Consider This

Integrated marketing agency, Wunderman Thompson UK, reached out to NHS Blood and Transplant after learning about colleague, Katie’s situation. Katie and her husband, Graham, have a three-year-old son, Ralph, who is currently battling a rare liver cancer.

After being diagnosed in January and undergoing eight cycles of chemotherapy, Ralph’s best option for survival is a multi-organ transplant. He is currently on the waiting list for this life-saving gift but his family fear that a suitable donor may not be found in time to save his life.

In the UK, families will always be asked to give their consent in order for organ donation from a child to go ahead. However, in 2021/22, only 52% of families gave consent for their child’s organs to be donated. This resulted in a total of just 40 organ donors under the age of 18, compared to the 243 children who are currently waiting for a transplant. In cases where a child was already registered on the NHS Organ Donor Register, no family went against this already considered decision to support donation.

While recent medical advances offer hope to families whose children need complex medical conditions, we need more family to consider organ donation. For some children, like Ralph, on the waiting list, a young donor is their only hope.

To help shift attitudes and increase support, the team at Wunderman Thompson UK have put their skills to good use and developed a campaign, named ‘Consider This’, which will shine a spotlight on the experience of Ralph, his family, the lifesaving impact of considering paediatric organ donation and the importance of registering an organ donation decision.

The first phase will launch on 4th September, ahead of NHS Organ Donation Awareness Week (18th – 24th September) and return to school. It aims to reach families, raise awareness, drive conversation and encourage parents across the UK to consider organ donation and confirm their family’s decision to be donors on the NHS Organ Donor Register.

The campaign will launch across radio, print and out-of-home, with highly emotive ads which capture the pain of waiting for a life-saving transplant, while encouraging people to have perspective when they get frustrated by waiting in their day-to-day life. Each ad highlights the life changing impact that agreeing to child organ donation can have and appeals to listeners to consider and search ‘NHS organ donation’ to find out more. The radio ads are bravely voiced by Ralph’s mother, Katie.

In one of the radio ads, Katie says; ‘While his friends get ready to start nursery school, my three-year-old son Ralph is waiting. Other mums will be packing their rucksacks and ironing their outfits, but my son Ralph is still waiting. His friends will be having their breakfast and fastening their shiny new shoes, but my son Ralph is waiting. They’ll be off out the door, excited for their first day of nursery school. But my son Ralph is still waiting, for a multi organ transplant.’.

Radio ads will go live the first week children return to school and during peak school and nursery run times, as parents get back into their term-time routines, to ensure optimum reach.

Print ads will feature in national newspapers including The Times, The Telegraph, The Metro, Daily Mail and Daily Mirror. They play on the everyday instances of waiting – children waiting for their birthday, Christmas, or an ice cream – and contrast it with the extraordinary situation that those children waiting for a lifesaving transplant find themselves in. They further enforce the intended message asking parents to consider organ donation with lines such as, “Some kids can’t wait for Christmas. Others can’t wait for a new heart. Please consider child organ donation. Just registering could help shorten the wait for children in desperate need.”

The ads will also run across out-of-home at high traffic sites across Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester, Southampton and London, including the iconic Westfield site.