Record blood donations for The American Red Cross

Over a decade ago (time flies when you are building tech for good!), the American Red Cross came to us with a problem. They wanted a digital solution to combat the barriers that potential and existing donors were facing. The process of donors having to call to make an appointment for donation became a sticking point in the process and the web platform just wasn’t performing as they would have liked. 

One litre of blood can save up to three lives so it was vital that the solution was as seamless as possible.

So we built a revolutionary solution that transformed the donation process, and has had over a million downloads, helped to save thousands of lives and also won several international awards including a Webby for Best Health App. Donors can track their blood and see the hospital that it ends up at and when it has arrived. Being able to obtain this level of detail has been essential in encouraging donors to keep donating as they get to appreciate the lives they help save – providing a reminder that ordinary people do extraordinary things when they give blood.

You can read more about that project here

It has been such an amazing journey building that life-saving app and expanding upon it with continuous improvement over the years and that ability to constantly iterate over the years has gotten us to this point.

Due to the impact of the Covid-19, nearly 4,500 blood drives were cancelled, as businesses and college campuses were closed, which resulted in over 150,000 fewer blood donations. The need for blood is constant across the US and this meant that The American Red Cross was facing severe blood shortages. Because of the shortage they were facing, the American Red Cross started to actively campaign across their channels to encourage more donations. 

This meant that our team needed to ensure that the blood donations app could withhold an extreme increase in donations. With over 300k blood appointments booked in January (the most ever booked through the app), it is clear that the campaign massively increased the amount of booked appointments, which is an amazing achievement at this time and because of all of our CI cycles, the app was robust enough to handle the traffic and a record breaking amount of donors could make their appointments easily.