New Donable App Addresses Blood Donation Crisis

By Lara Farrar - February 5, 2024, 12:00am

Early in January, the American Red Cross released an urgent call for help: Blood donations in the U.S., the organization said, are at their lowest in 20 years. “One of the most distressing situations for a doctor is to have a hospital full of patients and an empty refrigerator without any blood products,” Dr. Pampee Young, the Red Cross’ chief medical officer, said.

For several years now, blood donation centers across the country have been struggling with severe supply shortages.

While 60% of the American population is eligible to donate blood, only about 10% donate.

But one blood donation nonprofit has developed a new tool to try to recruit donors using a mobile phone application called Donable.

Created by Our Blood Institute, the Donable app combines the gig economy with social networking and a dash of altruism to recruit more people to donate the red stuff. (Our Blood Institute, formerly known as the Oklahoma Blood Institute, is a local nonprofit blood collection organization that serves Arkansas, including Little Rock, North Little Rock, Hot Springs, Fort Smith, and Russellville. The organization also runs dozens of bloodmobiles in the area and has additional locations in Texas.)

Donable works by recruiting what its creators call “agents” who are required to do some basic training, which we’ll call “Blood Donation 101.

Once that is done, the recruiting begins. For each successful donation (the donors have to actually show up, not just say they will), the recruiters earn money. More money is earned for new donors ($50) or for donors with certain blood types, like O positive, which is the most common blood type among the general population.

According to Justin Redwine, the chief technology officer of Our Blood Institute, a large portion of a blood bank’s budget is spent on hiring people to recruit donors. Donable aims to alleviate that expense, Redwine told me.

“Donable allows [a donation center] to do donor recruitment for less money than in the past with the added benefit of getting new donors in the door,” Redwine said.

It’s also trying to tap into the new ways digitally native Gen Zers are giving back.

“Quick and tangible impacts are focal points for Gen Z donors and advocates, making the generation more likely to support decentralized, grassroots movements that can immediately respond to a cause on the ground, rather than larger established nonprofits,” reports Philanthropy News Digest.

Since Donable was publicly launched only at the end of 2023, there isn’t a ton of data to support proof of concept, yet. A student at Oklahoma State University earned $600 for recruiting donors to local blood drive events.

There was a noticeable uptick in donations in January, Redwine said.

The hope is that other blood banks across the U.S. will be able to adopt the technology. (I had no idea that one blood donation can save up to three lives, and that every two seconds, someone in the U.S. needs blood.)

“We want this to be the solution to the blood shortage,” Allie Van Dyke, Donable’s marketing director, said.

“It is a big, lofty goal, but something has got to give here. Blood centers can’t just sit around. There has to be someone to solve this. Our hope is this app is the solution.”