Nonprofit blood bank cuts costs and saves days of work with Tremendous

Highlights

• A nonprofit blood bank uses gift card incentives to recruit and retain donors during periods of high demand and critical supply need.

• As a nonprofit organization, the blood bank needed to cut costs and streamline workflows to make its program more affordable and efficient.

• The organization switched to Tremendous for fee-free digital gift cards, a faster workflow, and a charitable donation feature that lets recipients give their reward back to the blood bank.

• Today, Tremendous powers donor incentives, loyalty rewards, and social media giveaways across multiple teams.

The challenge

The blood bank relies on its donor community to keep critical supplies stocked. But at certain times of year, it becomes more challenging to entice donors to show up and help meet the demand for blood products.

To solve this problem, the organization's senior digital marketing manager built the gift card rewards strategy based on an essential insight: incentives need to be timed and tiered to pull donors in exactly when the need is greatest.

The program worked. But the platform distributing their incentives wasn't keeping up.

Fees stacking up on a nonprofit budget

"Our previous provider would charge a fee per card issued," says the senior digital marketing manager. These fees added up quickly and impacted the ROI of the incentive program.

For a nonprofit operating on tight margins, the economics didn't make sense. "Being a nonprofit and just being cost-conscious. While we're successful in our business, it's not groundbreaking money-making," she says.

Time-consuming program admin

Executing a single incentive campaign was a grind. The marketing manager had to manually download every email delivery report and cross-reference appointment data to determine who qualified for a gift card. Start to finish, it took her 10 days to process a single campaign.

The solution

The marketing manager needed a smarter way to run the program without overhauling her carefully planned strategy. When she saw how the Tremendous platform worked, two things stood out immediately: the cost structure and the donate-back feature.

Tremendous is free to use and charges no sending fees for gift cards, which eliminated the previous per-card fees entirely. Plus, the new platform enabled the blood bank to give recipients the option to donate their reward back to the organization. A feature like that had never been available before.

"That is an opportunity to get that money back to then either use it for another gift card promo or repurpose it in another way that supports the mission," she says.

Once the organization officially switched to Tremendous, getting up and running was straightforward. "It was really easy to use and super intuitive," the digital marketing manager says. So intuitive that she's personally onboarded two coworkers to the platform. Now, the blood bank's loyalty program and social media giveaways rely on Tremendous as well.

Tremendous benefits for the blood bank

A cost structure that makes sense for a nonprofit

The previous provider's fee model created ongoing costs with no clear ceiling. Tremendous removed that entirely with no platform or per-card fees.

Total processing time reduced from 10 days to 2

Donor rewards under the old system meant manually pulling and merging multiple reports and working through the logic of who qualified. It took the marketing manager 10 days per campaign to collect and finalize recipient data and distribute incentives.

Today, sending out thousands of donor rewards through Tremendous takes only one hour. And thanks to email service provider (ESP) improvements, the data analysis portion of the process now takes only two days.

"Once all the data is finalized, it takes pretty much an hour to fully execute within the Tremendous platform," she says.

The donate-back feature: an unexpected win

One of the features that clinched the switch was the ability to list the blood bank as a charity option when donors receive their reward. Instead of claiming the gift card for themselves, donors can choose to give it back and further support the organization's work.

This offering worked better than expected, with 7%+ of donors currently selecting the donate-back option. In fact, the blood bank is the third most popular redemption option among its recipients.

"They probably view it as a double give-back," she says. "Not only are they giving back to save lives with their blood, but they're also making a charitable contribution back. It fills that warm-fuzzies bucket."

Recouped reward funds flow back into the gift card program and support the broader mission, which helps keep the program cost-efficient.

Built-in donor support tools

When a donor contacts the blood bank asking about their reward, the digital marketing manager can instantly look them up within the platform. She can easily find a donor's full history and confirm at a glance whether a specific reward was sent and when.

"I can find them and say, oh, they didn't receive their December gift card — the last one they got was in October," she explained. The ability to update information and resend on the spot has made donor care smoother for the organization's staff.

Easy to expand usage across teams

Tremendous' intuitive workflows made it easy for the blood bank to expand usage across multiple teams. After seeing how Tremendous streamlined donor incentives, the marketing manager trained other colleagues on the rewards sending process in just one easy session. Now, three of the blood bank's incentive programs run through a single platform.

"We created two more accounts, one for our loyalty program team and then one for our marketing and communications team that does social media giveaways. And I trained them on the entire platform," she says. "All of it is pretty seamless, easy, and straightforward."

The impact

What started as a bid to reduce program fees led the blood bank to a solution that saves time, returns money to its mission, and scales across teams without adding operational burden.

Campaign execution that once took days now takes an hour. Donor care has gotten easier and more precise. And the donate-back feature — which didn't exist in the previous setup — is now one of the program's most meaningful offerings.

• 21.9K gift cards issued across the donor incentive program over five months

• 5x faster total processing time per campaign, thanks to a combination of Tremendous and ESP system improvements

• 7%+ donate-back rate, with the blood bank ranking third as a donor redemption choice

• $0 in per-card fees compared to previous provider's cost model

• 3 internal teams now using Tremendous across donor incentives, loyalty programs, and social giveaways

Ready to simplify your donor incentive program? Send us a message at sales@tremendous.com, or visit www.tremendous.com to learn more.