Catherine Roman

Memorial Blood Center Case Study - April 2010

For this assignment, I was asked to choose a local company to serve as the focus of a case study. Over the course of the semester we were to investigate the needs of the company, their market situation, and their past and present communications efforts in order to suggest new strategies to help the organization meet their goals. I chose to make the Memorial Blood Center the focus of my investigation.

I ultimately found that the organization was running an extremely effective public relations campaign focusing on community engagement through blood drives, a mobile donation center, partnership with local celebrities and sports teams, press releases and annual reports, and an annual Whats Your Type event. All of these efforts helped make Minnesota have one of the highest awareness rates of blood donation in the country.

At the time of this report, one of the most important suggestions I had to the Memorial Blood Centers was that they focus on appealing to the young adult market. They had great engagement with high schools and working adults, but very little with the University of Minnesota, a huge untapped resource for a nonprofit operating in the Minneapolis metro area.

For the full report click on the link below.