Segmentation of target audiences for effective blood donation campaigns: Comparison of donors and non-donors

Currently, the United States suffers from a gap between supply and demand for blood. Although someone needs a blood transfusion every two seconds, fewer than five percent of eligible Americans donate annually. The seriousness of this problem urges both campaign practitioners to keep recruiting more donors for blood donation and researchers to examine theoretical foundations that predict the donation behavior. Particularly, in developing campaigns for blood donation, the appropriate grouping of a target audience is also imperative for obtaining successful results, so that campaigners should subdivide their audiences using specific categories. By using J. Grunig's audience segmentation concepts and expanding the predictors in the theory of planned behavior, this study investigated the differences between blood donors and non-donors for effective blood donor segmentation strategies. The study utilized two methods: 1) a national survey dataset to look at the effects of demographic, geographic, and psychographic variables on blood donation behavior; and 2) a college survey to examine the determinants of attitudes and behavioral intention of blood donation. Using binary logistic regressions, the findings of the study revealed that the differences between the donors and non-donors could be determined by age, education, healthy activity, religiosity, knowledge, fear, attitude, and self-efficacy. These findings provide campaigners for blood donation with insight to design effective messages and strategies in some aspects such as traditional audience segmentation strategies based on demographics, psychographics, or geographics; and theory-based campaign strategies for blood donation promotion that can be developed by determinants of attitudinal and behavioral variables.