Announcing our first charity partnership

SERV Norfolk Blood Bikes, more familiarly known as Blood Bikes, was founded in Norfolk in 2011. It transports vital supplies of blood and blood products, vaccines and urgent medical supplies as well as breast milk to the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, Queen Elizabeth Hospital and James Paget Hospital, allowing the NHS to divert the significant budget this service costs back into patient care.

Run entirely by volunteers, it is an incredibly hard-working organisation helping to save lives in Norfolk every day, and for those reasons won our agency vote for our chosen charity by a clear mile.

Liz Cooper, our head of PR, says it was a chance encounter at her local church that made her aware of the charity: “I hadn’t heard of Blood Bikes before the Barnham Broom and Upper Yare Group of churches selected them for support. It’s a local charity which relies on public funding to finance its live saving service and its team of enthusiastic people literally put their heart and soul into it, racing against time and in all conditions day and night, to deliver blood or breast milk to those who need it.”

The charity has monthly running costs of £3800 to buy and run its fleet of motorbikes and cars and train its riders, drivers and controllers, and we have pledged to donate all our fundraising efforts to the charity for a year. On top of that we’ll also support it with marketing expertise.

Helen Littlewood, our client service director, says: “We were looking for a local charity we were all passionate about and would benefit from our services. We wanted to make sure that by the end of the year the charity we chose had something lasting, a legacy if you like of our time partnering with them, to take it forward, raising its profile in a professional way to help it attract more support. We will be refreshing Blood Bikes’s brand identity, designing a new website and leaving it with marketing assets, so hopefully fundraising will be a lot easier in the future.”

Keith Grisedale, treasurer at Blood Bikes, is excited at the possibilities this partnership brings the charity: “This is a really exciting partnership for Blood Bikes. We are a relatively new charity which has been focused on establishing ourselves with the equipment required to get functioning and effective first and foremost. This partnership with OneAgency will hopefully take us to the next level, helping us grow.’

To find out more about SERV Norfolk Blood Bikes, visit their website at www.servnorfolk.org.uk