Global Blood Fund

Re-homing of displaced equipment retained its status as one of the most important programs. Gbf owns and manages 'eqxchange', a cloud-based platform enabling blood services worldwide to list equipment available for donation. This typically becomes available where items are displaced as a consequence of routine upgrade programs, leaving still-serviceable equipment surplus to local requirements. As well as viewing and responding to offers, the system offers blood services in low-income countries the ability to list and circulate their specific requirements worldwide. Once a match is made between donor and recipient, gbf manages and resources the logistics of re-homing. Donations mostly come from the us and europe. Recipients are typically blood services in africa, latin america, and asia. As previously mentioned, work has commenced on building new functionality into the platform. Examples of 2023/24 activity include the donation of several bloodmobiles, portable donor beds, centrifuges, blood mixers and t-shirts for use as donor recognition items.

In addition to the launch of the mentoring program, discussed above, gbf continues to promote its online training course focused on donor recruitment, retention and management. This remote learning initiative offers six hours/12 modules of free video content. Several hundred enrolees have now completed the program and it continues to attract significant interest and engagement and widespread approbation from the international blood banking community.

Much of gbf's activity relates to its ability to create and galvanize networks in the us, europe, and australasia (national and regional blood services, industry suppliers, regulatory bodies etc.) to assist developing-world blood collection organizations. Working both directly and through pan-national and professional associations, gbf is able to assemble multi-agency collaborations, with objectives and configurations differing by project. Over the period, close relationships were nurtured with asbt (africa society for blood transfusion), isbt (international society for blood transfusion), coba (coalition of blood for africa), aabb (association for the advancement of blood and biotherapies), adrp (association of blood donor professionals), gciamt (grupo cooperativo iberoamericano de medicina transfusional), etc. A formal memorandum of understand was signed with gciamt to reflect gbf's increased focus on the latin america region. Gbf also partnered with a french manufacturer of abo/rh testing technology, diagast, to support a pilot in ghana of pre-donation blood typing as a recruitment strategy.

Gbf's "open arms" program gives blood centers across the u.s. And in other parts of the world an opportunity to offer their blood donors a charitable alternative to the usual recognition items of printed t-shirts, etc. This program creates a virtuous circle of activity such as improving donor choice, motivating collection staff, saving blood centers money, providing a diversity platform to encourage blood donation from minority communities and providing resources for international development work in an area of interest to all parties. However, blood collectors are increasing looking to raise charitable funds to resource their own core-mission, leading to a reduction in the willingness to encourage their donors and other stakeholders to give to third-party organizations, however relevant the cause. In response, gbf has switched its strategy away from, for example, a passive branded presence in point-redemption stores, to instead offer tactical support on a cause-specific basis that will engage blood donors and thereby improve collection, or deliver against some other specific buisness objective. Support for ukraine was a successful example of this approach, though the salience of this cause waned during 2023.