Anyone have any good ideas about recruiting platelet donors? We recently started accepting platelet donors and I really want it to take off. Our Donor Center is located in a hospital so the potential is great.

Does anyone have ideas about what works and what doesn't?

My work email is brussell@baymedical.org

or just post answers here.

Thanks!

have a group of people compete for a prize or a lunch for the staff.

Like have the ER team vers the Nurses ... whoever gets the most people to donate wins , free lunch or a TV for the break room , something

This would only work if they have about the same number of people working ...

It doesn't even have to be the same number of people working... just use a percentage. This has worked well in the military for years (batallion vs batallion type competitions).

In studies, for years, when you ask donors WHY they donate, they will always tell you it's because they want to save a life. Link the donations to the patients where possible!! If they remember they are saving lives, they will be more likely to return. When I worked in a hospital-based blood center, we wrote thank you letters to our donors. ("Thank you for your recent platelet donation, it was vital to the care of a 57 year cancer patient/ 68 year old heart surgery/ 4 day old premature infant...") It took a lot of time, and we couldn't do it everytime (we didn't want them to expect it EVERY time in case the unit expired or broke...) Donors BROUGHT THOSE LETTERS BACK when they donated!!

Give your current donors, "extra credits" when they bring in a friend. Have a competition among your current donors as to who can bring in the most new donors.

CaridianBCT has all kinds of donor recruitment material that might help you (posters, flyers...), as well as a DVD/Video loop that can be showed in the canteen to help educate your WB donors. Have your staff wear a big badge ("ask me about donating platelets"). Make it easy for your staff to start talking to your WB donors about donating platelets!

We are located in the hospital also. We give our employees 3 hrs off for each donation. So, if someone donates SDP, they get 3 hrs off. Then they can come back in one week later and get another 3 hrs off for donating whole blood. Plus a SDP donation counts as a "pint" towards their "Multi-gallon" donor status. All multi-gallon donors are invited to a luncheon every year where we raffle off multipe prizes.