RC Lens Turns a Club Motto Into a National Blood Drive
RC Lens, in partnership with UNFP's outreach programme Players For Society and agency Sid Lee Paris, launched "Turn Blood into Gold" on April 30, 2022, transforming a Ligue 1 home match against Nantes into a large-scale blood donation drive held inside the club's own stadium in France, using redesigned player jerseys and a rewritten club motto to mobilise supporters.
The campaign responds directly to a documented public health emergency in France. France's Etablissement Français du Sang, which monitors national blood supply, reported that the country was 30,000 blood bags short of the 100,000 required to maintain its reserve. According to that same reporting, France needs 10,000 daily blood donations to treat patients, yet the figure has been declining year after year, with more than 500 additional donations required every single day to close the gap. RC Lens chose to act where its influence was greatest: inside the stadium and across the supporter community it has built over decades in the Pas-de-Calais region.
The campaign's structural foundation is the club's own motto, "Sang et Or" — Blood and Gold. Sid Lee Paris reframed that two-word identity into a public health call to action, modifying the front-of-shirt slogan to "Notre Sang est Or" — Our Blood is Gold — and redesigning the club crest so that its signature red was replaced entirely with gold. The jersey itself carried an additional layer of meaning: because every RC Lens player has at least one of the letters A, B, or O in their name, Sid Lee Paris added plus and minus symbols to the squad's surnames to recreate blood group designations across the full team sheet. A specially produced tifo for the matchday extended the visual language from the pitch into the stands. Players and the club amplified the redesigned crest across social media before and after the game, directing supporters to a blood drive held at the stadium. The match ended 2-2 after a comeback by RC Lens, but as the campaign itself notes, the more consequential result was recorded off the pitch. Clapboard rates "Turn Blood into Gold" at 71 out of 100.
RC Lens identified a strategic alignment that few sports campaigns achieve with such clarity. The club's motto was not adapted for the campaign — it was the campaign's entire premise, giving "Turn Blood into Gold" an authenticity that audience-first strategies built from scratch rarely replicate. Players For Society, the UNFP programme that connects professional footballers with causes serving the common good, provided the institutional credibility to move the activation beyond branded entertainment and into the territory of genuine civic mobilisation, as reported by The Drum.
The choice of a live matchday as the activation context is strategically precise. RC Lens supporters represent one of French football's most passionate and geographically concentrated fanbases, giving the campaign access to a captive, emotionally primed audience at the moment of peak club identification. In France, the documented shortfall reported by the Etablissement Français du Sang — 30,000 bags below reserve requirements — framed the ask with urgency that required no creative embellishment. The stadium blood drive transformed passive spectatorship into direct civic participation, collapsing the distance between watching sport and doing something consequential.
Within the French sports sponsorship and cause-marketing landscape, campaigns of this type compete for attention against larger-budget activations from clubs with greater commercial resources. RC Lens distinguished its approach from generic charity partnerships pursued by competitors such as Paris Saint-Germain and Olympique de Marseille by rooting the entire creative system in an artefact the club already owned — its name, its colours, and its motto — rather than attaching an external cause to existing marketing infrastructure. The global sports sponsorship market was valued at approximately 73.8 billion US dollars in 2022, according to Allied Market Research, underscoring the scale of commercial activity against which purpose-driven, low-budget activations like this one must earn attention on the quality of their idea alone.
Sid Lee Paris built the entire creative execution around a single constraint that became its greatest asset. Every player in the RC Lens squad carries at least one of the letters A, B, or O in their surname. By adding plus and minus symbols to the relevant letters within each player's name on the back of the jersey, the agency transformed a standard matchday kit into a visual directory of blood types — worn by twenty-plus athletes in front of a full stadium and broadcast to a national television audience across France.
The work was led by Chief Creative Officer for Europe Sylvain Thirache and President Johan Delpuech at Sid Lee Paris. Creative direction was shared by Céline Mornet-Landa and Clément Mornet-Landa, with art direction by Jessy Kikabou and Victoria Maldotti and copy by Joachim Senteni. Production was managed by Victor Grenu, editing by Yoann Plard, and the account was overseen by Yoann Deminiac and Loéane Le Berre. On the client side, Jérôme Dumois, UNFP director of the president's office and co-founder of Players For Society, anchored the partnership infrastructure that made the stadium activation possible.
