HDFC Bank conducts a blood donation drive every year. However, to date, our communication has always taken the mass approach. Leading to fewer donor turnouts. It was imperative to do something that would connect with people and get them to donate in large numbers. Our insight, people only donate blood for someone they care about. Thus, for our 2018 blood donation drive, we made a common Indian man who has donated blood for 151 times in his life the face of our campaign and spoke to millions.

Millions actually turned up to donate and prevented his health from deteriorating further.

Situation:

India fell short of 1.9 million units of blood in 2016-17--equivalent to 60 tankers--that could have aided more than 320,000 heart surgeries or 49,000 organ transplants, according to official government data. This was an alarming data point in our research.

Even blood donation drives see a weak response, despite best attempts to motivate people to come forward and donate their blood. It was time to go deep and understand what makes people donate blood when they do.

Brief:

To invoke people to come forward and increase the quantity of blood in Indian blood banks.

Objectives:

To get people to donate blood and #StopMithani.

India has a large number of blood donation drives which always have a poor turnout. This is because of the run of the mill communication around blood donation. We figured out the reason behind this. It was the fact that people donate care about blood donation drives. What they care about is, people. We identified one such man, Mr. Jyotindra Mithani. He has donated blood 151 times in the past 30 years. But he won't be able to do so anymore as he is 65. We made him the face of the campaign and urged people to #StopMithani from giving blood.

Our starting point was to understand the maximum number of times young and healthy individuals in the age group 18-35 years have donated blood in their lifetime. The answer was nothing we could be proud of.

The insight was a very basic human motivation – people go to great lengths for love. They donate blood for love, for people they care about. The flipside: this becomes a barrier for people to come out and donate blood to people that are not family or friends.

We needed to give the country a reason to donate blood – we needed to share the story of one common man who had gone beyond his way to make a difference. It was now our turn to save his life with a simple call to action: #StopMithani from donating blood.

We kicked off our nationwide appeal 10 days before the blood donation drive on 7th December 2018, through a radio interview by Mr. Mithani, where he shared his story.

This was followed by a digital video, voice blasts, social media messaging and on ground activations. Mr. Mithani’s heroic tale was also covered in the YourStory magazine, a popular youth platform in India.

We appealed to all the young and healthy individuals in the age group 18-35 years to come forward and start a nationwide movement. And lastly, to show Mr. Mithani we care, we placed a live ticker for the count of the number of donors outside his house to stop him from donating blood.

While the campaign went viral for a worthy reason, the only number we were concerned with was the number of donors that we needed to achieve to save Mr. Mithani’s life and salute him for his contribution.

Our blood donation drive saw an overall footfall of 3,66,572 in a single day and the number of successful donors during the blood donation drive was 3,10,746 against our original target of 1,00,000 donors!