Implementing a Custom Donor Journey Solution for NHS Blood and Transplant

NHS BT engaged Bluewave to revolutionise the organisation’s complex communication system, in order to drive intelligent engagement with their donor base across the UK.

Bluewave started our engagement with NHS BT in early 2023. We contracted with NHSBT in October of 2023 and are scheduled to go live in August of this year (2024). Find out more about this comprehensive digital transformation below.

About NHS BT

NHS Blood and Transplant is a special health authority, sponsored by the Department of Health and Social Care. NHS Blood and Transplant (NHS BT) is responsible for the supply of blood, organs, tissues and stem cells. It collects and supplies blood to hospitals in England and is the organ donation organisation for the UK. The organisation also undergoes world-class research into improving patient outcomes, and offers specialist services such and diagnostic and therapeutic services that provide vital support for blood transfusion, organ and stem transplantation.

The Challenge

NHS BT were previously using a number of manual operations, as well as an internal system that was no longer fit for purpose. Having recently implemented their NDP platform (Azure Data Lake) as well as implementing a number of new innovative solutions, NHS BT’s leadership team felt the time was right to innovate within their donor services department as well. Previously, disparate teams across data, email, content, and SMS were all working apart from each other, with little communication on campaigns. The organisation was looking for a way to bring all of these departments together, with technology that could facilitate seamless collaboration.

NHS BT’s marketing and communications department currently runs over 70 different campaigns, targeting potential and existing donors across the country. This presents a huge logistical challenge, with a lot of potential for human error. The organisation communicates with people who donate blood, plasma, platelets, stem cells. organs and more. Not only do they have in-house donation centres, but also mobile setups in local communities that existing and potential donors need to be made aware of, so that they can donate without having to travel very far. Increasing awareness of these donation events helps to ensure rare and previously low in stock blood can be donated quickly, and in areas where it’s urgently needed. NHS BT’s internal systems were dealing with various moving appointment slots for different events and occasions, and the organisation was looking for a tool that could match the correct demand with the right donor and the right communication, to get that donor into a donation session, and help to save and improve lives of patients within the UK.

“We send over 20 million communications to our donors a year, and we need to recruit more and more donors on a yearly basis to keep up with an ever increasing demand. At NHS BT, we know the best way to meet that demand is by modernising our marketing. If we can build personalised, impactful communications, we can effectively drive our donors to come forward, donate, and help us to save lives.” – Mark Croucher, Assistant Director of Donor Services at NHS Blood and Transplant

The Solution

Bluewave’s experts were brought on to deploy a custom marketing, communication, and logistics solution, built using Salesforce Marketing Cloud. This innovative solution allows users to build and manage personalised customer journeys. Marketing automation can be used to build customer journeys across email, mobile, advertising, website, and apps; delivering a seamless communication experience.

With Marketing Cloud Audience Builder, users can create a single view of each customer, with information from any source, and then target specific audiences and segments across the customer journey – helping users to go from simply managing data to building quality relationships. Marketing Cloud also harnesses the power of AI to power personalisation, using Salesforce Einstein’s predictive intelligence capabilities. These features allow users to pair customer profiles with machine learning algorithms, to automatically show the right content to each individual.

“Bringing marketing automation into NHS blood and transplant is something that we’ve been wanting to do for years. One of the things that we were struggling with was over communicating with donors. We have lots of different processes that can sometimes overlap, resulting in donors receiving multiple calls, emails, and text messages – this often feels disconnected.

We want to provide personalised, donor-focused communication experiences; journeys that take a donor from onboarding, to inviting them to sessions, making sure they’re prepped for the session and that they understand the process, right up to thanking them afterwards for their donation and inviting them to come back in future. Beforehand, we didn’t feel we could achieve this particularly well, but with the help of Marketing Cloud, I’m confident we can achieve this goal with ease.” – Jason Towler, Head of Marketing at NHS Blood and Transplant

The Process

When the project began, NHS Blood and Transplant decided to focus on three initial campaigns that would deliver high value to their donors. This would include a mobilisation campaign that targets donors of specific blood types, encouraging them to sign up to give blood at specific times, in specific locations, when their blood type is in most demand. Bluewave’s experts accomplished this by utilising NHS BT data from their systems and matching priority donors to available time slots in their location. The second campaign our team implemented was a hospital issue campaign that contacts donors who have previously given blood, thanking them for their donation, and letting them know where their blood was used. Finally, we also collaborated with NHS BT’s marketing team to craft a quarterly newsletter campaign, personalised to each donor’s blood type, that would regularly share the latest news and updates from NHS BT.

