Even vampires need a little help reaching out. Actually, self-proclaimed vampire, Avery Krouse, is the telerecruitment team leader for Blood Assurance, a regional blood bank in the South. He’s responsible for contacting thousands upon thousands of potential blood donors in an effort to supply more than 60 health care facilities with this precious crimson commodity.
Krouse needed a communications solution he could sink his teeth into...well, he was in search for something better than what Blood Assurance currently had on board. “We were using another vendor and we were not exactly happy with the ease of use of their service, the cost was also a factor,” says Krouse. “We found CallFire much more affordable.”
Initially, Blood Assurance began using CallFire’s Cloud Call Center on recommendation. “I did some Googling and contacted some of my colleagues in donor communications in our national industry group and [they] recommended CallFire,” says Krouse. “I got with my Vice President of marketing and recruitment, Charlie Callari, and he and I looked at the CallFire product and bought a small pack.”
It wasn’t long before Blood Assurance started implementing CallFire’s Voice Broadcast and SMS text messaging solution to reach out to potential blood donor leads. “The response [was] tremendous and we’re paying significantly less than we did before for the same services,” says Krouse. “It seems like pretty much every other day we upgrade our plan to the next one up because we just want to send more.The phones were ringing off the hook, it was fantastic.”
And, quantity is the name of the game when soliciting for blood donations. According to the American Red Cross an estimated 38% of the U.S. population is eligible to donate, but less than 10% actually do each year. What this means is blood banks like Blood Assurance have to put out a lot of feelers in order to receive a fraction of responses.
“Out of 4,400 calls, we ended up with 12 positive responses, which turned into donors that presented themselves for donation,” says Krouse. “For contacting donors who don’t necessarily know us, and people we don’t necessarily know that they donate, that’s what we consider to be a good response.”
Krouse tells CallFire that a vendor provides upwards of approximately 12,000 potential leads at a time for Blood Assurance. “To call it would be much more than [anyone] could do in a reasonable amount of time.” So, Blood Assurance needed a solution that could handle the bulk of calls efficiently. This is where CallFire outshines other communication means.
“It might take less than 100 touches to get an appointment using text messaging through CallFire, whereas, compared to an internal emailing system, it might take 300 touches to get an appointment.”
And, the demand on Blood Assurance continues to grow as the need for blood increases. Currently, there are offices serving Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia, including several mobile donor buses. Krouse said that they have also just recently expanded in the tri-cities, Tennessee area.
“Specifically, we’ve opened the new office in Johnson City, Tennessee. We are servicing the hospitals in that area now, so we are also drawing blood for those hospitals and so to do so, we needed to build a donor base practically from scratch.”
To fill blood banks is a daunting task, indeed. Thousands of phone calls need to be placed on a weekly basis, which turn into a mere drop in the bucket in terms of actual donations. So, with no time to waste, Avery Krouse and Blood Assurance needed a solution that was not just affordable and efficient, but easy to use.
“I found it very easy to use and anything I had questions with, there are the tutorials that are on your [site] that are super easy to use,” says Krouse.
“I’ll definitely recommend this product to other blood centers.”