Narratives, emotions, and slogans: Community co-designed campaigns to recruit black blood donors from the general U.K. population.

Abstract

Background: Blood is an essential medicine, and to deliver effective health care, blood services need to attract donors who represent the diverse demographics of health care users. At present, there is a substantial shortfall of Black donors. We report how a novel community-based co-designed arts-based approach to encourage Black donors generalizes to the wider U.K.

Population:

Method: The co-design process involved four stages: (a) needs identification (n = 42 Black people) to identify where, when and with whom Black people discussed blood donation; (b) workshops to co-design arts-based interventions (n = 12: Black people-professional actors/artists and lay people); (c) test and refinement of the narratives (n = 1); and (d) evaluation using an online experiment to provide a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the co-designed narratives relative to a slogan-based campaign in terms of affect (mediator) and two outcomes (willingness to donate and encourage others to donate; n = 826: 345 Black people, 481 White people).

Results: Four script narratives were produced: (a) comedy-challenging misconceptions; (b) reciprocity-donating for mutual benefit; (c) donor-recipient-linking donors and recipients; and (d) sliding doors-reversing a timeline to provide a positive outcome. All four narratives were evaluated positively. For White people, the slogan-based campaign enhanced both outcomes via positive affect. For Black people, the donor-recipient narrative enhanced both outcomes via positive affect.

Conclusion: All communities positively rated the co-designed arts-based approaches and showed specific benefits for encouraging Black donors. Blood services should consider using co-designed arts-based approaches. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).