Double the State's Blood Donations
A social-sector funnel case — no price lever, all behaviour.
The Prompt
A state health department collects 4 lakh units of blood annually against an estimated need of 7 lakh. Paid donation is illegal; imports between states are limited. The health secretary asks you to design a programme to close the gap within three years.
Opening exchange
Supply problems without a price lever become funnel problems: eligible population → aware → willing → actually donates → donates again. Two clarifications: how does the 4 lakh split between voluntary camps and "replacement" donation by patients' relatives? And what's the repeat-donation rate among voluntary donors?
55% voluntary camps, 45% replacement. Repeat rate among voluntary donors: 12% donate more than once a year. Eligible population in the state: roughly 2.8 crore.
A 12% repeat rate is the buried treasure — a repeat donor costs almost nothing to re-acquire.
Then notice the arithmetic before structuring: 4 lakh units from ~3.2 lakh unique donors out of 2.8 crore eligible — barely 1.1% participation. We don't need to convert the masses; we need either +1 percentage point of first-timers, or to move the repeat rate from 12% toward 40%. The repeat lever is cheaper — these people already cleared every barrier once.
Structure & Hypothesis
Analysis & Data
Build the three-year bridge from 4 to 7 lakh units.
Three streams. Repeat: 3.2 lakh registered donors, repeat rate 12% → 40% via SMS recall and micro-camps adds ~1.4–1.6 lakh units. Replacement conversion: 1.8 lakh replacement donors a year are already in the building — converting 25% into registry donors adds ~0.5–0.7 lakh. New first-timers: institutional camps in colleges and uniformed services, +0.8–1.0 lakh by year 3. Total: +2.7–3.3 lakh — the 3 lakh gap closes, with repeat as the engine, not posters.
Three quantified streams that sum to the target — a bridge, not a wish list.
What's the binding constraint nobody mentions?
Collection and storage capacity. Doubling donations means doubling camp logistics, cold-chain capacity, and testing throughput — if a donor shows up and waits two hours, you lose the repeat. I'd audit blood-bank processing capacity in parallel and stage the demand generation to match; wastage (expired units) should be tracked as a KPI alongside collection, since mismatch shows up there first.
Recommendation
Recommend to the health secretary
- Build the donor registry + 90-day SMS recall system first — the repeat lever (12% → 40%) is half the gap at a tenth of the cost of mass campaigns.
- Convert replacement donors at the bedside: enrol them into the registry at the moment of donation, with a family blood-assurance benefit as the hook.
- Run institutional camps on an annual calendar (colleges, police, factories) rather than ad-hoc drives — predictability builds the habit.
- Expand processing/cold-chain capacity in step, and track wastage % as a co-equal KPI with collections.
Key Takeaway
What this case teaches
When price is off the table, structure supply as a behavioural funnel and hunt for the cheapest conversion: people who've already done the behaviour once. Retention beats acquisition in social programmes for exactly the reason it does in subscription businesses.