January 10, 2023
This article originally appeared in AABB News, a benefit of AABB membership. Join AABB today to read the rest of this month’s issue.
Since 1970, the United States has recognized January as National Blood Donor Month. The first National Blood Donor Month was proclaimed by President Richard Nixon to pay tribute to voluntary blood donors and to encourage people to donate blood during the winter months – a time when there are often decreases in the blood supply. The mission to raise awareness and celebrate donors’ contributions continues.
“Here is a New Year’s resolution we should all make: become a regular blood donor in 2023, and start now as we mark National Blood Donor Month,” said Debra BenAvram, CEO of AABB. “We salute all those who have already given this life-saving gift and encourage anyone eligible to make a donation appointment today.”
Blood donations have become the focus of increased importance since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic disrupted the nation’s blood supply, fueling a national blood crisis and some of the most significant blood shortages in more than a decade. Blood centers faced immense and unprecedented challenges as schools and churches closed, blood drives decreased and businesses went fully remote, impacting donor turnout and collections.
The pandemic’s impact on the blood community forced blood centers to pivot and adopt new strategies to engage and retain donors. From shrinking mobile programs and staffing shortages to effective promotional campaigns and a thriving high school program, the following AABB institutional members share their current challenges as well as strategies to stay afloat while navigating donor recruitment in a post-pandemic world.
These are just a few examples of the many ways in which blood centers throughout the country have had to expand and reconsider their operations in the past few years.
David Graham, NYBC vice president of regional blood centers
One of the largest community-based, non-profit blood collection and distribution organizations in the United States, New York Blood Center Enterprises (NYBCe) has served more than 75 million patients and 600 hospitals nationwide. NYBCe and its partner organizations collect approximately 4,000 units of blood daily and distribute nearly 1 million blood products annually through on-site donor centers and mobile blood drives. David Graham, NYBC vice president of regional blood centers, discussed the center’s challenges and success with engaging young donors and connecting with potential donors through advertising and education.
Be Where They Are
It has become harder to reach younger donors after the pandemic. We’ve done more social media and digital advertising to be where they are and engage them through areas outside of school, such as Instagram and TikTok. We’ve had some success with TikTok. Being present on the youth-oriented sites has had an impact and increased the number of young donors, but engagement with this demographic is not like it was pre-pandemic. There seems to be social awareness and community awareness within this generation, so we are trying to find other charitable and nonprofit organizations that we can tie together.
Education
Being a regular donor is part of our community’s emergency preparedness. We strive to educate potential donors on reasons for blood transfusions beyond trauma or mass casualties. When natural disasters or shooting catastrophes occur, a lot of people come out to donate, but we talk about being prepared for the next emergency and emphasize the ongoing need for patients with sickle cell disease or cancer who need platelets or red cells or patients who need routine surgeries. Having that strong inventory helps us respond to all daily needs and emergency situations. We stress that regular donations help us keep a strong inventory, which is important because blood has a short shelf life.
Get The Word Out
We relied so much on our blood drives and volunteer coordinators in the past to spread the word, but we are doing more of that now. We’ve never done this much advertising before. Now we have promotions and ads on the radio, billboards and social media. We have noticed some success with radio advertising. It’s hard to know and measure what brings the donor in. We lost many mobile donors during the first year of the pandemic, but our retainment rates have improved as we pivoted. We are not where we want to be, but we are better than in the early days of the pandemic. You must do multiple things to influence an individual’s blood donation today.
Make It Convenient
There is an expectation that it should be easy for donors, and they shouldn’t have to work hard to donate blood. Our donors want to search for convenient ways to donate, and we want to ensure we are meeting their needs and communicating with them. We hope to incorporate more digital tools. We all use apps, and they are extremely convenient. We can learn a lot from the for-profit world in this area. We want to make it easier for the public to interact with us.
What’s Next
The end of the year and beginning of January are tough times for blood donations. We try to get more media support to highlight blood donor and recipient reunion stories and the importance of donating. We are also expanding our relationships with hospitals. As we work more as partners, we focus on using their platforms to encourage people to donate. We ask our hospitals to advocate on our behalf and talk about the general health care of our community. Donating blood is an important part of that.
Theresa Pina, vice president of operations
Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center is the only blood provider to Houston and its surrounding communities 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The independent community blood center serves 26 counties across the Texas Gulf Coast, Brazos Valley and East Texas and more than 170 hospitals and health care institutions. It has 17 centers and hosts approximately 7,500 mobile blood drives annually. Theresa Pina, vice president of operations, discussed the center’s strong comeback with high school donors as well as the art of donor appreciation.
