Red Cross reaches out to Nascar for blood donors

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: In a perfect world, donating blood would be purely an altruistic pursuit. In the real world, however, the American Red Cross is finding that a little corporate sponsorship—plus a few freebies—helps to coax people to roll up their sleeves.

The organisation, which has been beating back various public relations problems, embarked this year on its first corporate-style marketing effort. In January, it hired its first brand manager, Elizabeth K Reitman, who had spent seven years in marketing and advertising at Discovery Communications and Time Warner. In April, the Red Cross named a new president and chief executive, Gail J McGovern, who has taught marketing at Harvard and has held senior positions at AT&T and Fidelity Investments.

In late April, the Red Cross announced its first national campaign, supplementing a patchwork of local marketing initiatives. The umbrella effort, called Red Cross Racing, aims to turn the more than 75 million fans of the Nascar racing circuit into regular blood donors.

For now, the outreach is narrowly focused on Nascar fans, but the broad approach represents a small but important foray for the American Red Cross. Last year the organisation was plagued by a leadership scandal, a large deficit and faced millions of dollars in fines by the Food and Drug Administration for mistakes in blood collection and distribution.

As part of a self-examination, the Red Cross began to reassess its blood drives. The collection process has been highly decentralised, with each of 36 regions in the US conducting its own marketing and advertising. That meant that on any day, there were about 500 blood drives across the country.

“What we needed was not to have one look in Southern California and a completely different look in Boston,” said Reitman, the brand manager. “It’s been a definite mind shift to get a consistent look.”

The Red Cross sought advice from a corporate supporter, 3M Worldwide, based in St Paul, Minnesota, which has long conducted blood drives among its workers and donated products and money to the Red Cross. 3M has also been a corporate sponsor of Nascar for four years.

“Nascar reaches one in four Americans,” said Robert D MacDonald, 3M’s senior vice-president for sales and marketing. “Its geographical reach has been growing from where it started in the South, and now it’s pretty much all over.”

The maker of Scotchgard, Post-its and Thinsulate, 3M offered to donate advertising space on one of its racecars, the No 16 Ford Fusion driven by Greg Biffle of Roush Fenway Racing. The Red Cross emblem then appeared on the hood of the 3M car in Talledega, Alabama, in April. The same car will also appear in the race in Phoenix in November, with the Red Cross logo appearing on the car’s side in eight other Nascar races.

The Red Cross has been setting up tents at Nascar events, where fans can register online to donate blood. (No blood is collected on site, in part because many Nascar fans enjoy tippling while they watch a race.) The Red Cross follows up with e-mail messages to each person signing up to donate blood.