Refer a Friend

Overall, the number of people donating with Vitalant has dropped about 20% in the last three years, while patients’ needs remain strong. Without new donors, it’s increasingly more difficult to supply the blood hospital patients need. Many people say they never donated blood because they’ve never been asked. Your help is needed to make that personal ask — of friends, family members, coworkers, fellow church members, etc. — to donate blood. It’s a simple way to help even more patients and make sure blood is available when people need it. When someone you referred makes a blood donation and uses your referral code, a record of that donation will appear on your personal dashboard in your secure online donor account, so you can keep track of the good you are doing.

Sharing the importance of donating blood with your friends and family helps ensure that blood is on hospital shelves in your community when it’s needed. That’s an awesome benefit for everyone.

All Vitalant blood donors can participate in our donor recognition program, and take advantage of thank-you gift cards and other items offered during critical times or for making automated donations (Power Red, platelet or plasma donations). You’ll also feel amazing knowing you’ve helped save multiple lives!

You should see the appointment count on your dashboard update within minutes of a friend using a referral code to book an appointment. The donation count will update the day after a successful donation. Keep in mind that only successful (completed) donations will appear on your dashboard.

As long as the donation is on the same date as the appointment your friend made using the referral source code, the donation will appear on your referral dashboard.

At this time, we are unable to share information regarding who made an appointment using your referral code. But the good news is that future phases of the program are expected to include this information in your referral dashboard.

Please call our Customer Care team at 877-258-4825 prior to your appointment to confirm the referral code has been added to the appointment information. If you are already on-site for your appointment, please ask our staff to confirm in our system that the referral code is attached to your appointment. Referral codes cannot be added or changed after your appointment time.

Please call our Customer Care team at 877-258-4825 and they can update the referral code for you. IMPORTANT NOTE: Referral codes can only be added or changed prior to your appointment. Once your appointment time has passed, we will no longer be able to update or add the code.

A friend may have booked an appointment but was unable to successfully donate; they may have missed or rescheduled their appointment; or they may have simply forgotten to enter the referral code when booking the appointment.

Referral codes are automatically created for anyone who has a donor portal account. 

At this time, we are unable to assign custom codes. We’ve designed the referral codes we provide to be easy to remember.

Absolutely! We encourage donors to share their referral codes with as many people as possible to raise awareness of the need for new donors and repeat donors. Sometimes, it takes a village, so thank you for helping us spread the word!

Donor privacy regulations do not allow us to share information on who made an appointment but could not donate. Sometimes donors — through no fault of their own — are deferred from donating due to medical reasons or other FDA safety requirements.

This is mostly a personal preference. As a convenience, we offer the ability to send a message directly from your Vitalant donor account. This feature will open an email in your own email provider (e.g., Outlook, Yahoo, etc.). The email will be prepopulated with a basic message and a direct link to the donor portal that includes your unique referral code. This link also can be made into a QR code or copied and pasted into text messages or social media. If you prefer, you can copy your code and send a message separately via email, text, a social media post or any other way you would like to spread the word about the need for new blood donors.

We kindly ask that your friend book an appointment on vitalant.org. They’ll need to add the referral code to the appropriate field when they book their appointment. If they forgot to add the code when booking the appointment, they should call our Customer Care team at 877-258-4825 to add it. Referral codes must be added to the appointment prior to donation. Unfortunately, we cannot add a referral code to an appointment at the donation site or after the person has donated.

Donation or blood drive staff will not be able to look up or add referral codes. The best way to ensure your friend’s referral code is used is to include it in the referral code field when booking an appointment online. If you book an appointment over the phone with our Customer Care team, tell Customer Care the referral code at that time.

At this time, the referral code dashboard is only available on the website. However, we are planning to add referral codes to the app in the future. Thank you very much for your patience!

At this time, blood drive coordinators are not able to add referral codes to the appointment system. If you would like to use a referral code, please go to vitalant.org and book your appointment for the company blood drive directly. You can enter the referral code at that time.