Strong Comeback
We are collecting more from our high school donors than we were pre-pandemic. We are proud of it. We’ve worked hard to get back into our high schools. We are the fourth largest city in the U.S. and one of the most diverse communities in the country. It was particularly important for us to get into our high schools again from a diversity perspective, so we hit the ground running
Show Appreciation
Our retention rate remains the same as pre-pandemic. Some months are a little better but retaining donors has become more difficult. Blood centers in general have to offer more incentives to get donors to come in. In the past, we didn’t offer an incentive every time a person donated blood, but now we offer hoodies, beach towels and other items. We’ve spent a lot of time reconnecting with our partners and sponsors, as many of them faced financial challenges during the pandemic. More of them want to give back to the community now. Donors are altruistic, but they also like to have some type of appreciation. For some, it’s an item or being highlighted on social media. Our long-time donors are just proud to be donors and they wear their t-shirts with pride. Everyone is motivated differently. Offer a little bit of everything so you can touch on all those different motivators in your community.
Improving Communication
Many people don’t answer their phones anymore and that was a terrific way to historically re-engage or retain a blood donor. At the same time, there are technologies that prevent people from receiving your calls such as carriers marking your calls as spam, which makes retention difficult. People are also overwhelmed with emails, so it’s hard to stand out. We recently implemented a texting program with psychographic segmentation to better understand our donors’ motivators and send tailored text messages. We hope this new program helps with our retention rate, as texting is less intrusive than a phone call. For a blood center to retain a donor, it’s all about re-engaging, and everyday there are fewer ways to re-engage them. It’s been more challenging since the pandemic. We spend more money doing it now, but it’s essential for us.
Awareness Ads
We spend a substantial amount of money on television and radio ads to remind people of the ongoing need to donate blood. People see our content and commercials while watching their favorite shows on streaming platforms. Our awareness ads are fun and not dramatic. We try to keep it light to let people know blood donations can be fun and make you feel good.
What’s Next
We send out a message to all our donors on behalf of the CEO during National Blood Donor Month to show appreciation. We also plan to debut donor recipient videos on our website throughout the month and launch a public relations campaign and social media campaign with evergreen content to recruit donors and raise awareness. In addition, we will work with local media to talk about the need for ongoing donations.
Lisa Entrikin, CEO
Founded in 1952, Rock River Valley Blood Center (RRVBC), located in Rockford, Ill., is the only provider of blood to 13 hospitals in the region, which requires 800 donors per week to meet the demand. Lisa Entrikin, CEO of RRVBC, discussed the remote workforce’s impact on donations and the importance of offering a high-quality donor experience.
The Biggest Challenge
Our donations were 60% fixed site and 40% mobile (pre-pandemic), and we went to 75% fixed site because many businesses would not let us come in. Now that things are returning to normal, we are up to about 35% mobile donations, which is still not back to where we were. We are still struggling. Many of these businesses once hosted mobile drives, but now the employees work remotely. If they used to see 50 donors, we may only see 25 now because half their staff may not be in the building. That’s been exceedingly difficult. We’re trying to be creative and, in some cases, doing shorter hours per drive and hosting two days in a row, but those turn into expensive units.
Create an experience
We have a gallon milestone program that recognizes donors, but we’re not a center that gives away donor gifts. Within the last few years, it’s been increasingly harder not to have incentives because it’s happening at centers all around us. We’ve invested in training programs, specifically for phlebotomists, to provide stellar customer service for blood donors, which is key to retaining donors. We instill that it is important to follow SOPs, but you must also have that special touch. We emphasize the importance of making direct eye contact and using donors’ names to make them feel valued when they are here to give.
What’s Next
We are doing a New Year’s resolution t-shirt giveaway to encourage people to commit to donating blood. We are also hosting a press conference this month with trauma surgeons from our three largest hospitals, two of which have level one trauma centers. In addition, we are launching an initiative in 2023 to attract 7,000 new donors to RRVBC, which is double the number of donors we receive annually. We are a small center, and we’re losing people as they age out or move out of the area, and we’re not replacing them as quickly as we need to, so we’re kicking off our initiative during National Blood Donor Month and will push to meet our goal by Dec. 31.
