Double the State's Blood Donations
The Prompt
A state health department collects 4 lakh units of blood annually against an estimated need of 7 lakh. Paid donation is illegal; imports between states are limited. The health secretary asks you to design a programme to close the gap within three years.
Structure & Hypothesis
Analysis & Data
Build the three-year bridge from 4 to 7 lakh units.
Three streams. Repeat: 3.2 lakh registered donors, repeat rate 12% → 40% via SMS recall and micro-camps adds ~1.4–1.6 lakh units. Replacement conversion: 1.8 lakh replacement donors a year are already in the building — converting 25% into registry donors adds ~0.5–0.7 lakh. New first-timers: institutional camps in colleges and uniformed services, +0.8–1.0 lakh by year 3. Total: +2.7–3.3 lakh — the 3 lakh gap closes, with repeat as the engine, not posters.
Three quantified streams that sum to the target — a bridge, not a wish list.
What's the binding constraint nobody mentions?
Collection and storage capacity. Doubling donations means doubling camp logistics, cold-chain capacity, and testing throughput — if a donor shows up and waits two hours, you lose the repeat. I'd audit blood-bank processing capacity in parallel and stage the demand generation to match; wastage (expired units) should be tracked as a KPI alongside collection, since mismatch shows up there first.
Recommendation
Recommend to the health secretary
- Build the donor registry + 90-day SMS recall system first — the repeat lever (12% → 40%) is half the gap at a tenth of the cost of mass campaigns.
- Convert replacement donors at the bedside: enrol them into the registry at the moment of donation, with a family blood-assurance benefit as the hook.
- Run institutional camps on an annual calendar (colleges, police, factories) rather than ad-hoc drives — predictability builds the habit.
- Expand processing/cold-chain capacity in step, and track wastage % as a co-equal KPI with collections.
Key Takeaway
What this case teaches
When price is off the table, structure supply as a behavioural funnel and hunt for the cheapest conversion: people who've already done the behaviour once. Retention beats acquisition in social programmes for exactly the reason it does in subscription businesses.