Red Cross Campaign

Calls to give blood are a ubiquitous part of the white noise of everyday life, whether you tune it out on the radio driving to work, or you yourself are a regular donor you probably have heard that the need is great and never ending. That’s true. In fact the need is great enough it can create some odd economic and power dynamics. Power dynamics that ProPublica has in fact reported on in great detail. But dropping down from the 30,000ft view there are real people who need blood donations in order to see tomorrow and the only source of blood is from generous donors. The politics can get very simple in a situation like that.

While working for Nexstar I was tasked with spearheading a partnership with the American Red Cross. Local TV is somehow still one of the best ways to effectively reach a broad audience and the Red Cross is always in need of donations. While these partnerships are pretty common in the industry and are generally considered a very rote, paint by numbers assignment, at the time of this campaign donations across New England were either down or flat and so this project took on an urgency it might not otherwise have had.

For this campaign I was the lead producer and crafted a 3 tiered content strategy to achieve three goals: 1) Be flexible enough to cover available broadcast airtime, 2) Get organic traction on social media, and 3) not exhaust the audience with the same message repeatedly. These three tiers included:

• A premier piece featuring local hero (and lovely person) Stephanie Schaffer, who would tell her story with a call to action to donate and which we’d feature in primetime placement during live sports etc

• Several supporting pieces from our own NewsTeam talent who would answer common questions. These functioned as good pieces to bookend with other News Promotional pieces and could fit well with National News breaks etc.

• Finally 10 shorter fact videos which offered us flexibility to fit these into any available commercial slot that became available, at any time of day and which offered plenty of variety so we could hammer home the message without exhausting the higher tiered content ad nauseam.

Tier 1:

This campaign was also supported with social and broadcast PSA’s connected to specific donation times/places so we could pair the broader pieces of content back-to-back with point in time content for maximum effectiveness. We also held live events, hosted by our News Team at donation centers, and additional on-air calls-to-action all of which, when bundled together represented a hugely comprehensive messaging campaign.

On this campaign I was the lead producer, director of photography, and also edited and animated all of the individual segments.

This campaign, which aired in 2019, still represents the high water mark for engagement and was considered by our local partners at the Red Cross one of the best content campaigns ever put forward.