Nicole Risenger, mobile blood donor center recruitment coordinator
Each year, approximately 3,000 patients at Luminis Health Anne Arundel Medical Center (LHAAMC) receive life-saving blood transfusions and nearly 7,300 units of blood are needed annually. LHAAMC has served the Annapolis, Md. community for more than 30 years, and the donations received stay in the community to help local patients. The center’s blood mobile program continues to face challenges due to staffing shortages and a decline in corporate drives. Nicole Risenger, recruitment coordinator, discussed how LHAAMC has pivoted to increase donations through a new rewards program and collaborations.
Learning to Pivot
Our mobile program has really suffered due to staffing shortages after the pandemic. We require CDL licenses for our drivers due to the weight of the bloodmobile bus. We have seen a significant drop in blood drives. We were averaging about 20 drives a month, and now we’re lucky if we get eight because we need to find organizations willing to have a drive and we don’t have drivers. We also lost many drive coordinators because they were affiliated with larger companies and businesses that went remote, so we didn’t have a place to host the blood drives. Schools are still wary about letting us come to campuses.
These challenges really required us to pivot and develop new collaborations. There has been a great outpouring of support from many of our local rotary groups and community organizations. It’s shifted from business and company-centric drives to community drives, as more neighborhood and community organizations have stepped up to fill in the gap.
Adapting to the New Norm
The work from home culture is here to stay, so we are becoming more strategic and judicious when we go out into the community. We have a standing drive with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. We used to do drives every other month and now we do three annually because we work around their mandatory day in the office. The world is still trying to figure out how to fit us back into their everyday routine.
What’s Next
We’ve really been focused on increasing employee donations. This has been our biggest push since COVID-19 because everybody is still adjusting. Mobile blood drives have been particularly hard in communities because people are wary. It forced us to look inward to see how we could utilize our resources elsewhere. We piloted an employee donor recognition program this past year, and we hope to launch a hospital-wide initiative that coincides with 2023 National Blood Donor Month. The goal is to reward employees with points for blood donations and platelet donations, so they can eventually earn gifts. The program has been a work-in-progress, but it is finally coming together.
Cliff Numark, chief of marketing
Founded in 1943, Vitalant is one of the nation’s oldest and largest nonprofit transfusion medicine organizations which comprises a network of about 120 community blood centers. Vitalant provides life-saving blood and comprehensive transfusion medicine services for 900 hospitals and their patients across the U.S. Cliff Numark, chief of marketing, shared the organization’s challenges with new donor acquisition and its future strategies to retain donors.
Building a Donor Base
We believe that the business-related blood drives will be the biggest challenge this year based on what’s happening with the work from home environment. We saw a 50% reduction from our peak of business blood drives, which is staggering because they represented about 20% of our mobile blood drives in the past. We’ve also seen our retention rates and frequency increase, but we haven’t had enough new donors, which is problematic. The formula for building your donor base is increasing your retention, re-engaging lapsed donors and getting new donors. We are working on all three. We may not be exactly where we were in 2019 in terms of new donor acquisition, but we are striving to make up for that in other areas.
Be Intentional
Even though business blood drives are down, some continue to operate. Our strategy is to identify people who could organize blood drives with large inclusive businesses to ensure they know we are still here. We want to be intentional about reaching out, both online (email marketing, digital advertising, social media, web optimization, etc.) and offline (direct mail and phone, e.g.). We also plan to identify new organizations that might be interested in helping the cause and engage their team members in a community-building opportunity.
Remain Front and Center
We are facing a drastically different environment for collections today. Things have changed since the pandemic. When people didn’t have a lot of things to do during the shutdown, it was easier to get them to donate because it got them out of the house. As we’ve moved our way through the pandemic, it has become more difficult. We are back to the bad old days in blood banking when we are competing for people’s time with other things, whether it’s going to see a movie or attending a community event. We must be front and center and demonstrate how they can help save a life with one hour of their time. It’s a powerful statement, but we must get that message out there to both the sponsors organizing blood drives as well as individual donors. We see the challenge head on, so we are developing strategies as we deal with a post-pandemic world.
What’s Next
We launched our virtual blood drive program in 2020, and we’re working on enhancing our virtual program, so it’s less manual and engages more people. We’re also developing a referral program in 2023 where people can encourage others to donate online, and we will be able to track their efforts.
If you look at organizations like the American Cancer Society and American Heart Association, people can request donations for their birthday through online fundraising, a widespread practice. You can’t really do that in the blood space, but this program would enable us to do it on an individual donor basis. This referral program is a big opportunity because people will feel good about getting other people to donate.
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