Stem cell donors called up for Match of the Day campaign

June 12, 2014
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Donating is the easy bit. The hard bit is watching England play afterwards…

Anthony Nolan is kick-starting a new awareness campaign working with our stem cell donors to coincide with the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve asked a selection of our selfless donors, who’ve proven to be our ‘Match of the Day’ for a stranger, to predict the scores for selected games during the World Cup.

This campaign is important to Anthony Nolan because we urgently need more young men aged 16–30 to sign up, as they are most likely to be chosen as a match but make up just 14% of the register.

Our stem cell matches predict the football results

Each ‘Match of the Day’ donor will hold up a sign showing their prediction, while they donate their stem cells to save the life of a stranger with a matching tissue type.

The photos will be shared across Facebook and Twitter before each game and will include a little bit about the donor, their reason for donating, how it feels to donate, and of course, their prediction. You can follow along using the hashtag #MatchOTD

Alexander Scott, Head of Marketing at Anthony Nolan says,

“With the World Cup 2014 set to be the biggest social media event of all time we wanted to capitalise on this fantastic opportunity to reach potential lifesavers.

“We want to bust myths around donating bone marrow or stem cells by highlighting how easy and pain free the process is. We’re going to shine a light on the ‘feel good’ side to donating through our love of football.”

All the people featured in our Match of the Day campaign have donated stem cells or bone marrow sometime over the last month. The day that we feature them on social media is not the day that they have donated.