Mission：

In Taiwan, 7.5% of the population donate blood. That’s the highest rate in the world.

But shortages in specific blood types still occur often.

If a disaster strikes, that can usually mean the difference between life and death.

This means although people are willing to donate blood, yet donors do not donate at the right area and time or the donated blood are not types that urgently needed.

Blood shortages are also unpredictable and immediate.

There’s no easy way for people to find out about blood shortages.

How can we immediately alert and mobilise people to donate in daily lives and call for people with specific blood types to donate at the most needed time and area in order to shorten the blood shortages time of certain types?

Insight & Idea：

Taiwan’s smartphone penetration rate is ranked top 2 in the world.

People often use navigational apps in their daily lives.

We discovered that the ‘location icon’ we all use daily to search locations looks just like a blood drop when flipped upside down.

And with that… the ‘Blood Beacon’ was born.

We understand that people are reluctant to download extra apps.

We incorporated the ‘Blood Beacon’ into a popular navigational app.

When users look for locations on mobile devices,

the ‘location icon’ connects them with real-time blood inventory data.

If there’s a shortage in a specific blood type, the ‘location icon’ flips upside down,

alerts the user to the blood type in demand,

and navigates them to the nearest blood donation center.

If there’s no shortage, the ‘location icon’ stays the same.

Execution：

We first cooperated with the ‘Parking Lot App’, an application with over 2 million users.

When 2 million users look for parking spaces, they could receive detailed information including blood type in shortage and blood donation location by using mobile phone, motivating more people with matching blood type to donate their blood.

From December 26th, 2018, this idea has since been permanently built into the ‘Parking Lot App’ allowing a long-term and close cooperation.

This idea is a certain and sustainable way in allowing blood donation center to spread blood shortage messages in daily lives without any media buy.

This is just the beginning.

We will be cooperating with 4 additional food and car service related navigational application in December of 2019, making this idea even more widely used.

Results：

◆ Since the Blood Beacon went live, we reduced the average blood shortage time from 35 hours to just 7. Blood donations have become faster and more efficient.

◆ In Taiwan, within a short two-month time (January and February of 2019), the number of first-time donors has exceeded 11,900 because of the alert via the app.

◆ 22 Taiwanese news agencies picked up the idea.

The upside down location icon, the starting point for the helping—— Yahoo News

Making blood donation more effective —— Malaysian News

Every parking spot is a starting point to assist these people —— ET today News

◆ In Taiwan, resources of Blood Center are fairly absent, there is no enough media budget to promote their messages. Even more so, blood shortage comes up very sudden and unable to predict.

Therefore, without the use of broadcasting through media, we propose an idea that people could come across in daily lives, using faster and more effective method, without any media budget.

Leveraging statistics from the Blood Center to broadcast blood shortage alerts sustainably, recruiting the exact blood type that is in need, fundamentally resolving the blood shortage crisis in Taiwan.