Non è come pensi.

Many people don’t reject bone marrow donation: they simply picture it the wrong way. They imagine it as a painful, debilitating procedure involving the spine, and mistake joining the Registry for an immediate and irreversible commitment.

In most cases, however, donation takes place much like a standard blood draw, while joining the Registry is not a donation in itself: it means making yourself available, to be contacted only if one day you turn out to be a match for someone awaiting a transplant.

This gap between perception and reality is where “It’s not what you think” comes from: a communication platform created for a younger audience that starts from common misconceptions instead of ignoring them, makes the registration journey clear and understandable, and reframes joining the IBMDR Registry as something accessible and achievable.

Leviathan developed the project’s creative and communication strategy, carried out in collaboration with IBMDR and with the support of Race to Donate.

“It’s not what you think” was not conceived as a one-off campaign, but as a creative territory designed to work across different formats and channels without losing its recognisability.

It is built around three pillars: debunking misconceptions, one at a time and without sounding didactic; simplifying the registration journey by explaining what actually happens and in what order; and giving meaning to the idea of availability — making it clear that joining the Registry means making yourself available, not donating immediately.

Everything else stems from these three pillars: native social content, street interviews, the involvement of sports personalities, and a dedicated landing page. Each touchpoint addresses a different part of the same journey, from discovering the topic to considering pre-registration, while every piece of content is designed to stand on its own without relying on the others to be understood.

It is a framework built to be reused and expanded over future campaign cycles, rather than exhausted within a single campaign window.

The campaign leads to two landing page variants tested against each other: the first more comprehensive and informative, the second shorter and more direct, to understand which approach works best with traffic already warmed up by social content.

Both are built around the same principle: objections before answers, and answers before the call to action.

This is where the campaign delivered its most interesting insight. People who stopped to open one of the FAQs addressing common misconceptions — how long donation takes, age requirements, whether tattoos or piercings are an issue, and which diseases bone marrow donation can help treat — were eight times more likely than average to click through to pre-registration.

Opening a question is not passive curiosity: it was the strongest signal of intent recorded throughout the campaign, and it shows where to focus in the next cycle.

When information is the barrier, answering questions is already conversion.

The editorial strategy delivered 72 pieces of content across Instagram and Facebook in six weeks, largely Reels, generating more than 526,000 organic views and over 22,000 interactions.

Two content streams delivered the strongest results. Street interviews, filmed in Milan with students from Politecnico di Milano, captured real, unfiltered perceptions: asking the question without context brought common misconceptions to the surface in people’s own words — making them all the more credible to debunk.

At the same time, a network of Italian sports personalities lent their voices to the cause through organic collaborative content published on IBMDR’s channels. This was the content stream that achieved the widest reach.

Over the same period, the Instagram community grew by 16.5%, without any dedicated follower acquisition budget: a direct side effect of a consistent and engaging social presence.