How this award-winning campaign shortened organ transplant wait times for children

To donate organs after death, a person needs to die in a hospital in specific circumstances, which is a rare event in pediatrics. With the numbers of eligible donors so small, every decision counts.

Consent rates are lower for child organ donation than for adults with only 48% of families supporting donation for a relative aged under 18. This compares to an average of 66% families agreeing overall.

To maximise registrations on the NHS Organ Donor Register the campaign needed to reach as many parents as possible to raise awareness and increase consideration to act.

But driving awareness was not going to be an easy task, with the death of a child one of the most difficult, distressing and taboo societal subjects, which most want to turn away from rather than confront.

Execution

For the 233 children on the waiting list, life is put on hold as they wait patiently for a transplant.

Children like 3-year-old Ralph Tatham, waiting for a multi-organ transplant, or 7-year-old Dáithí, who has been waiting for a heart transplant for 2000 days.

Instead of going to school or playing sports, they wait. All of the ordinary moments of childhood, the aspects of daily life that most of us take for granted, are put off.

233 dolls, representing 233 individual children on the waiting list, were installed in hospitals and GP surgeries all over the UK, providing a contextually relevant healthcare environment to reach parents. Visitors were able to scan a QR code to learn more about the children's stories and register as organ donors.

For the stunt, the dolls were created by volunteers and artists, with materials coming from donated clothes, sheets and fabric off-cuts. Executions encouraged parents to consider registering themselves and their children on the NHS Organ Donor Register and told the real stories of children on the waiting list.

QR codes were placed on badges on the dolls, which took parents to the Waiting to Live microsite, where they could listen to the stories of children in their own voices. Where children were not able to be recorded for age or medical reasons, clips of their voices were given to AI to produce the recording.

The installation of the dolls received widespread media coverage on national television, as well as appearing in donated media worth over £500k, such as TV, OOH, print and radio. In every execution the dolls, and the child’s individual stories, were the centre point, with a call to action ‘Register yourself and your child as donors’.

Results

1.5bn earned media impressions

+10% lift in under-18 opt-in registrations on the NHS Organ Donor Register

-18% drop in under-18 opt-outs

5000+ under-18 donor registrations

£14.6m earned media value

1m+ people reached through organic social

“This is the campaign we’ve been waiting for” – Suzi Brown, Corporate Communications Manager, NHS Blood and Transplant.

By shining a light on children waiting for a transplant, the campaign succeeded in its main aims and started a national conversation around child organ donation.

The campaign saw a +10% lift in under-18 opt-ins with over 5,000+ donor registrations in the target age group, achieving the main organisational objective for NHS Blood and Transplant, as well as a -18% drop in opt-outs year-on-year.

In the words of one parent, “The first thing I did when I heard about Waiting to Live was put Jake and Bobbi on the register. We support donation but I wanted to make it official and let everyone know all of us would donate.”

Without any paid media budget, the earned media coverage generated over 1.5 billion impressions, reaching families across the UK with an estimated £14.6m earned media value.

The highest-reaching individual pieces of coverage included articles and features in the BBC, generating over 137 million impressions, and the Daily Mail, with over 90 million.

On social, it was NHS Blood and Transplant’s top-reach campaign of the year, with 1.8 million impressions, all of which were organic.

The website saw a 115% rise in visits, while each visitor listened to 3 stories on the microsite on average, showing engagement with the content before parents clicked through to register.

By putting children at the heart of the story, the campaign made an invisible wait visible, raising awareness of a vital cause and starting a national conversation around child organ donation like never before.

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