The Challenge: There are over 1000 people in Canada who need a bone marrow transplant in order to survive. Only 25% will find a stem cell match within their family, the other 75% need the One Match Stem Cell and Marrow Network to help find their match.

The Objectives: To increase the number of donor registrations in the 17-35 year old male target group, and to raise public awareness of stem cell donations both nationally and internationally.

The Strategy: We built our concept on the insight that in order to connect with this hard-to-reach audience in a meaningful way we couldn’t simply tell them what to do we had to physically immerse ourselves into their world to gain their trust.

The Execution: One Hero is a parallaxing, animated site that transforms the user’s scroll into a digital turn of the comic book page, unraveling an immersive story told across five chapters, encompassing 26 frames and over 200 individual images.

The Outcome: In the three month launch period we experienced 425,000 Twitter impressions, Twitter mentions from 46 different countries, 58,000 site visits, and an average time on site over 9 minutes in the first week. Most importantly, donor registrations increased 30%.

The primary platform for communication was the microsite at onehero.ca. Within the site you could learn more about the donation process, take the knowledge test, and link to testimonial videos from One Match donation recipients.

This was supported by digital banner ads across relevant sites, teasing at the content without fully revealing that it was connected to Canadian Blood Services. Additional, paid social advertising helped drive further awareness on Facebook amongst our target, driving them to the site.

We achieved our primary goal of increasing registrants to the program, with a 30% lift in new registrants compared to the same time last year. Additionally, we saw our campaign widely shared on Twitter and other social channels - with tweets from 46 different countries and over 58,000 site visits - particularly amongst our target of young males.

Lastly, our time on site during the launch period was over 9mins, indicating that our target was spending a great deal of time to engage with the content. While the campaign is over, the site continues to be shared socially, driving further stem cell donation registrants for Canadian Blood Services, and potentially saving more Canadian lives.