News and Updates from July 2015

Rakta Kranti

Dengue continued to be the biggest challenge to deal with for all teams at Sankalp. For Rakta Kranti, it was to maintain a steady supply of blood in the city. The plan was to have atleast 15-20 blood donation drives in this period. However, in total 13 blood donation drives were organized by the team leading to a collection of 1078 units of blood. The month began with a host of small blood donation drives - HDFC Ergo, a new partner organized a drive leading to a collection of 34 units, Bethel Marthoma Church organized a drive where 9 donors donated blood, an apartment complex in Whitefield (Mahaveer Palace) had a drive with 30 blood donor heroes coming in to donate. Good time and energy was spent on motivating and educating donors. The small drives helped maintain the stocks for 1/2 days at a time. Among the regular organizations who support the cause of blood we had Xentrix Studios organise another series of blood donation drives at their offices. Enthusiastic donors came in good numbers at their Bagmane campus and patiently waited for their turn to donate as the venue was a little small. 48 units were collected. At their other location, the timing was not too right and hence only 16 people could donate. At the blood donation drive in Continental 221 units of blood were collected. With a new facility having more than 1000 people, the team put in tremendous efforts to publicize the event and close to 300 people walked in. The team are enthusiastic and hopeful to improve the numbers further in the next drive! This is clearly an example how a team red within the organization can make a big difference. We also had our next series of blood donation drives at ITPB campus. With publicity using mails, SMS and brochure distribution on site 226 units were collected in a 2 day drive. As always, the support from Ascendas and Applied Materials was instrumental in having a smooth event. National Instruments as usual bailed us out of trouble with a blood donation drive on very short notice. This time the team planned for a blood donation drive involving the entire tech park thereby giving a chance for a greater number of units to be collected. he event saw 70+ donors walking in and 55 units of blood being collected. 2 other organizations where an excellent publicity campaigns made a difference were Sankalp Semiconductors and Xerox. Both organizations are small in terms of number of employees working there. However, they have gone out of their way to invite people from several other organizations in the campus and ensure that patients do not suffer due to lack of blood. 100+ donors walked in to the drive at Sankalp Semiconductors and a massive 200+ at the Xerox drive (In fact at this place the drive stopped because we ran out of resources!). Such organizations are an example of how simple and meaningful steps by corporates can build a culture of regular blood donation for the employees.This month also saw us roping in a new organization on board - the Indian Institute Of Management (IIM), Bangalore. The blood donation drive at the sprawling campus saw 150+ students come forward to donate and 118 units were collected. Here too good publicity ensured a steady flow of blood donors throughout the day. Sankalp would like to thank all these organizations and the blood donor heroes at each of them for Giving Life A Better Chance. With a non compliance of 1.5 per camp, 2.69% adverse reactions and 13.8% deferrals the numbers looked promising and progressive on all fronts. Teams from Victoria, Bowring, Nimhans, Rashtrothana, Sanjay Gandhi, Narayana hrudayalaya participated in the drives.

Emergency Wing

For the emergency team, the sleepless days and nights continued. Huge demand for platelets and regular requests for SDP meant that throughout the month the number of cases to deal with was quite high. The team got in touch with several donors through the course of the month and enabled many SDP donations across Bangalore city. The team also coordinated with patients and blood banks in making effective use of RDP units. The average number of calls on the helpline through the month was >50 per day.

Sankalp Tech

Receipt generation has been fully automated for Sankalp Finance. Gone are the days for manually creating receipts for our donors. The new feature created by Sankalp Tech team tracks receipts, provides a beautiful printable receipt and acknowledgement, reaches back to our donors through mails and provides them with the 80G receipts for their contributions on time. Sankalp Finance is now end-to-end tech driven!

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