Royal Flying Doctors Service: Australia’s Biggest Waiting Room
The Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) is one of the largest and most comprehensive aeromedical organisations in the world. With a 93 year history of serving Australians in the bush, the RFDS provides essential primary health care and emergency care across huge expanses of this country. They have a fleet of 79 aircraft plus over 150 road service vehicles and have over 1,000 patient contacts every day. They have been consistently voted Australia’s most reputable charity and, more recently, our most trusted charity.
Our Relationship with the RFDS
Laundry Lane have been working with RFDS for over four years and over that time have developed a strong and trusting creative relationship. Amongst a number of other projects, we developed a video display showcasing the history and impact of the RFDS in Australia which is on permanent exhibition in the National Museum in Canberra.
Laundry Lane were chosen to help develop the RFDS national TVC and digital campaign in 2021.
The Campaign: Australia’s Biggest Waiting Room
The primary purpose of this campaign is to create awareness for the RFDS, drive donations, and communicate the multitude of primary healthcare services the RFDS offers beyond emergency care. Particularly among young people living in Australian cities who might never have come into contact with the organisation personally, it was important to raise awareness of the important work the RDFS does right across Australia.
The Plan/Creative Process
Creatively, we wanted to communicate the vast, diverse landscapes and the broad healthcare needs in rural and remote communities across Australia that RFDS serves. Seeing the opportunity to utilise the beauty and diversity of Australian landscapes and communities, we wanted to capture real people in their own environments – and by avoiding the use of actors, we sought to draw out the inherent authenticity of the RFDS brand. We wanted to show how it really is, not overstated or overproduced and to let our amazing landscapes talk for themselves.
The Production Process
This was a fantastic challenge for our whole team. From filming and editing to motion graphics design and digital marketing, our team was able to contribute across the board. Despite having to constantly adapt throughout production, we were able to deliver a family of TVC and digital assets of which we’re all really proud.
Whilst current border and filming restrictions did hamper our production schedule, we were still able to capture some great scenes across western NSW and Tasmania. Planned trips to other locations were cancelled, which meant we needed to adapt the campaign and rely on some of the RFDS extensive footage library. This made the editing process all the more important, our team managed this process with professionalism, creativity and patience.
The Assets
We created TVC (60’ and 30’ versions) plus several digital assets (animated stills, parallax images, and still images of various sizes) for an 8 week campaign. Our favourite asset is the longer digital version (Hero 120’) which really allows the scenes to breathe and the narrative to unfold. Our ability to adjust the campaign based on feedback from our digital marketing team enabled us to continue creating and adjusting assets based on audience engagement.
Digital Strategy
We created a strategy to promote the assets across Facebook and Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Ads. Initially the focus of the campaign was creating awareness and the focus was on impressions, reach and video views. As the campaign progressed we funnelled viewers through the marketing stages to focus more on generating clicks, site visits and donations.
The Results
We’ve had an overwhelmingly positive response to the campaign, in just the first week we had over 3 million impressions and fantastic engagement over social media. In particular our ‘Hero 120 second video’ has had a great response across all platforms. As the campaign progressed the engagement stayed consistently high and we were able to achieve great results.
This campaign was successful in generating a conversation about the RFDS and the essential services they provide and was a great creative, collaborative experience for Laundry Lane.
