St John Ambulance was keen to redefine its brand and focus on how First Aid can be the difference between life and death. BBH had developed a stunning print campaign to dramatise how lives are lost every day for want of first aid. But although the need was clear, there wasn’t a solution available to drive a response.

To solve that problem, we developed a pocket first aid guide – which we offered free to anyone who texted in or registered on the website.

The campaign caught the media’s imagination (with a great deal of help from the PR geniuses at Golin Harris). The Times included our SMS shortcode in its leader column and The Sun reproduced the whole guide across a (free) page.

The response was phenomenal. We generated over 150,000 responses (around 50% from ‘free’ PR coverage) which converted brilliantly to Direct Debit.

A subsequent TV ad (by our friends at DTV) proved so successful that we had to pull it because the telephone agency couldn’t cope. And St John have been recruiting cheap donors with the same proposition ever since…