Red Cross turns to Nascar in unique marketing campaign
By Elizabeth OlsonTHE NEW YORK TIMES
Sunday, June 15, 2008
In a perfect world, donating blood would be purely an altruistic pursuit. In the real world, 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 organization embarked this year on its first corporate-style marketing effort. In January, it hired its first brand manager, Elizabeth Reitman, who had spent seven years in marketing and advertising at Discovery Communications Inc. and Time Warner Cable Inc. In April, the Red Cross named a new president and chief executive, Gail McGovern, who has taught marketing at Harvard Business School and held senior positions at AT&T and Fidelity Investments.
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 focused on NASCAR fans, but the broad approach represents a small but important foray for the Red Cross. Last year, the organization was plagued by a leadership scandal, a large deficit and faced millions of dollars in fines from 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 decentralized, with each of 36 regions in the United States 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. "It's been a definite mind-shift to get a consistent look."
The Red Cross also sought advice from a corporate supporter, 3M Worldwide, 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 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."
3M offered to donate advertising space on one of its race cars, 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, Ala., 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 this season.
The Red Cross has been setting up tents at NASCAR events, where fans can pick up literature and register online to donate blood. The Red Cross follows up with e-mail messages to each person signing up to donate blood.
At Talledega, Thomas said, the Red Cross fell a little short of its goal to register 4,000 fans. More fans have registered on www.redcrossracing.com, but the Red Cross said it had no overall figure.
"What we're trying to do is take this marketing technique, so instead of 50 donors who give one time a year, we have 75 donors who give two times a year," Thomas said.
The cost to 3M? The advertising space on the hood of the No. 16 race car, MacDonald said, is worth about $500,000 each race, based on the average of $20 million it costs to sponsor a full NASCAR season.
But "more important than the money," he said, "is a marketing program that is working for the Red Cross and one that they can build on."
Local Red Cross divisions are still engaged in efforts of their own. After all, the Red Cross is responsible for 43 percent of the country's blood supply, so it needs to rely on more than NASCAR fans.
In May, the Red Cross in Massachusetts worked with the Uno Restaurant Holdings Corp., the company that runs the Uno Chicago Grill franchise, on a campaign called "Give a pint, get a pizza." The idea was to collect blood for the summer months when supplies are low because people are on vacation.
Uno sent out 100,000 postcards about the blood drive and wound up giving away 20,000 vouchers to donors for a free pizza, said Richard Hendrie, Uno's senior vice president for marketing.
"We've had a great response so far," he said. "It's enough that we're thinking about doing it again later this year."
Independent blood centers have also figured out that giveaways are a good supplement for donors' altruistic impulses. The New York Blood Center, which serves 200 hospitals in New York and New Jersey, is aiming at younger donors with offers of VIP passes to concerts and a $500 college donation for each student who organizes a blood drive that brings in 50 pints.
"We're working to develop a new generation of givers," said Robert L. Jones, president and chief executive for the center.
Right now, the center is exploring the idea of giving each donor a free cholesterol screening or cardiovascular profile. As Jones put it, "This would benefit the donor a lot more than a mug or a T-shirt."
