Sport Club Recife is known for having some of the most passionate fans in Brazil. They are fans from birth to death. We wanted to push their passion further as no other football team has before.

While most football team´s communications have a commercial drive inviting fans to buy more merchandising and tickets, our challenge was to engage the fans in much more deeper way.

Our strategy was to create a new kind of fan. The immortal fans. Their hearts, eyes, lungs... could keep cheering for Sport Club Recife even after death.

We offered a good reason to people who had never thought about donation to donate: their passion for their team.

The idea was to use the fans passion to promote a bigger social cause, that could generate a much more passionate conversation around the team´s brand.

The outcome was an incredible engagement response, reducing dramatically the organs donations waiting lists, and in some categories reducing to zero.

The campaign is appropriate to PR because as we are talking about a very sensitive subject that is a taboo in Brazil (organs donation), we needed to ensure the engagement of the media to drive credibility. Moreover, our intention was to provoke a social conversation that could reach the most traditional family homes in a truthful and passionate way.

Our PR objective was to engage the media, in special the sport journalists. Our intention was to provoke a social conversation that could reach the most traditional family homes, focusing the PR message to weekly sport news programs, and social media influencers, such as football bloggers and fan clubs.

• Over 51,000 organ donor cards and counting.

• Organ donation increased by 54% in a year, breaking a historic record.

• The waiting list for heart and corneal transplants in Recife was reduced to zero.

• We created a lifetime commitment between fans and the Sport Club Recife brand.

• Dozens of lives saved including all the patients featured in the campaign.

We created the first Organ Donor Card for a football team. It keeps the passion of the fans alive through the lives of others and help solves the biggest barrier to organ transplants in Brazil: family authorization.

An integrated campaign launched the Organ Donor Card featuring real patients on transplant lists during the SPORT vs. SANTOS game. The game was a symbolic milestone. A stand was set-up for fans to get their donor cards made at the event and all the main sport journalists and social media influencers were invited to the venue.

We partnered with the patients on transplant list who participated on the campaign to tell their personal stories on national media.

Fans could get their Card at Sport’s website and Facebook App. Fans could share and invite friends to make their own cards and amplify the PR effect.

We had a very low budget and needed to generate a big buzz among football fans. The big PR opportunity was to use the media that they naturally see to follow their team´s games results as a tool to impact them in a unexpected and truthful way.

In order to generate new news in sport shows, we used doctors, specialists and the actual patients to talk to the journalists rather than the team speakers. We need to be perceived as an authentic movement to touch the fans and be able to talk openly about a taboo in Brazil such as organs donation.

We also brought the attention to the media that new patients were benefited from this campaign, to prove that the fans passion for Sport Club Recife could save lives.