Using a Sponsorship to Improve the Success of Blood Drive Donations

Abstract

Promoting the idea of blood donation as well as the successful recruitment of blood donors represents substantial marketing challenges. For example, blood products have a short shelf life, donation is invasive, the industry is heavily regulated, and safety issues restrict the number of eligible donors. Moreover, many organizations that collect blood are non-profit services that are not equipped to make use of many of the tools of marketing and promotion. In the for-profit world, organizations are increasingly using sponsorships to enhance the effectiveness of their marketing expenditures. This paper reports on the use of a sponsorship to increase blood drive donations. The sponsorship used a standing annual holiday promotion/stakeholder appreciation campaign conducted by a large local group of gastroenterologists. Linkage of the sponsorship to a local blood drive resulted in increased response rates from donors and in the number of units of blood collected. Implications of the use of sponsorships for future blood drives are discussed.

Intention of future donations: a study of donors versus non‐donors

“…If we take into account that (i) blood still cannot be produced artificially, (ii) some components of blood have a relatively short shelf-life, (iii) donation is invasive, (iv) blood donation is an extremely regulated sector and (v) the number of people who can donate is limited, donor behaviour needs to be analyzed in order to create a wide and constant database that satisfies the growing blood demand (Goette & Stutzer, 2008;Hogan et al, 2008;Moog, 2009).…”

“…This situation shows the need to incorporate the marketing philosophy in this sector through the use of tools to predict the volume of donors, estimate blood demand, retain and recruit donors, guarantee the availability of the product, have information on donors and manage relationships both on demand and on supply (Grant, 2010). Promoting the idea of blood donation and successfully recruiting blood donors represent two very important marketing challenges for blood donation services (Hogan et al, 2008). Nowadays these challenges are more relevant as pure altruism is no longer enough to guarantee a reliable blood supply (Gillespie & Hillyer, 2002;Nilsson Sojka & Sojka, 2003;Lacetera & Macis, 2010).…”