Engaging blood donors as advocates: Social media preferences and associations with marketing stimuli.

Abstract

Background: Various critical medical procedures would become impossible without blood donations-saving lives in emergencies, surgeries, and chronic conditions like thalassemia. Therefore, it seems crucial to enhance donor recruitment and ensure blood supply. For this, we rate donor motivations and explore associations between donors' engagement with marketing stimuli and willingness to participate in donor recruitment. To help design tailored marketing strategies, this study examines age-specific social media preferences for promoting blood donation.

Study design and methods: To reach these objectives, we conducted a cross-sectional survey with 907 donors at Israeli blood-donation centers. Data on donation motivations, social media preferences, and willingness to recruit others were collected through a structured questionnaire.

Results: The leading motivators for blood donation were solidarity and marketing stimuli. The results also revealed a significant association between donors' engagement with marketing stimuli and willingness to encourage others to donate blood. The channel preferred by donors of all age groups for promoting blood donation content was WhatsApp. The choice of other social media varied significantly by age. While younger donors (18-30) favored Instagram, other donor age groups (31-50; 51+) preferred Facebook. Based on average values, the most popular social media for promoting blood donation content were WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram.

Discussion: Insights from this research can support blood collection agencies in refining marketing strategies for donor recruitment. For maximizing the reach of recruitment efforts, it seems essential to use various social media based on donors' age groups.