NHS Blood and Transplant: Modernising Marketing to Save and Improve Lives
In this blog, Mark Croucher – Assistant Director of Donor Services at NHS BT, shares the organisation’s marketing journey with Bluewave and Salesforce.
NHS Blood and Transplant has been on a mission to modernise our marketing technology and successfully reach out to new and existing donors. With 6,000 donations needed every day and only 2% of the population giving blood, it’s critical that we deliver a great experience to maintain and increase the donation of blood, plasma, and platelets. We utilised marketing automation to provide improved donor experiences, resulting in more donors donating and helping to save the lives of more and more people across the UK.
Let Customers Build the Case for Change
Our direct marketing and email communication teams were working with outdated technology, and it was clear to them just how clunky the experience was. We had been using a mix of spreadsheets and offline data to build the campaigns every time, which took a lot of time and effort that, in hindsight, could have been better spent elsewhere. It was the voice of our customers, however, that really highlighted the need for a new approach, as they weren’t shy in providing feedback. Through them, we realised our emails were too frequent, not joined up, lacked personalisation, and were less effective than they could have been. We have the best of intentions, but the process of sending multi-channel messages across email, SMS, or phone calls that didn’t all align was really putting donors off. We knew we could do better – we could be more coordinated, more intentional, and deliver much more impact, while increasing efficiency and exhausting less resources.
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How to Define Your Needs
We had heard of the benefits of marketing automation, but it was all new to us. We’ve all seen examples of it used in ecommerce spaces before – an email asking you if you still want to purchase that pair of shoes you looked at, but now with a further discount, or the tempting videos of a holiday far, far away – but how could this apply to us? How do we build a set of requirements that gets us the right tool to meet our needs? We focused heavily on pre-market engagement, which gave us the chance to see what was out there. Through this process, we began to understand how to highlight our non-negotiables and pitch our requirements – nothing too detailed, but specific enough to make sure we got the right tool for the job. Salesforce Marketing Cloud became a clear front runner, with its ability to build the right customer journeys that would help us mobilise donors across the country. More importantly, it gave us the chance to assess Salesforce implementation partners to help us make this happen. Due to their understanding of where we were in our journey, their industry knowledge, and their collaborative, agile delivery methodology, we chose Bluewave Technology to implement Salesforce within NHS BT’s internal systems.
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The Power of Collaboration
With a robust business case and contracts signed we were ready to get cracking. However, amidst the excitement, energy, and passion came a wealth of risk and worries. We’d never done anything like this before.
We were used to traditional large-scale software build programmes, but ‘off the shelf’ software as a service was a whole new ball game. Thankfully, the due diligence in finding the right partners and the correct tools really paid off. Bluewave understood us as a business, they knew when to lean in and when to let us lead. The process was so seamless and efficient that we actually started the project early. Even before the ink was dry, our “one team” came together to create a plan we could all get behind. This made problems much easier to solve.
Integrating new technology alongside ageing tech gave us some challenges. We had to build new data connections, adapt our approvals and governance processes, refresh all our brand assets, as well as create many new impactful email templates. We were guided by our purpose. The whole team was very aware that this project wasn’t just about great looking emails, but about delivering the right message to the right donor, at the right time – all to encourage a donation booking that could ultimately save someone’s life. There was a lot at stake and Bluewave understood that. We were all passionate about getting this right.
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Was it Worth It?
After 8 months of delivery, our new emails went out to donors exactly as we had originally planned during our very first project call. We’ve now automated many of our key processes and we are getting much richer data and insights on how our donors engage with our communications. The success of this initial project has given us scope and opportunity to review every single communication, making them more relevant. We are also driving efficiencies which is saving us a lot of time and money.
The successful delivery of Salesforce Marketing Cloud has also given us new capabilities, at a time when we need them most. For example, recent surges in the demand for blood left us with lower levels of O negative blood, but within days, our team was able to create four segmented and personalised emails that drove 3,500 donors to book in. We now have a rich backlog of donors that Bluewave and Salesforce have helped to shape. This project has been an absolute success, and I am delighted to share that NHS BT is now well on the way to modernising and transforming all of our donor experiences, encouraging more donations, and – most importantly – saving and improving more lives.
For more information about this project, please watch our case study video here.
To find out more about Bluewave’s bespoke digital transformations for public sector organisations, please contact a member of our team today.