We challenged locals to prove their toughness.

Blood Bank of Hawaii has two distinct seasons of need; summer and winter, when potential and active donors decrease due to vacations, school breaks and holidays. During these months, the Blood Bank can experience a 15 to 25% dip in donations and has been forced to rely heavily on imported blood to satisfy demand from 18 hospitals statewide. To ensure Hawaii’s safety, the Blood Bank needed a social media campaign that would get people out of their busy lives and into donor chairs.

In Hawaii, it’s not enough to be “as good” as the mainland. We want to be better. So when it comes to showing our local pride, we’re determined to stand up for our state, our island, our neighborhood. For this campaign, we tapped into that insight by pitting the big population on Oahu against the smaller Neighbor Islands, and even neighborhoods against each other—all for a great cause.

The Tough Enough campaign launched in May to counteract the summer slump. To galvanize communities, we created an island versus island competition with active stats on the landing page. Personalized emails were targeted by island to further fuel the competition. To activate social buzz, we created temporary Tough Enough tattoos to be passed out at all blood drives along with key hashtags.