Driving donation: challenges ahead

Jon Latham has spent 25 years in marketing across a whole range of blue chip organisations in the private sector prior to joining NHSBT in 2009. In his current role as NHSBT assistant director, he manages the marketing and donor services for the blood service, helping to ensure that the organisation recruits some 200,000 new blood donors every year, thereby ensuring that a vital two million donations are available every year to the NHS. “We are a joint England and Wales Special Health Authority dedicated to saving and improving lives through the wide range of services we provide to the NHS,” he explained. “We provide a reliable, efficient supply of blood and associated services to the NHS in England and North Wales, collecting blood from donors, testing, manufacturing and delivering it to hospitals. We are also the organ donor organisation for the UK and are responsible for matching and allocating donated organs.” He acknowledged that NHSBT must be mindful of the serious challenges which it now faces in today’s harsh economic healthcare climate, which have informed the organisation’s Strategic Plan 2013-18, as he explains: “Our strategy for the next five years is ambitious and is focused on us being the best organisation of our type in the world. We want to deliver a modern world class blood service that is responsive and attractive to our donors and achieve better integration and planning of the end-to-end blood supply chain from donor through to patients. “We have worked hard to reduce the price of blood to hospitals over the last few years, so it is important that we increase collection productivity, by regularly reviewing when and where we collect blood. Blood is a precious resource that we should not waste, so we need to work hard to collect blood in the right quantities, at the right time to meet patient needs. “Also in organ donation and transplantation, we want to build on the excellent progress made over the last five years. Last year, there were 1,212 deceased organ donors in the UK, a 50% increase on 2007/8. But despite this, three people are still dying in the UK every day due to a shortage of organs, so we need to transform the public’s attitudes to donation and build on current practices within hospitals.”

Donor engagement

Key to NHSBT succeeding in its ambitious plans is that the organisation continues to attract the necessary new donors it requires each year, which is why it hopes to engage young donors in particular. Jon Latham commented: “We need around 8,000 donors to attend sessions every working day to meet our current targets which equates to around two million donations each year from 1.4 million active donors and we try to keep supply at around 5% over the amount required by hospitals. Red cells shelf life is 35 days from donation while platelets are only seven days so our role as an organisation is to turn around the national blood supply on an almost monthly basis. “Targeting new donors is critical, therefore, as we require around 200,000 new donors every year just to keep the donor base stable. We do not use TV adverts to generate new donors partly due to the expense, but also the boom and bust nature of the medium which results in too many donors coming in when you are on air, but not enough when the ads are not running. For new donors the most successful recruitment recently has been as a result of PR campaigns using well known celebrities or TV programmes combined with the use of social media such as Facebook and online advertising.” The recent 100,000 New Donors in 100 Days campaign utilised all three elements with the cast of Channel 4’s Hollyoaks programme, which has a young audience base fronting the appeal. This was also marketed online and via social media. “During the 100 days of the campaign itself we managed to exceed the target and recruit 119,000 new registered donors which was an amazing result,” Jon Latham continued. “Another example of this targeted marketing was that NHSBT also recently undertook a partnership with Paramount Pictures on World Blood Donor Day to coincide with the release of their big summer blockbuster World War Z – starring Brad Pitt. World War Z was released at the end of June and our objective was to work with one of the main target audiences of the film, the 17-20 year olds, to raise awareness of the importance of blood donation. “We were able to film some of our donors and patients attending the premier and this was used as part of a social media and radio PR campaign based upon the joint theme of saving humanity. These types of partnerships are becoming more popular as they provide low cost opportunities to reach a far wider audience.”