Beyond the jersey, the creative system extended across multiple touchpoints with deliberate economy. The club crest was recoloured — red replaced with gold — creating a modified emblem that players and the club distributed across social media in the days surrounding the April 30 match against Nantes, as reported by Famous Campaigns. A tifo produced specifically for the matchday carried the visual language into the stands, ensuring the campaign occupied every sightline inside the stadium. The front-of-shirt modification from "Sang et Or" to "Notre Sang est Or" completed a creative system in which every element — jersey back, jersey front, crest, tifo, and digital assets — reinforced a single, legible message without redundancy. As noted by Esloganmagazine, the campaign achieved formal coherence rarely seen in cause-marketing activations of comparable scale.
The "Turn Blood into Gold" campaign produced measurable results against its primary objective. Donation appointment slots for the stadium blood drive filled within minutes of going live, according to reporting by The Drum and Adobo Magazine. The drive collected hundreds of blood bags, and the activation generated a reported 26% increase in blood bags collected compared with previous blood drives held in the same city, as corroborated by Famous Campaigns and Esloganmagazine.
No verified award wins for "Turn Blood into Gold" have been recorded at Cannes Lions, the Effies, The One Show, D&AD, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards. No published data is available for media spend, production budget, paid media reach, brand tracking uplift, or donation-retention rates beyond the immediate activation window. The absence of long-term measurement data is characteristic of sports cause-marketing campaigns structured around a single matchday event rather than a sustained media investment.
Structurally, the campaign demonstrates that creative efficiency — achieving maximum communicative impact from minimum new production — is itself a performance lever. The redesigned jersey required no new media buy to generate coverage; the matchday broadcast and social amplification by players and the club served as the distribution channel. The 26% improvement over prior local blood drives suggests the combination of high-trust messenger (professional footballers), emotionally resonant context (a live match), and a conceptually tight creative idea produces measurable behaviour change at low cost per donation. For cause-marketing practitioners and sports rights holders across France and beyond, that ratio represents the campaign's most replicable finding.
Turn Blood into Gold was a blood donation campaign created by Sid Lee Paris for RC Lens, UNFP, and Players For Society in France in 2022. It transformed a Ligue 1 matchday against Nantes on April 30 into a stadium blood drive, using redesigned jerseys that encoded blood types into player surnames and rewriting the club's motto as a public health appeal.
France faced a documented blood supply shortfall. The Etablissement Français du Sang reported the country was 30,000 blood bags below its 100,000-bag reserve requirement, with more than 500 additional daily donations needed. RC Lens leveraged its motto Sang et Or — Blood and Gold — and its passionate supporter base to drive awareness and direct action.
Sid Lee Paris identified that every RC Lens player carries at least one of the letters A, B, or O in their surname. The agency added plus and minus symbols to those letters, recreating blood group designations across the full squad's names. The front of the shirt changed the club motto from Sang et Or to Notre Sang est Or — Our Blood is Gold.
Donation appointment slots filled within minutes of opening, according to The Drum and Adobo Magazine. The drive collected hundreds of blood bags and produced a reported 26% increase in blood bags collected compared with previous blood drives in the city, as corroborated by Famous Campaigns and Esloganmagazine. No media spend or long-term retention data is publicly available.
The campaign was led by Chief Creative Officer for Europe Sylvain Thirache and President Johan Delpuech at Sid Lee Paris. Creative direction came from Céline Mornet-Landa and Clément Mornet-Landa, with art direction by Jessy Kikabou and Victoria Maldotti, copy by Joachim Senteni, and production by Victor Grenu. Jérôme Dumois of UNFP and Players For Society co-led the client partnership.
No verified award wins for Turn Blood into Gold have been recorded at Cannes Lions, the Effies, The One Show, D&AD, the Clios, the Webby Awards, or WARC Awards. Clapboard rates the campaign 71 out of 100, reflecting strong creative integration and measurable behavioural impact relative to its production and media footprint.
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