Guest blog by Tim Vigeon, Roger Morris and Peter Harte, The Blood Bank

What is The Blood Bank?

The Blood Bank was created to serve as a platform to educate and encourage those who can to donate blood.

We are using the concept that, as a sector, we are used to savings, deposits, and lending. The Blood Bank is taking those concepts and turning them into a nationwide effort to get more people informed about blood donation and ultimately increase the giving thereof. By lending our time and making a different type of deposit, the financial services market will save lives.

What do we do?

We share our stories about why we give blood, but also those of beneficiaries of those donations.  We encourage those who haven’t donated before to consider doing so; ask lapsed donors to start donating again; and generally raise awareness of its importance, given that the NHS needs 400 new donors every day to meet demand and 135,000 new donors a year to replace those who can no longer donate blood.

LinkedIn has been our main medium for promoting The Blood Bank up to now, but more recently an event was held in London with over 200 people in attendance. Amid the music and drinks, what most people had in common theme was that they were blood donors or interested in donating blood. There are further events planned in 2022.

Where opportunities arise, we are also using industry events to promote The Blood Bank.

Successes?

It has been hard to measure the exact number of new or lapsed donors who have donated blood since the launch of The Blood Bank (we are engaged with the NHS Blood and Transplant team to keep track of this where possible but it’s not a perfect mechanism), however it is very apparent that word has spread and more people in the finance community are donating and sharing their experiences publicly.

It is humbling to read the number of comments in which people have said that we have inspired them to give blood, as well as those from people who have been the lucky recipients of these donations.

Next steps?

We see this as a long-term journey, and we are only at the beginning of it.

Ideally, we would like to promote The Blood Bank at financial services events (virtual and physical) with representation, stands etc, and continue to grow our relationships with trade publications and the wider media.

We’d like to work closer with the NHSBT (NHS Blood and Transplant) to see if we can establish more accurate data and support more closely where we can.

Who are we?

The Blood Bank came about as a result of a LinkedIn post in November 2020, following which regular donors Tim Vigeon (Head of Lending at Buckinghamshire Building Society), Roger Morris (Group Distribution Director at OSB Group) and Peter Harte (Sales Development Manager at Dashly) came up with the idea that, as a mortgage industry we are used to working together for a common cause—and what better one is there than to do something amazing and save people’s lives?

Various trade publishers (Barcadia Media, Mortgage Solutions, Medianett and Definite Article Media) as well as industry bodies (IMLA, AMI and BSA) have helped to get The Blood Bank off the ground.

To find out more, visit www.blood-bank.co.uk

The views, opinions and positions expressed within guest blogs are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of the BSA.