Bluewave’s technical team took the time to understand NHS BT’s needs and quickly got to work building and integrating these campaigns within a custom Marketing Cloud instance. Over time, NHS BT will expand their use of Marketing Cloud, with plans to automate many of their 67 other donor journeys.

“Working with the team in NHS BT has been a fantastic experience. They have been so engaged and knowledgeable. Their dedication to improving their donor experience has been exceptional. Delivering our Marketing Cloud training to the teams in NHS BT was a particular highlight. We are looking forward to seeing the results of the organisation’s campaigns” – Marketing Cloud Consultant at Bluewave

The Bluewave Way

The Bluewave Way is our agile implementation process, which has led to the delivery of over 250 successful Salesforce projects and engagements over the last decade, with NHS Blood and Transplant counted amongst them. The Bluewave Way is all about implementing the foundations for a customer or client that we can then incrementally improve as we move through the journey of the product with them. Our experts immersed themselves within NHS BT’s company culture, collaborating as one team, working in an agile manner towards a shared goal, with a focus on communication throughout.

“Working with Bluewave on the delivery of Salesforce Marketing Cloud has been a great experience so far. They’ve worked with us at every stage of the journey, from project management right through to delivering the specifications for our particular campaigns. They’ve really come in and understood the business, helped us get to grips with how our data works and how it can help to drive the communications that we want for donors.

Bluewave has also delivered excellent training, helping to upskill our team. Everybody got an opportunity to be hands-on with the Marketing Cloud tool and we’ve already started to see the benefits and the opportunities that it’s going to bring to us in our day to day work.” – Jason Towler, Head of Marketing at NHS Blood and Transplant

At Bluewave, not only do our experts provide knowledge and training through our expertise in Salesforce, but we also gain a lot from these collaborative projects with our clients. In this case, our project managers and technical experts were able to understand NHS Blood and Transplant as an organisation – their business needs, their goals, and what motivates their staff. This resulted in one of our project managers being moved to donate blood for the first time.

“Prior to working with the NHS Blood and Transplant Service, giving blood wasn’t something that I had done before, but having been immersed in their culture and the way that they work, I found myself fully buying into their mission and everything that they are trying to achieve. The team’s values really rubbed off on me, and over the course of this project, I’ve given blood twice and will continue to do so in the future. It was a great opportunity to test the post-donation comms as well.” – Senior Project Manager at Bluewave

The Results

Following a Salesforce-powered digital transformation of NHS BT’s marketing and communications system, the organisation now has three highly personalised campaigns that are up and running currently. NHS BT is able to make use of Marketing Cloud’s automation technology, and has cut down the time it takes to craft an email campaign from 6 weeks to 6 hours. This increased efficiency has greatly improved how effective the organisation is at communicating with donors, and has also improved staff satisfaction. Bluewave’s intervention also helped to upskill staff, who are now able to embrace SQL and HTML coding, as well as Marketing Cloud’s user-friendly dashboards to craft campaigns from start to finish. Ultimately, the best result of this project work is the increase in quality communication with donors, which will ultimately lead to more donors coming forward, and more lives being saved.

“We know that our donors love donating, but they also tell us that we could be more coordinated and more personalised with the communications that we deliver. Our partnership with Salesforce and Bluewave has helped us take our marketing to the next level, with the help of Marketing Cloud automation technology.

This project is going to deliver serious cost savings to us as an organisation, making us more efficient and more productive, and ultimately, helping our team recruit more donors and encourage existing donors to donate more often.” – Mark Croucher, Assistant Director of Donor Services at NHS Blood and Transplant

Customer Feedback

NHS Blood and Transplant were delighted with our marketing automation platform deployment and have continued to spread the word about Salesforce within the NHS ecosystem. You can now watch a testimonial video where Mark Croucher – Assistant Director of Donor Services – shares his experiences with us, describes how transformative Marketing Cloud has been for NHS BT, and how this Salesforce-powered solution will help the organisation save even more lives.