Although blood donation eligibility restrictions were always for legitimate blood safety reasons, the LGBTQIA+ community and allies felt hurt, discriminated against and distrustful of Lifeblood after decades of apparent inaction.

So, a campaign to accompany the announcement that sexually active gay and bisexual men could now give plasma without a wait period had to jump a lot of hoops. It needed to:

• celebrate the change without any self-congratulatory back-slapping for Lifeblood,

• introduce plasma and its importance, and

• signal relevance to the key audience of gay men without being explicit in the headline about sexual activity.

With the creative studio I developed the campaign copy for owned social, social ads, influencer posts, LGBTQIA+ publications and owned media, as well as eDMs from Lifeblood’s CEO to nearly a million active and lapsed donors.

It was a success. The creative garnered a largely positive reception in the LGBTQIA+ community and in just one year over 3,500 previously ineligible donors donated plasma.