Customer Story How the American Red Cross and PEANUTS® Joined Forces to Inspire the Community

With a focus on the needs of the people they serve, the American Red Cross puts the care and support of communities first.

In April 2023, the American Red Cross partnered with Activate HQ, an agency passionate about purpose-driven influencer marketing, to help them bring the PEANUTS® partnership to life and ensure it aligned with their brand vision. The "Be cool. Give blood." campaign was built around the premise that the comic strips that have charmed readers for generations encourage community members to take care of one another.

Through Red Cross Biomedical Services brand and marketing partnerships, they empower the best of humanity. They’ve worked together with generous partners such as PEANUTS® to mobilize loyal supporters to support the greater good by donating blood.

These partnerships have helped mobilize different communities and audiences by informing them of the important need for blood donations while providing unique “donor rewards” such as the exclusive Red Cross PEANUTS® t-shirt for their contribution.

The campaign incorporated several best practices focused on authenticity, community, and value that helped make it so successful.

When selecting creator partners and crafting the campaign messaging, the American Red Cross and Activate HQ knew there had to be an authentic connection with the brand, creator, and the creator's community. For this purpose-driven campaign, they sought to ignite interest and engagement within the very passionate PEANUTS® community about this unique opportunity. Due to the large number of core PEANUTS® fans, they knew it could lead to increased donations within this community while also reaching and exciting a wider audience of casual fans.

This strategy came to fruition with the first-time donor response the highest it had been in over a year; in April 2023, there were 70,000+ first time donors, which is over 16,000 more first time donors compared to all months since April 2022 and the highest since July 2020. They saw significant participation from Gen Z, which is a coveted demographic to introduce the importance of ongoing blood donations as this generation has a track record of being civic-minded and altruistic. Not only did Gen Z show up to donate (10% of the presenting donors were ages 16 to 19), they proudly created over 100 UGC videos generating over 2M engagements by sharing their experience, helping inspire even more donors to participate. The promotion is credited for 98% of the donor appointments and 91% of the donor presentations in April 2023.

To take this a step further and provide value to their loyal fans, the American Red Cross provided an exclusive PEANUTS® t-shirt with Snoopy + American Red Cross branding in exchange for donating blood, creating a win-win-win for the brand, creators, and potential donors. To keep the content momentum going, the donation centers featured the exclusive branding in their signage and stickers making it easy for creators and donors to capture and share additional PEANUTS® + American Red Cross-branded content leading to millions of earned media impressions via user-generated content inspired by the creator campaign.

• 113 total posts from paid and UGC creators resulted in:
  13.7M impressions | 4.3M reach | $1.1M social media value | 2M engagements
• 600% increase in web traffic during the first week of the campaign compared to previous weeks
• 70,000+ first time donors in April 2023
• 14,000+ new donors in the first week compared to a weekly average of 7.7K in March 2023
• 10% of the presenting donors were ages 16 to 19
• The promotion was credited for 98% of the donor appointments during April 2023
• Reached nearly 7.7M unique contacts through 57.2M marketing sends
• The first Red Cross Instagram post of the promotion garnered more social impressions and engagement than any Red Cross post ever published on the platform