Client: DKMS Africa
Period: June 2024 to May 2025
Approach: Media relations, patient storytelling, influencer, community and vernacular media
The Challenge
DKMS is one of the largest stem cell donor registries in the world, with more than 12 million potential donors across seven countries. None of that scale helps a patient in Soweto if the person who matches them isn’t on the list. A patient of African descent had roughly a 30% chance of finding a match on the South African registry. A white patient had 79%.
Twenty South Africans are diagnosed with blood cancer every day. For many of them, survival depends on a stranger with the right tissue type — and that stranger is most likely to share their ethnic background. The registry was too small and it did not look like the country it served. HLS’s brief was to help close that gap and support the push towards 100,000 registered donors, working alongside a client team whose on-the-ground insight shaped every activation.
The Hook
A statistic tells you a problem exists. It never tells you the problem is yours.
Published research confirmed what HLS already suspected: the numbers created concern without creating action. People read 30% and felt sympathy. Nobody read 30% and drove to a registration drive. The gap needed a face and a name.
So HLS built the campaign around real patients who were waiting, told in the languages and on the platforms their communities already trusted — not translated into those languages, but told in them, by people those communities recognised.
The obstacles were never medical. Research showed 31% of people believed donation would be painful and 9% believed it could endanger their health, with almost 20% saying they would not consider registering at all. Layered onto that were cultural and spiritual concerns about the body that no fact sheet was ever going to resolve.
The Line
Patient appeals ran as a constant thread through national television, print and radio.
Two young brothers, Abu and Ayyub, needed a match. So did Dr Andrew Ross, a medical professional who had spent his career on the treating side of the diagnosis and now found himself on the receiving end of it. A doctor waiting on the same registry as everybody else made the shortage impossible to file away as someone else’s problem.
Around the appeals ran an always-on educational stream, from myth-busting features to plain-language explanations of what donation actually involves, pegged to Sunflower Day, World Cancer Day and Bone Marrow Stem Cell and Leukaemia Awareness Month.
HLS then went after the specific demographics the registry was missing. Youth Month brought 11 youth influencers into a single registration drive. Men’s Health Month, supported by an earned feature in GQ, took on the shortage of male donors. Vernacular radio carried the message into communities in their home languages through Umhlobo Wenene and Gagasi FM. A partnership with the DHL Stormers and Seabelo Senatla put a credible male voice in front of a large sporting audience.
Not everything held. Practising doctors turned out to be almost impossible to retain as influencers, for the obvious reason that they were busy practising medicine. So HLS moved to medical interns and nurses, who were available, closer to the communities being targeted, and carried the same clinical credibility.
The Sinker
100,000 registered donors — a client milestone the campaign helped reach in October 2024.
- R10.8 million in earned media value, against an R8 million target
- 633 million audience reach, against a 500 million target
- 351 clippings against a target of 250, with 100% key message pull-through
- 16 influencers engaged against a target of 10, reaching 647,198 people and generating more than 300,000 interactions at engagement rates between 8% and 12%
- 296,194 website visitors and 3,329 registrations during the activations
Nobody registers for a statistic. They register for a person. That is why the patient stories carried this campaign and the numbers only supported them. DKMS Africa cannot buy its way to a national audience, so reach had to be earned — and R10.8 million of earned media value against an R8 million target is budget the organisation never had to raise. That coverage put 296,194 people on the website and converted 3,329 of them into registered donors. Awareness work is easy to run and hard to justify. HLS justified it on the only number the client counts: names on a list.
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