Facebook Introduces a New Feature to Help Increase Blood Donations

Facebook Introduces a New Feature to Help Increase Blood Donations

Last week, Facebook held its second annual Social Good Forum and made several exciting announcements that look to make a really positive impact on the blood donor recruitment industry around the world.

On the heels of announcing their changed mission this summer from connecting people to "[giving] the people the power to build community and bring the world closer together," Facebook announced the expansion of their new Blood Donation Sign Up tool, among others.

3 Factors To Improve Operational Leadership At Your Blood Center

3 Factors To Improve Operational Leadership At Your Blood Center

When I have asked internal tele-recruitment departments why they are not hitting goal, I most often hear one or two different answers. They feel they are understaffed OR they feel the donors are all too busy to donate. I am here to tell you – these are emotional answers, so please be empathetic with your team if you hear these, but there’s likely a different reason.

Traditionally there are 3 factors that impact the ability to reach goal:

  • Performance
  • Record Availability
  • Labor Availability

How Your Blood Center Can Use Facebook Messenger To Recruit Blood Donors

How Your Blood Center Can Use Facebook Messenger To Recruit Blood Donors

Facebook and Hubspot are partnering up this week to bring users live stream video content about the changing landscape of social media and how businesses should react to it. We attended the first session which included a panel of experts talking about major trends in social media and how you can adapt your marketing strategy to take advantage of them.

One of the most popular talking points was around Facebook Messenger Ads and their growing impact on businesses.  Did you know that every month over 2 billion messages are exchanged between people and businesses on Facebook? It's becoming a more natural, and maybe even preferred, way of communicating with businesses for many people.

What Blood Centers Can Learn From Hurricane Harvey In Preparation For Hurricane Irma

What Blood Centers Can Learn From Hurricane Harvey In Preparation For Hurricane Irma

In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, Texas and Louisiana have been left to recover from what could be the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history. More than 50 inches of rain and widespread flooding led to catastrophic damage and imminent risk to lives of local patients. The threat to the blood supply in Texas and Louisiana continues to put more lives at risk as we estimate more than 6,000 people were not able to donate because of the storm.

As blood centers on the east coast prepare for the onslaught of Hurricane Irma, we wanted to share some of the key points and learnings from the last few weeks with the storms in Texas/Louisiana region in case they spurred additional thought or help to your processes in preparing for Irma’s arrival:

What if... A message about the safety and security that comes from a backup plan

What if... A message about the safety and security that comes from a backup plan

Hey everyone!  I just wanted to write you a quick note because lately this has been a hot topic.  Blood centers are inquiring about engaging with Incept, in the event of an outage or disaster, to have us “on the ready”.  For the few that have picked up the phone and called us, let’s be honest, they each had a major event (power outage, flood, phone system issue) that left them without the ability to call their donors for several days.  So they called Incept to see if we could help.

What is the best approach for developing a donor communication strategy?

What is the best approach for developing a donor communication strategy?

As with many industries, the way we communicate with our donors needs to change.  We can’t keep doing what we’ve always done and expect better or even different results.

Our approach to developing a solid communication strategy begins with a collaborative meeting between recruitment, marketing, and Incept.  What we are finding is that so much of our communication is done in silos and we need to begin to break down those barriers and integrate our communication.

So, how does a call center even get into the blood banking business?

So, how does a call center even get into the blood banking business?

This is a great question and probably one of my favorite stories.  Before I answer the question though, I think it’s important to understand how Incept, as a company, got started.

In 1993, two brothers who were call center managers for a large non-profit focused call center, set out to start a consulting business that would literally manage telemarketing campaigns on behalf of non-profits, so that the non-profits had experts representing them and could hold call centers to the highest-level integrity and results. 

Case Study: Facebook's Impact On Blood Donor Recruitment

Case Study: Facebook's Impact On Blood Donor Recruitment

Is your blood center struggling to meet goal with your existing donor base? Is your donor base simply not large enough or are you struggling to convince them to take action?

We ran a test for a mid-sized blood center who was struggling with exactly this.  We approached the test using an omni-channel approach, first combining tele-recruitment and Facebook strategies that resulted in an 8.2% increase in successful donations.

4 Tips For Using Video To Recruit Blood Donors

4 Tips For Using Video To Recruit Blood Donors

Internet video will account for 79% of global Internet traffic by 2020. That's less than 3 years away folks. Are you making every effort to integrate this into your marketing strategy now?

This can be tough for blood centers. How are you supposed to know where to start? Video is so expensive - how could you even afford that kind of marketing strategy? Unfortunately, it's more of a question of "when" than "if."

To help you get started, we've put together a list of 4 tips for using video to recruit blood donors: