the brief
Donate Life Virginia is charged with organ donor registration across the Commonwealth. Organ donation polls well—most people think it’s a good thing. But only 40% of Virginians are actually registered as donors. That’s a big gap between what people believe and what people do. DLV came to Elevation with a hard ask: close that gap, move holdouts onto the registry, and give more people a second chance at life—on a limited budget.
the work
Research surfaced two patterns: 65% of unregistered donors lived in just three dense urban centers, and most of the resistance wasn’t principled—it was mythological. Our Myth-Conceptions campaign enlisted history’s most famous mythical creatures to debunk the myths keeping people off the registry. Who better to explain the difference between fact and fiction than the original fictional experts? We built a multi-year, one-urban-center-at-a-time plan—Northern Virginia first, then Greater Richmond and Hampton Roads—and launched with a particularly sassy mermaid across video, digital billboards, paid social, search, and location-based mobile display, with calls to action pointed at DMV locations where registration actually happens. The opening nine-week burst generated more than 25 million impressions and drove 11,000+ sessions to donatelifevirginia.com—92% of them new visitors. Pre- and post-campaign surveys confirmed that people who saw the work were significantly more likely to register. The campaign has since expanded to include more mythical creatures— Bigfoot, a Fairy—still busting myths and giving more Virginians a second chance.
