. Although ConnectLife wanted to continue trumpeting the region’s urgent need, we knew the true power of marketing exists in its relevance—not repetition. So, we leveraged our audience’s hometown pride, seasonality, and love for one’s neighbor to apply consistent pressure on the community to give blood through a variety of messaging that wouldn’t wither with age.

Playing to the home crowd – Unlike the American Red Cross, ConnectLife keeps all blood donations in Western New York. This hyper-local focus is their lead differentiator and aligns perfectly with our audience’s inherent desire to help their neighbors. We just needed to make sure our message hit home without disparaging the competition.
 
First, we created a marketing campaign called “Keep it Here.” Bold and direct, we let our audience know that only ConnectLife keeps all blood local. And by saturating our communications in the rich blues of ConnectLife’s brand identity, we created further separation from the Red Cross’ signature red and white. Together, messaging and visuals reinforced a look and feel that our client could truly own and leverage to connect with potential donors’ hometown pride.
 
A change in seasons—and tone. When the winters are long and unforgiving, Western New Yorkers can’t wait to get reacquainted with the great outdoors. But on the flip side of summertime fun are more opportunities for a vehicle, boating, and cycling accidents. That’s why ConnectLife and the rest of the WNY medical community refer to summer as “trauma season.” Using seasonal relevance to frame our message on connected television and radio, we were able to communicate the urgent need for blood in a new way without abandoning the core message. 
 
Since we couldn’t tell the whole story on social, digital, and outdoor channels, we dialed up the intensity of our language to question non-donors lack of participation.
 
The pandemic presented an additional challenge for ConnectLife because, at the time, many people were reluctant to leave their homes. But rather than pause the campaign, it was an opportunity to leverage our audience’s heightened dedication to supporting each other to convey the collective impact our community could make by donating blood.
 
We extended ConnectLife’s brand assets to include custom illustrations that put a fresh spin on communicating our urgent need for blood. This additional pop of personality balanced the gravity of the message without being perceived as a juvenile. And the new calendar graphic helped to extend our ask from making a single donation to booking several appointments in advance.

Usually, when a client tells you to stop their marketing, it’s not good news. But when we learned that ConnectLife had booked blood donation appointments 60 days out, we were happy to pump the brakes until the client caught their breath.