With a campaign that has actually saved lives, St John Ambulance has rejuvenated itself in the public eye. 

St John Ambulance has recently been celebrating the success of its Life Lost campaign, created by St John Ambulance by GolinHarris. The campaign’s brief was to encourage reappraisal of the importance of first aid and the St John Ambulance brand. This in turn was intended to encourage more people to learn first aid through the use of free guides, website pages, iPhone app downloads and courses. Also key to the brief was a desire to increase support for the cause via donations. 

Variety of objectives 

In terms of tangible objectives, St John Ambulance (SJA) wanted to increase awareness, understanding and positive feeling towards the brand by 20%, increase the number of people learning first aid by encouraging 50,000 people to request a free first aid guide and selling £1m of training courses, sell 10,000 iPhone applications, increase visits to the website by 20%, increase its number of fans on Facebook by 10%, increase doorstep donations by 10% and, finally, acquire around 2000 new donors’ telephone numbers. 

Stark statistics 

In order to achieve all this, SJA and GolinHarris developed a campaign that tried to establish first aid as a life and death matter, stressing the importance of learning this skill. By using a mix of third-party and in-house media, the way they did this was by working with the stark statistic that 150,000 people die each year in situations where first aid could have given them a chance to live. Furthermore, figures were singled out for five situations where first aid could have been the difference between a life lost and a life saved: choking, heart not beating, severe bleeding, heart attack, a blocked airway. These scenarios were chosen as they are common situations where members of the public can intervene. 

Five key activities 

In terms of activating around this idea, SJA and GolinHarris did a number of things: 

• They sourced case studies for each scenario, demonstrating how first aid can save lives.
• Celebrity endorsement was secured to highlight the cause in the shape of John Sergeant.
• Free first aid training and press kits were provided during media house tours and briefings.
• The SJA Facebook page was relaunched with comments and discussions related to Life Lost.
• There was a strong emphasis on internal comms throughout the organisation to ensure staff and volunteers could be advocates of the campaign. 

Life-saving SJA taken more seriously 

In terms of outcomes, the campaign can claim to have saved at least one life (a mother wrote to SJA saying she saved her daughter after using the iPhone App). In terms of media, the campaign achieved 368 pieces of coverage, 98.5% of which was positive, 55.8% of which referenced tips for saving a life. Evidence of the transformative impact of the campaign was this comment from Liz Hunt, Daily Telegraph who said: “Despite its good work, there was something faintly comical to me about SJA …I owe the organisation an apology….Do I know enough to save a life? I’m ashamed to say that I don’t, although I intend to remedy that.” 

New-found modernity 

Back to the numbers, there was a 50% increase in spontaneous brand awareness (23% pre-campaign to 32% post-campaign) with 75% saying the campaign is effective. 72% of those surveyed felt more positive towards SJA, describing first aid as a vital skill and SJA as a caring, modern organisation. Reflecting that new-found modernity, it reported 1,031,177 visits to sja.org.uk (up 25% year on year with two-thirds new visitors), 13,756 downloads of the iPhone app and 18% growth in Facebook fans with no social media ad spend. In terms of hard numbers, it exceeded its £1m target for sales of SJA training courses and increased average doorstep donations by over 30%.