LifeStream Blood Bank goes digital with gift cards and cuts donor incentive issues by 60%

The highlights

→ LifeStream Blood Bank is a Southern California nonprofit that incentivizes blood donors through a points-based donor store and donor center promotions.

→ Undelivered e-gift cards, incorrect balances, and unresolved support tickets were causing friction with donors.

→ LifeStream switched to Tremendous after a decade with its previous vendor, gaining reliable delivery, responsive support, simpler funding and reporting, and lower costs.

→ Since switching, donor complaints have dropped about 60%, and half of LifeStream's gift card distribution has moved from physical to digital incentives.

The challenge

LifeStream Blood Bank runs multiple donor centers across Southern California. Gift card incentives are a core part of how it recruits and retains volunteer donors. Donors earn points for each donation and redeem them in an online donor store for e-gift cards or Visa gift cards. The team also runs frequent promotions, offering gift cards from popular regional brands or Visa gift cards to donors who come in during high-demand periods.

For close to a decade, LifeStream distributed gift cards through a previous reward vendor. Over the last few years, the team started to experience several service issues that negatively impacted the donor experience.

Gift cards that didn't arrive, or arrived wrong

Delivery failures, incorrect card amounts, and cards that showed a zero balance at checkout became more common. Each one chipped away at the trust LifeStream had built with its donors.

"Our donors expect a very high level of service from their donor center, and they don't see the vendor behind it," says Thresa Lozano, Vice President of Donor Operations. "To them, it's LifeStream that's providing the service. So when a gift card fails, it's our reputation and our relationship with that donor on the line."

Donor issues that couldn't be resolved

The breaking point came when donors brought problems to LifeStream that the team couldn't fix. "We just had too many donor issues we couldn't resolve," Thresa says. "We couldn't get anywhere with our vendor’s customer service, and that's really what led us to seek out a different solution."

Increased incentive admin work

As a result of digital delivery issues, LifeStream leaned more heavily on physical gift cards for its promotions. That meant manually ordering, storing, counting, and distributing cards across more than a dozen collection sites, and running out mid-promotion was a real risk.

"When you bring a donor in with an incentive and they make that critical donation, the last thing you want is to tell them we're out of cards," says Michael Shepherd, LifeStream's Marketing Director. "You never want to disappoint a donor like that."

The solution

When LifeStream started looking for a new gift card platform, reliability was its top priority. The team needed e-gift cards that reached donors fast, support that resolved donor issues promptly, and a vendor it could trust with its donor relationships. 

Before committing to Tremendous, the team tested the platform as end-users. Tremendous funded a test balance, and leaders from its donor operations, marketing, and finance teams placed real orders for both physical Visa gift cards and e-gift cards.

"I set up the platform myself in no time, and I'm not the most tech-savvy person, so that says a lot," says Thresa. "We verified it would work the way we expected before we put a single donor into the system, which gave us peace of mind."

Once the team decided to move forward, setup took about a week. Today, teams across LifeStream rely on Tremendous for incentives. Marketing sends gift cards daily, donor care resolves gift card questions on the spot, and finance manages funding and reporting.

Tremendous benefits for LifeStream Blood Bank

Gift cards that reach donors quickly

The delivery problems that drove LifeStream to switch have largely disappeared. Zero-balance and wrong-amount cases haven't come up since.

When a donor says a gift card never arrived, it's almost always sitting in a spam folder, and LifeStream can now fix that in minutes. A donor care agent looks up the donor in Tremendous, resends the gift card, and asks them to check their inbox. "80 to 90% of the time, that resolves it," says Thresa. She hasn't come across a single e-gift card issue since the switch that the team couldn't resolve.

Physical Visa gift cards for donors who need them

LifeStream serves a broad demographic, and some donors don’t have a smartphone or an email address. Those donors deserve a great experience too, and the previous setup made that hard to deliver. Now the team orders a physical Visa card on the donor’s behalf in Tremendous, and it ships directly to the donor with their name printed on it.

That name matters for more than just convenience. For compliance purposes, it’s important that incentives for volunteer blood donors be nontransferable. A personalized card adds an extra layer of assurance that the gift card stays with the intended donor. The cards are also valid for a full year and widely accepted, which wasn’t always true with LifeStream’s previous solution. Ordering physical cards through the platform also means every one is logged automatically, which protects the team as much as the donor.

“When you’re handling the high volume of gift card incentives that we deal with, you want to protect your team and their integrity through tracking and documentation,” says Thresa. “Tremendous gives us that. Our team never has to physically handle a card, and every incentive is accounted for.”

Support that responds within a day

Escalations are now rare, but when they do happen, they're quick. The team reaches out to Tremendous once or twice a month and gets an answer within 24 business hours, with no follow-up needed. Before the switch, the team was going back and forth with its vendor several times a week to get issues resolved.

"When an issue takes too long, I usually hear about it from my team, and lately, I'm not hearing complaints,” says Michael.

Funding and reporting finance can work with

Month-end used to mean counting physical gift cards on hand, tallying every order in a manual spreadsheet, and handing that file to accounting to allocate expenses across marketing and donor recruitment. Now the finance team pulls the funding report and order report from Tremendous, drops them into Excel, and allocates costs from there, with a record of every incentive sent.

Funding is just as simple. "It’s seamless. You log in, set up your bank account, fund it, and within 15 minutes, the funds are available,” says Kevin Nunn, LifeStream's CFO. And low-balance alerts flag when it's time to add more funds. "It gets our attention right away, so that we're all on the same page."

The impact

What started as a search for a reliable gift card delivery solution turned into a shift in how LifeStream runs its incentive program, from the way finance closes the month to the promotions it offers. But the biggest impact is what donors say.

The donor operations team compared dissatisfaction comments against gift cards sent before and after the switch, and found a drop of about 60% after moving to Tremendous. For the first time, donors are leaving positive comments about their gift card experience.

Now that LifeStream is confident in its incentive delivery, the team is changing how it operates. Half of its gift card distribution is now fully digital, moving away from heavy physical card distribution. Only a handful of monthly promotions still involve physical cards: the rest are e-gift cards or points. The team no longer over-orders inventory or runs out of cards mid-promotion, and it spends far less time chasing undelivered gift cards.

"Tremendous has transformed how we run our promotions," says Michael. "It's smoother for our team, and more importantly, smoother for our donors."

Cost savings are adding up, too. The team estimates it's saved at least $1,000 a month in transaction fees alone, and about $10,000 across the first few months of running promotions through Tremendous.

Thresa notes, "We haven't done a full analysis yet, but we definitely see it in our budget. There's a significant monthly savings there."

• 1 week from decision to launch

• 19,700+ incentives sent through Tremendous since launch

• 50% of gift card distribution moved from physical to digital

• 60% reduction in donor dissatisfaction comments about gift cards

• Support escalations down from several a week to 1-2 a month

Need a more reliable donor incentive solution? Sign up now or schedule a demo to see Tremendous in action.