Additional Tips and Great Ideas

ADDITIONAL TIPS AND GREAT IDEAS

Premium Giveaways - We always have a Donate Life Day at our WPFL locations. When a person registers on the state donor registry, they are offered a premium appreciation gift. (travel mug or water bottle)

Linking Hospital Development with WPFL - Our hospital development team and community affairs team work together to put on "Donate Life Days" at our hospitals, making our hospitals WPFLs. These events are usually casual meet-and-greets where staff are invited to come by and visit during their lunch breaks. We have exhibits with hospital development information, community affairs information, tissue donation information, donor registry laptops, and even bone marrow/blood donation information. A video plays in a separate area so that people can choose to watch a 10-minute video while eating their free lunch. Recipients and donor family members are on hand to chat with staff regarding their experience. And lastly, we have a raffle to entice staff to come and also as a way to collect information about participants using the raffle tickets. We usually see a big spike in referral rates after these events. We also register quite a few staff members on the state donor registry.

David Heneghan Public Affairs Manager, California Transplant Donor Network 1611 Telegraph Avenue Suite 600 Oakland, CA 94612 510-251-7005 FAX: 510-251-7055

Gift of Life Michigan has a Workplace Partnership for Life section of our own website: www.giftoflifemichigan.org/workplace-partners/workplace-partners.htm, which we're starting to use more effectively lately. Here’s something super cheap and easy OPOs can do to engage their Workplace Partners more. We just changed our "Featured Partner" to one of our large hospitals (much donor potential) that has done some great promotion of the Michigan Organ Donor Registry recently, as well as some other great pro- donation activities within the hospital. We showed the hospital PR folks what we had done to highlight their good deeds, and it has generated more good deeds. They're going to be including a blurb about the hospital being our "Featured Partner" in a couple of internal publications this summer. We hope this drives a lot more traffic to our website, resulting in more Donor Registrants and greater support of the Workplace Partnership for Life.

Michigan has resurrected our WPFL Advisory Council (a joint venture between Gift of Life Michigan and the Michigan Eye-Bank), and we've met a couple times this year to create a plan of action on re-engaging our current Workplace Partners. This might be a good idea for others to do, too. We've got several activities/ideas coming out of all this:  We split up the list of 175 current Michigan Workplace Partners, and will be calling them to find out if the contact person listed is still our contact person, what they've done to promote donation, and what opportunities lie ahead for further promotion of donation.  To help with this, we created some talking points for our volunteers and staff people to use when talking to these contacts.  We also created a little flyer on cardstock (see Michigan WPFL Promo Flyer) which can be mailed to the contact person to follow up on the conversation. We wanted to offer the WP some options for involvement, but if they're already somewhat involved we wanted to offer them opportunities to increase their level of involvement. So we came up with a "Three Phase" approach, and will be offering each WP a chance to select which activities they want to do, recognizing them for achieving a new “Phase.” We printed up some of our ideas for action on the card, and have an expanded ideas list on our website (www.giftoflifemichigan.org/workplace-partners/Life-members.htm).

Jennifer Tislerics Special Events & Partnerships Coordinator Gift of Life Michigan 800-482-4881, ext. 227 [email protected]