Why?
Blood Centers are always in need of ways to attract more donors to help save lives. Your restaurant can offer an incentive and/or host a mobile blood drive to help increase blood donations in your community. This not only helps the community, but will also drive additional traffic to your location from coupon redemptions from donors and increased advertising reach from the partner.
Estimated Time to Execute:
~20 minutes to research and send contact email to blood center. Communication as needed with partner to figure out logistics. Blood drive itself may last ~4 hours.
Execution:
- You will need to contact your local blood center (should be
within 5 miles of your location) and let them know your interest in partnering
with them. Target time is during the month of July.
- Simply Google Blood Center + Your City or go to Google Maps, put in the address of your restaurant, then do “Search Nearby” for Blood Center.
- There are two main ways to partner, but if your blood center
has other ideas, be creative!
- Offering an incentive for a blood drive
- This can be an incentive for a day, week or the entire
month! Depending on the amount of coupons distributed to their donors, the more
advertising we should get.
- Example: If providing 1000 $5 gift cards for a week of
incentives ($5000 value), we should ask for promotion such as Facebook
mentions, an email blast and text message blast to donors.
- Incentives can range per restaurant, but should be somewhere in the $5-$10 value range. Gift cards, bonus cards or a free item like an appetizer are good options.
- If you have a sister restaurant nearby, you can do two coupons and work together for the same organization.
- Example: If providing 1000 $5 gift cards for a week of
incentives ($5000 value), we should ask for promotion such as Facebook
mentions, an email blast and text message blast to donors.
- This can be an incentive for a day, week or the entire
month! Depending on the amount of coupons distributed to their donors, the more
advertising we should get.
- Hosting a mobile blood drive
- Offering an incentive for a blood drive
- This option may work well for those restaurants with a parking lot. A mobile drive will be scheduled for a specified date and time at your location with a bus in your lot.
- You can also offer an incentive for donors to use immediately at your restaurant (ie. Free slice of pizza after you donate!) or for a future time.
Things to remember:
- Before
committing to any partnership, you must discuss terms with Kathryn. Depending
on what the partner is looking for, we may need to do some analysis on impact
to financials.
- Keep it local. The closer the location, the more likely you’ll have exposure to potential new guests.
- If it’s a larger donation, don’t be afraid to ask what they will do to advertise the partnership. We will advertise on our end, but it should also be promoted to their donor base in a variety of ways.
- Be generous! The more attractive the offer, the better it will work for both of you.
Example Email:
Hello,
My name is Kathryn Broderick and I’m the Marketing Manager for Monterey Grill in Port Orange. We are looking for ways to further connect in our community and know that July can be a tough month for blood donations. We wanted to see if we could partner with you to offer an incentive to your donors during a specified time in July.
We are flexible on the details, but are initially thinking providing you with 500 coupons for a free appetizer to our location for your donors to come enjoy. Depending on your needs, we could also host a mobile blood drive at our restaurant.
I’d love to discuss further and see how we can work with you and become a partner of OneBlood. Please contact me at 773-750-2887 or Kathryn.broderick@cleanplaterestaurants.com .
I look forward to hearing from you!
-Kathryn Broderick