Client: NHS Blood & Transplant
The NHS urgently needs 4,300 blood donations every day to meet the escalating needs of hospitals. However, with other pressing personal and social issues hitting the media headlines, it’s easy for blood donation to fall off the nations radar. To combat this, NHS Blood & Transplant is tasked with filling their 26 permanent donor centres across the country on an ongoing basis and paid media is a key lever at their disposal to fill blood donation appointments. However, with appointment availability changing everyday, reacting quickly enough to ensure they are recruiting donors in places where they can physically donate was impossible and led to frequent manual pausing and adjusting of paid media laydowns, impeding media efficiency and potentially wasting the advertising investment it took to register them in the first place. But how could we harness media innovation and data to overcome these obstacles to help collect even more lifesaving donations? We utilised cloud technologies and Airflow orchestration to develop an agile data solution capable of categorising their 26 donor centre locations into three distinct availability buckets: high, medium, and low. Using daily data allowed us to be reactive to availability every single day and automatically upweight advertising accordingly. As this was a first-of-its-kind Government innovation, a unique A/B test was designed which identified that cities harnessing our data innovation were driving significantly a greater number of new donor appointments and helping to save more lives.
