Blood donors' attitudes towards incentives: influence on motivation to donate.

BACKGROUND: Understanding the factors that motivate donors to donate will facilitate improvements in recruitment programmes. Donation incentives are often used to improve the effect of recruitment programmes. This cross-sectional study was designed to understand donors' attitudes toward incentives.
MATERIAL AND METHODS: Participants (n=421) were recruited among volunteer donors at the Shiraz Blood Transfusion Centre when they registered for blood donation. They completed a questionnaire with items regarding demographic characteristics, donation status (first-time donor or regular donor), and their motivation for donating, their attitude towards incentives, and the best type of incentives. Multiple logistic regression and chi-squared tests were used to analyse the data with Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software.
RESULTS: The majority of donors (85.6%) donated blood for altruistic reasons. One quarter of the donors (25.3%) believed that incentives should be offered to encourage them to donate. Most donors (84.5%) believed that the most effective incentive was offering specific blood tests. Donors who had donated for non-altruistic reasons were more interested in receiving incentives. The desire to receive incentives was more widespread among younger, married, first-time donors, donors with a lower educational level and donors with a history of more than five donations. The desire to receive incentives decreased as age increased. DISCUSSION: Most of the donors (74.7%) had no desire to receive incentives, and this was even more apparent among donors who donated for altruistic reasons. Non-monetary incentives may be effective in attracting younger, married, first-time donors, donors with a lower educational level and donors with a history of more than five donations.