With declining donor bases, many blood centers are increasingly realizing the importance of maintaining relationships with their donors.

74% of marketers agree that social media has grown to be an indispensable part of their business when it comes to generating leads. In terms of a blood center, social media is a way that you can educate, appreciate, and recruit your donors in a cost-effective manner.

If you look back to my last blog post on the subject there are important points on what I think could help a blood center looking to get more established in social media or even to help tighten up their content concepts. I’ve surfed around the Facebook Pages of many blood centers and, for the sake of this article, we will focus on these pages and content strategies since Facebook is easily the biggest social media site out of the bunch.

Today we are going to recognize blood centers that think outside of the box and are correctly utilizing social media to their advantage.

Creating Visible Calls to Action with Your Facebook Posts

• Keep your donors informed of current promotions with your blood center. It would be great if everyone just wanted to donate to donate, but sometimes a little incentive can be the final nudge for a donor to give blood. The Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center did an excellent job in putting their current promo of Subway cards for donors in the month of June right at the top of the page in the navigation boxes. It is clearly labeled and explains the grounds for the promotion of the month. The best thing is that they have utilized their navigation boxes by creating app pages to host this information.

• Make the donor feel appreciated and that what they are doing is right. It is always refreshing to see when a blood center takes a real “grassroots” approach to be more personable online. Blood Centers of the Pacific does just that. They interact with their donors and respond to inquires and comments left on their page with lightning-quick reflexes. What I noticed most about their page is that they put a real emphasis on the action of donating blood. Some of the content they have created is very simple, but the message “Find the Hero in You” from their cover photo really sets the tone for what they are about. They also have taken the time to recognize their donors through photos, which is smart. Photos are one of the easiest ways to reap engagement with little effort.

• Give your donors an easy way to sign up. There are other blood centers that do this step on their Facebook Pages, but I wanted to recognize the American Red Cross Blood Services for clearly using their navigation boxes at the top of their pages to host an app that links a donor to sign up online, right from their Facebook Page. It really doesn’t get any easier than that. Check out their scheduling app for yourself. Keep in mind, creating apps on Facebook is easy. There is pre-made code out there that can make it easy for anyone with basic IT or Facebook knowledge to set up.

This article really isn’t about creating content itself but rather using common sense to utilize your blood center’s page in a more efficient manner. For tips on actually creating content, you can check out my previous blog post on the subject (linked above).

Let’s talk about the ways these blood centers have used their pages as extensions of their organization. What did you notice or like about these examples? What could be better?

Image Credit: http://ppbh.com/