American Red Cross: Unlocking $90m+ revenue with blood donation.
Dan Gough
Red Cross had a huge problem
Their web form for blood donation has a ~90% drop-off rate. It's costing them millions in leaking revenue.
We hopped on a plane. Two of us stationed ourselves in a blood donation centre and prototyped in real time with blood donors, using a skeleton iOS app.
Over 10 days, we iterated screen by screen to an almost final design. Every single step of the pre and post blood journey was iterated, edging our completion rate up… and up and up.
From pitch to completion
As the lead designer, I drove the project from pitch, to concept, to completion. Including spearheading a world-first feature: a way to track your blood donation to use.
After launch, the appointment drop-off rate fell from 90% to under 10%. Flipping a metric we started with from "bloody hell, that's bad" to "bloody hell, that's amazing."
Not only that, blood appointments overall went up by 87%.
Best App Winner: Webby Award
Revenue: +$90m
Lives saved: 1.5 million
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Posted Jun 30, 2026
Lead designer. After launch the appointment drop-off rate fell from 90% to under 10%. Blood appointments went up by 87%. So far, it's generated $90m in revenue.
