Highland and Moray Give Blood, Save Lives campaign is up for national award
A campaign to boost vital blood and plasma donations across the north of Scotland has made it to the shortlist of a national awards scheme.
Almost exactly a year ago Highland News and Media, publishers of The Northern Scot, launched our Give Blood, Save Lives campaign.
Working in partnership with the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service (SNBTS) we called on readers across the Highlands and Moray to give blood - the aim being to achieve 5000 individual donations before Easter this year.
Thanks to our readers we did just that - and collectively helped save or improve the lives of up to 15,000 people relying on those donations.
• Blood donations - where do they go?
It was a significant increase on the number of donations SNBTS’s north team would otherwise have expected across the period and we were proud to do our bit.
Most vital to the campaign’s success was the generosity of readers in sharing their often powerful and moving accounts of what drove them to donate, or how they have benefited from donors’ generosity over the years.
We know how many of our readers are out there doing good in the community and it was a privilege to shine a light on some of them - as well as to hopefully persuade others they could contribute too.
Give Blood, Save Lives has now been shortlisted for the 2025 Making a Difference Award, a showcase of powerful national and local newspaper investigations and campaigns set to run during Journalism Matters week (November 3-9), with the public invited to vote for their favourite.
The vote goes live on https://newsmediauk.org/making-a-difference/ at 9.30am on Monday (November 3) and closes at 5pm on Thursday, November 6, with local and national winners announced the following day.
A win would be just a small way to say thank you to everyone who contributed to the success of this life-saving campaign.