Donor Careers
What motivates and hinders people to donate blood? And how can these donors be more effectively recruited and retained? We outline how economists, psychologists and sociologists studied a wide range of individual donor characteristics and donation motivations. While we show that the likelihood to be involved in blood donation varies within persons and among different socio-demographic categories, these studies lack theoretical and empirical knowledge on whether and how blood donor behaviour is susceptible to change over the life course. By adopting a life course perspective on blood donation, this project aims to answer the following research question: Which individual, social and contextual factors are associated with blood donor behaviour, and what influence do these factors have across the blood donor career?
Childbirth, losing a job and starting a job increased the likelihood of donor lapse, while health-related events (i.e., blood transfusion in a family member, death of a family member) decreased the likelihood of donor lapse. At the individual level, practical concerns play a role in the donation decision. Decreased available time after childbirth and starting a job, as well as lower self-perceived health in combination with losing a job are reasons for donors to lapse. Moreover, at the social level, having fewer other blood donors in the social network partly explains why donors are more likely to lapse after they lost their job. Given donor’s behavioural change after experiencing a life event, we advise blood collection agencies to design promotional materials addressing relevant barriers to donate blood and motivate donors to keep donating blood at decisive moments during their donor career.
Further, we concluded that blood donors are clearly sensitive to price changes imposed by the blood bank. Donors whose nearest blood donation centre closed were 53% more likely to lapse than donors whose nearest donation centre remained open. Moreover, changing the opening days of donation centres also influenced the donor’s donation decision: the percentage of donor lapse increased as the number of opening days decreased. Also, while O-negative donors in general are more likely to continue donating blood compared to blood donors with other blood groups, they are not willing to make an additional sacrifice as the price of donating blood increases. In conclusion, blood collection agencies need to be careful in changing donation centre locations and openings day, and timely communication about upcoming changes is important in donor retention.
While most donors were recruited via other blood donors (i.e., the donor-recruits-donor strategy) or registered with the blood bank on their own initiative, we could assess proportional differences in how people from different sex, age and ethnicity were recruited as donors. For instance, the donor-recruits-donor strategy was especially reported by donors aged 35 or younger. Among older donors, the blood bank promotion team was the most commonly reported recruitment method. Moreover, our results show that recruitment methods are associated with the length of the blood donor career. While 70% of the donors recruited by other donors were still actively donating blood after five years, this ranged from a high 80% for recruitment via organizations and online media to a low 50% for missing minority campaigns and telephone recruitment. Given the wide variety of motivations for registration as a blood donor (e.g., altruistic feelings, warm-glow, moral responsibilities, or conforming to the family tradition), subsequent blood donor careers are highly person-specific, and some donors could use more support in becoming loyal donors over time.
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