Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center's Blood Donor program recently entered into a partnership with the non-profit organization Takes All Types to recruit younger blood donors online. Takes All Types uses social networking sites to connect younger blood donors with blood collections organizations.
Takes All Types aims to disseminate information to young people through web sites that they already use, such as Facebook, the organization's founder and executive director, Ben Bergman, said.
"The organization is the epitome of the old saying, 'Think globally, act locally,'" Bergman said. "We're trying to create a global community, so local blood collection operations can leverage its power and communicate with one another."
Facebook's "Vampire" application, which allows users to virtually bite one another as a sign of playfulness, helped inspire Bergman to create the project, he said.
"We had been thinking about how we could do something useful and meaningful through these social networking sites," he said. "We saw the vampire game and we made the connection to collecting blood in a similar manner."
DHMC signed a one-year contract with Takes All Types in January, and both parties have said that they will consider a more long-term partnership, depending on the initiative's success.
"As I've been learning about the Upper Valley community, more and more folks prefer electronic methods of communication, so this just really seems to be a good plan with a lot of possibilities," said Michelle Dozier, DHMC's blood donor program marketing specialist.
Dartmouth Medical School professor Zbigniew Szczepiorkowski, director of the transfusion medicine service at DHMC, said he hopes the partnership will help make young people more aware of the need for and relative ease of donating blood.
He described the partnership as a "grassroots effort for building a new generation of donors."
"Many of our donors are typically older," he said. "How to reach the younger generation of donors has always been a great challenge."
Blood donors have an average age of 50, according to a DHMC press release.
"Now, more so than ever before, there's a huge need for younger donors to understand the importance of rolling up their sleeves and donating blood," Dozier said. "The best way to reach this generation is through these social networks, since everyone today is so technologically savvy."
Bergman added that there has been a cultural shift among youth toward "greater civil-mindedness" and a greater "sense of collectivism."
"We hope to take advantage of the opportunity to capitalize on this," he said.
Szczepiorkowski said he is optimistic about using the same tools that young people already use on a daily basis to inform them about becoming blood donors.
"You have over 4,000 students at Dartmouth, but right now we don't have really good penetration of undergraduate students as blood donors," he said. "If we could get some more of them to become donors, our blood supply would increase dramatically."
The number one reason why people choose not to donate blood is because they have never been asked, Dozier said.
"The students at Dartmouth now are a lot more giving than those who were there during my time at college, but they can only be giving if they know where and how to do it," she said. "It is our hope that our partnership with Takes All Types will enable information to be provided to potential donors in the most useful manner."
The partnership aims to contact potential donors on a more regular basis, so people view giving blood as part of their routine, Szczepiorkowski said.
"Certain times of the year, especially during vacations or winter snowstorms, you have a decrease in donors, but an increase in demand, due largely to trauma victims," he said. "At times like these, what matters is the blood that's already on the shelves, not the people who donate after the fact."
DHMC is one of five pilot sites for Takes all Types. The others include the University of California, Los Angeles, Stanford University, Coney Island Public Hospital and the Blood Center of New Jersey. Bergman said he looks for partners, like DHMC, that are willing to try new innovative marketing methods.
