Persuasion Campaign: Blood Donation

Persuasion Campaign: Blood Donation

Planning

Donating blood is when a person, has his or her blood drawn to be of use on other people. Many people give blood because they want to help others as there is always need for more blood; however, during winter season, there is a decline of blood donation, not to mention that there has been a notable decline in numbers of blood donations in the past five years in overall, according the Taiwan Blood Service Foundation latest report. For this reason, our goals are to increase blood donations universities in Taipei, targeting university students, ranging from 19 to 25 years of age. University students are young people and tend to be healthier, which greatly increases their odds of being able to donate. Plus, they are more proactive. This means, that if they can see how donating blood could help many others then they would definitely be inclined to do so, especially if they knew how greatly blood was needed and how easy it would be for them to take part in. Essentially we would like our target audience to change their attitude toward donating blood.

One theory that we are going to implement is the Social Proof Theory, the idea that if everyone else is performing some action, you feel the need to perform the same action too. If we provoke people from the same age and doing the studying to believe that the same people are donating blood, we will be increasing similarity, and since Social Proof Theory states that people are more likely to perform an action if similar others are performing the same behavior, our target audience will be more likely to donate blood. Reciprocity can also be used as giving an incentive such as cups, leads to a fixed action sequence, such as the need to re-gift the person who initially gave you the present. This can bond donors with the cause. Then theory of Guilt comes up. If our target audience refuses to donate blood after we give them a free water bottle, we hope that they feel obligated because they violate a moral principle to help out those who are in need, and in this case, those who are in desperate need of blood. In order to make this guilt appeal effective, we will use the two key processes of guilt: empathy and efficacy. We will provide efficacy by setting up a blood drive on campuses, in multiple places, so that students have easy access to the blood drives. Additionally, we will provide facts on the pamphlet about how simple it is to donate blood at these blood drives, and a map featuring all the locations where one can donate blood. This idea of guilt also plays into the idea of Consistency, and the effect it has on compliance. By signing the pledge to come to a scheduled appointment time to donate blood, our audience will feel the pressure to justify initial commitment. This will work because the desire to stay consistent is a central motivator for behavior, and thus the audience will feel the need to comply. If people don’t comply, they will feel a spreading of alternatives, in terms of cognitive dissonance, as they will believe that blood donation is good but they will know that they violated their commitment.

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