Research Article How to Motivate Whole Blood Donors to Become Plasma Donors Gaston Godin 1 and Marc Germain 2 1 Research Group on Behavior and Health, Laval University, FSI-Vandry, Room 3493, Quebec City, QC, Canada G1V 0A6 2 Medical Afairs, H´ ema-Qu´ ebec, 1070, avenue des Sciences-de-la-Vie, Qu´ ebec City, QC, Canada G1V 5C3 Correspondence should be addressed to Gaston Godin; gaston.godin@fsi.ulaval.ca Received 21 May 2014; Accepted 13 October 2014; Published 28 October 2014 Academic Editor: Erwin Strasser Copyright © 2014 G. Godin and M. Germain. his is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. his study tested the eicacy of interventions to recruit new plasma donors among whole blood donors. A sample of 924 donors was randomized to one of three conditions: control; information only by nurse; and information plus self-positive image message by nurse (SPI). Participants in the control condition only received a lealet describing the plasma donation procedure. In the two experimental conditions the lealet was explained face-to-face by a nurse. he dependent variables were the proportion of new plasma donors and the number of donations at six months. Overall, 141 (15.3%) new plasma donors were recruited at six months. here were higher proportions of new plasma donors in the two experimental conditions compared to the control condition ( < .001); the two experimental conditions did not difer. Also, compared to the control condition, those in the experimental conditions (all  < .001) gave plasma more oten (information only by nurse:  = .26; SPI:  = .32); the SPI intervention signiicantly outperformed ( < .05) the information only by nurse condition. he results suggest that references to feelings of SPI such as feeling good and being proud and that giving plasma is a rewarding personal experience favor a higher frequency of plasma donation. 1. Introduction In the USA, plasma intended for fractionation is obtained mainly from remunerated donors [1]. herefore, the main challenge for commercial plasma collectors in the US is to apply procedures that will safeguard the quality and safety of the product. In many other countries, however, nonremuner- ated plasma donation is the usual practice. his means that speciic interventions not based on monetary incentives are required to recruit plasma donors. To our knowledge, in the scientiic literature only a few studies have reported the impact of interventions on plasma donor recruitment [2–5]. Each of these interventions mainly provided information about the plasma donation procedure and was successful in recruiting a signiicant number of new plasma donors. Nonetheless, it was recently shown that one- on-one conversation was the best approach to motivate whole blood donors to become plasma donors especially if the con- versation was donor-oriented, that is, focusing on “donor’s needs and welfare” [5]. his latter observation is in agreement with the results reported by Ferguson et al. [6], showing that committed blood donors are more willing to donate blood when exposed to a benevolence message. Moreover, their results were consistent with those of Weyant [7] who showed that when helping costs are high (e.g., giving plasma), beliefs in personal beneits are more important for promoting action. Given the increasing importance for blood agencies to recruit new plasma donors without remuneration, the present research focused on (a) whether two interventions outper- formed a control condition regarding the recruitment of new plasma donors, (b) whether any of the two interventions engendered a greater number of donations compared to a control condition, and (c) the moderating efects of gender, age, and donor status on the indings. 2. Methods 2.1. Participants and Procedure. he population targeted by this study was whole blood donors aged 18 to 70 years, who donated at one of the mobile blood drives organized by H´ ema-Qu´ ebec, the blood establishment in Quebec. To Hindawi Publishing Corporation Journal of Blood Transfusion Volume 2014, Article ID 752182, 6 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/752182