It’s been a bad weekend for bad marketing examples and in this case I have to unfortunately report on the Anthony Nolan Trust.

But before we continue I want to point out I am a registered donor for the trust and actively support what they do and would encourage others to investigate them further and if they are eligible to sign up.

On Saturday morning I received an email from them enquiring how nice I am to strangers with a link to a quiz on their website. Now I don’t usually take part in these quizzes that seem to be appearing all over Facebook. I already know how nice I am to strangers… after all I donate blood, I’m registered on the Anthony Nolan register should anyone need my bone marrow and I donate money to various organisations investigating the causes of baby loss and premature birth amongst other things so all in all I would say that makes me a pretty nice person.

The pure reason I clicked through to undertake this quiz was so that I could ultimately post my results to my social media channels and encourage others to undertake a quiz that is actually worthwhile (rather than for vanity reasons) and to help to generate awareness with the objective of getting eligible donors to sign up.

Anthony Nolan Trust Stranger email

So what was the problem?

Firstly I didn’t feel that the quiz optimised well within a mobile device and it is most likely due to to the animated answers. I can appreciate these being used to make the quiz a little more fun, but I felt it actually made the experience less enjoyable.

Additionally, the last question just gave options without any indication of what the animations were depicting and I tried this on a few devices to check it wasn’t just me. I have no ideas what these examples were a metaphor for, especially I’m not exactly an animal fan.

 

Online quiz faults

 

Secondly, after completing the questionnaire the trust wanted my email address – bearing in mind i had received an invitation to this quiz via email – would this mean I would start to receive duplicate emails?

I will admit there was an option to skip this step in order to find out my results and share on my social media channels but it was early in the morning and I was accessing on my phone so the barely visible ‘Skip this step’ option was overlooked – I just wanted to see my results and share them and I can’t help thinking that they got this step the wrong way round as I just ended up closing the screen.

Anthony Nolan

I know, I know, you could be saying that I am being overcritical. However you’ve read this blog post and perhaps its the first time you have heard of the Anthony Nolan Trust. Maybe you even signed up to become a donor… in which case they (and I) have achieved their objective!

However, I can’t help feeling that maybe they should have done a little more testing before pushing out to a wider audience.

Aside from that – Anthony Nolan Trust keep up the good work!

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