Driving Action on Kidney Disease for Kidney Care UK

Across the UK over 7 million people have some form of Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD). It means kidneys do not work as they should and can’t remove toxins and waste products from the body. It’s potentially fatal.

While there is no cure, there are treatments that can improve kidney function and reduce the risk of complications. Like many areas of health, the sooner problems are detected, the sooner beneficial interventions can be made. But people have to know they’re at risk for anything to happen.

Kidney Care UK, the UK’s leading kidney patient support charity, provide vital support and practical services for people typically experiencing the serious implications of later stage kidney disease. But the charity recognises its role in helping those in earlier stages, or even pre-disease but at-risk, to look after their kidneys too.

The problem is that kidneys are a less understood organ, not typically registering on our everyday list of concerns. How do we get them their due attention, and help thousands who may be unaware of the problems ahead?

Kidney Care UK were on the front foot having created an online risk checker tool – a five minute process to help the public check their risk and start a conversation with their GP if needed.

We’ve worked with them in 2024 to design a campaign to drive awareness of the role of kidneys, the value of understanding risk and to encourage people to take their check.

We did this through extensive consultation with the charity’s team, who brought huge personal and sector experience to our creative and strategic thinking. We prototyped creative approaches and messaging and tested them with our mid-life target audience through insight groups. We iterated from what we learned to finalise the concept before testing again before launch.

The strategy was driven predominantly by the EAST framework. The Easy five minute test was a core asset, and our playfully provocative creative helped stop the scroll on social media. We socialised the test by encouraging Kidney Care UK to share the number of users to help socially norm the act of completing it, and emphasised the test’s value in enabling early and timely interventions.

In early research, our groups’ basic grasp on kidney health was an understanding that they filter blood to keep our bodies “pure”. This was where the headline of #BloodyAmazing came from. The first rule of any campaign is to get noticed, and this one was too important to be politely ignored.

At the beginning of 2025, just a couple of months after launch, the campaign has driven over 125,000 people to the checker, thousands of whom have discovered a risk about which they were unaware, but a charity ready to help them address it. That’s #BloodyAmazing.