NHS : Registering losses

Poor campaign management drives people away.

The Site

NHS, the UK’s National Health Service, compromised an organ donor registration campaign through poor management of URLs and its web estate.

NHS is running an integrated publicity campaign to encourage people to sign up to its Organ Donor Register. A printed leaflet and TV ads give a website address for joining the scheme: organdonation.nhs.uk. The address in the leaflet includes a ‘www.’ prefix, the TV ad not. [On 2 and 3 December] Entering the URLs as given into a browser triggered a ‘not found… unavailable or may not exist’ message. A similar outcome accompanied attempts to follow highlighted links on the NHS website.

The NHS site’s contact service reacted promptly to e-mails about the problem, offering a different URL (http://www.uktransplant.org.uk/ukt/default.jsp) with the message “We think this may be the new link”. It opened an Organ Donation microsite where the main picture panel on the home page carried a large ‘register now’ button. This failed to open the registration form, which had an ‘https’ URL for a page on a server that “isn’t responding”. The contact service got back with the apology: “It seems as though there is a problem with their site and we don’t have any control over it”.

[The advertised URL, organdonation.nhs.uk, was functioning fully by early evening, UK time, on 3 December.]

The Takeaway

NHS’s help team may have thought that the problem here lay with the autonomous Organ Donation microsite but its inability to deliver a registration form was just the last dodgy link in a campaign let down badly by poor handling of its online elements. Someone needs to explain the failure to support the URL as published, with automatic redirection if necessary. Fixing forwarding links on the NHS site – the contact service said they would be updated – won’t solve the underlying issue which is that the management of the campaign’s online basics is not as integrated as it ought to be.

For as long as such the problems persist there are potential losses to the NHS: more people will turn to the more cost-intensive offline alternatives offered in the print and TV material or simply give up the attempt to register. That, ultimately, is not simply a variation on abandoned journeys, but a matter of life and death.

[Updated]

First published on 03 December, 2009