Team:Greece United/Communication/BloodDonation
Bleeding out Biology!
Voluntary Blood Donation
Greece is one of the few countries that has reached the point of importing blood from other
countries to cover
the needs of its citizens. This problem has many causes, the most obvious being the lack of
awareness and information
around blood donation, and its decoupling from fun and excitement.
Our goal was to contribute in advancing voluntary blood donation, by exploiting our social media
network to
lure more volunteers and by enhancing the blood donation experience with fun biology facts and
dissemination
of project activities and respective memorabilia.
Our idea was to organize a blood donation event, in a central location, where people could more
easily come and
donate. (The hospital is in the outskirts of our town and that is a discouraging factor.) First,
we uploaded an interest form where we asked from our social media followers if they would be
interested
and eligible to participate in a blood donation event in the Autumn of 2021. The answers where
enough and
encouraging so we moved our plan to the next step.
We established collaboration with the Blood Donation Unit of the University Hospital of
Alexandroupoli and
2 different voluntary blood donation teams in Alexandroupoli, the Group of Volunteers in
Alexandroupoli (#iVol)
and the Club of Volunteer Blood Donors, in order to jointly organize two different blood donation
events.
The organization started with us developing on-line appointment forms for volunteers to book a
donation appointment
so as to ensure quality of service and keep crowding at minimum (a very important requirement during
COVID-19 pandemic).
The blood donation events occurred on 06 and 09 of October 2021 in 2 different locations in
Alexandroupoli.
We managed to gather 18 bottles of blood the first day and 35 the second, resulting in 53 bottles
of blood,
a local record!
During the blood donation, our team was there to inform the participants about bone marrow donations
and
how needed they are, but also about the group and the progress of our project. Of course we donated
too! We also
informed the local community executing a series of events, among those a parade about blood
donation, at the downtown
center of Alexandroupolis, Greece.
We handed out specially designed (and printed by us) 3D printed keychains and awarded unofficial fun certificates of participation titled “Certificate of Heroism”. You can see both below.
3D printed key chain.
Voluntary Blood DOnation Certificate.
We proposed the idea to our iGEM partner team KOREA_HS and provided know-how and best practices. As a result, iGEM team KOREA_HS proceeded to organize blood donation events in their city in Korea in the same week with our event. This way we tried to tackle the blood shortage in a worldwide level with simultaneous events. You can see more information about their events in their wiki.