2018 Winners & Shortlists

The Campaign

While 4 million Lebanese reside inside Lebanon, almost 14 million others live abroad (source: Foreign & Commonwealth Office). Despite the distance, the Lebanese living abroad are well connected with their relatives and friends in Lebanon usually staying in touch via Facebook and other social networks. This insight inspired us to mobilize the Lebanese diaspora and use their voice to amplify our message and spread back home. We based our idea on the thinking that if we create a sense of urgency regarding the scarcity of blood donations inside Lebanon among the Lebanese diaspora, then they will be intrigued and will try to help by sharing our message among their friends and relatives back home which will amplify our voice and enable us to highjack the social conversation in Lebanon

Execution

In an unprecedented move, we placed the standard Arabic ‘posts’ on unbranded outdoors targeting Lebanese people worldwide. An elaborate process, which required collaborating with media agencies worldwide, to identify cities with a high expat population, and target communities with donation calls straight from their home towns. Unaccustomed to seeing Arabic outdoors asking for blood donations from their neighborhoods back home, with our message “El hal bi 2eedak”, Lebanese expats were moved by their strong nationalism, and couldn’t help but act immediately. Many questioned what was going on. Others pushed friends and family to take action and donate, flooding social networks in the process. Local News and online influencers quickly took notice and opened up the conversation on the problem. With our stunt captivating the nation, we took to Facebook Live and revealed that DSC was raising awareness on the dire blood shortage

While our objective was to achieve 10% increase in both registered blood donors and blood units donated, we managed to achieve a 20% increase in donors and a 22% increase in blood units in only 6 months. A staggering double the objective in half the time. And with no media cost at all, our campaign generated $529,386 in earned media. However our biggest achievement of all was to highjack the social conversation in Lebanon and direct it toward an important social issue that touches everyone’s life

The Situation

Without PR, this campaign wouldn’t have succeeded. It helped in spreading our message, amplifying it and creating the desirable impact we’ve hoped for. This manifested in more than half a million dollars of earned media and double our objective of donated blood units and donors registered in just half the period.

The Strategy

Our target was Lebanese Netizens on Facebook who use the platform to share stories and opinions, vent anxieties and connect with loved ones abroad. Yet despite their active online presence, posts from individuals & NGOs regarding social issues like blood donation rarely gets their attention and are mostly ignored. So, to shed the light on the severe blood shortage in Lebanese, we took the Arabic Facebook blood donations posts and placed it on unbranded outdoors across several cities with high Lebanese expatriate community with a common hashtag: Solution is in your hands (in Arabic). The strategy was to Let expatriates spread our message by sharing our outdoor posts among their community. Once shared, we had celebrities and influencers ready to comment on those posts and repost them to stir the conversation. To support the influencers, we had a PR plan with several media outlets to create more buzz.