How Be The Match uses social media to help save lives
The Challenge
Be The Match, the largest and most diverse blood stem cell registry in the world, helps people diagnosed with blood cancer or other blood diseases. With nearly 16 million potential donors, the nonprofit helps to save lives through cellular therapy and donor matches.
Over the last few years, the social team experienced a period of rapid growth. In a single year, a three-person staff oversaw a 778% increase in inbound messages, fielding 32K messages, and sometimes receiving more than 1K messages in a single day. They also added 14K registry members (through social media alone). While such staggering growth can be exhilarating, it’s still a challenge — particularly when being handled by such a small team.
Around this time, the team also published the story of Susie Rabaca, who was seeking a donor after her leukemia diagnosis. Picked up by numerous media outlets and even ABC’s Good Morning America, her story quickly went viral.
For Susie’s benefit (as well as patients like her), it was critical that Be The Match build on the momentum and swiftly respond to the massive influx of new donor sign-ups, social media followers, and inbound messages.
Be The Match needed a robust solution that offered:
- A dynamic, powerful platform for a small team to manage staggering growth across social media channels.
- Automated workflows to increase ROI and streamline social media activities, making it easier to manage an increasingly high volume and share story content to increase potential donor registrations.
- Streamlined ability to manage paid advertising comments and engagement via X, formerly Twitter and Facebook ads.
The Solution
Using Sprinklr, the team conducts all social media activities — scheduling, responding, and engaging — mostly through the planner and their community management workflows.
When Susie Rabaca’s story went viral and the team began receiving thousands of messages a day, Social Media Specialist Sarah Middleton said they “used Sprinklr like crazy.” She added that, “Using Sprinklr to respond to those messages quickly and add thousands of registry members on such a short amount of time was amazing. With such a small social team and a high volume of messages from our community coming in, Sprinklr allows us to really crank through those messages with automated workflows.”
Swift response times are critical for any company, but the sense of urgency is exponentially magnified for Be The Match. Missed messages aren’t just lost opportunities; they could be someone’s potential life-saving donor. Any lag in response could have drastic consequences.
Middleton added, “Sprinklr makes it very easy for us to be more human and interact with our community and just engage them in whatever way they need. Whether that’s connecting them to the right person in the organization or just answering a simple question or giving them the right link. We have the capability to answer those questions with just two clicks of a button.”
Whether it’s a few clicks, or a robust dashboard, Sprinklr gives Be The Match the tools they need to succeed, including:
Analyze real-time reports across social media platforms to proactively engage through listening inquiries and drive new conversations with possible donors.
Connect authentically by delivering personalized, compelling responses to up to 1K+ messages a day.
Monitor trends from top influencers with alerts about posts that are trending in their space — helping the team be where the conversation is.
The Outcome
By simultaneously testing a competitor of Sprinklr for a month, the social team was able to compare the platforms. The difference in speed and efficiency responding to community management and inbound messages was clear.
“We find Sprinklr invaluable at Be The Match. I use it every day, all day long, and I think without it, I don’t think any of us would really be able to do our job as well as we can. We’re able to make sure that we can respond to every single message, every single question. Every one of those messages is important because any one of those people could be a potential lifesaver in the future.”
Social Media Specialist, Be The Match
Middleton noted, “With Sprinklr, it’s literally two clicks and it closes out immediately. With the competitor, we found there was sometimes a 20-second lag. When you’re responding to hundreds of messages, that expands out to literally hours.”
Middleton explained that on the competitor platform, paid advertising comments and engagement weren’t populating, so they couldn't see any comments that may have been coming in via X, formerly Twitter ads or Facebook ads. “That's a huge miss for us, because if people are asking how to join and we miss it, that's one registry member that could have saved a life that we're missing,” Middleton said. “Every missed message that we don't respond to or don't see could be someone’s potential life-saving donor.”
In addition to community management, the team is using other features in Sprinklr as well. Ryan Pena, Social Media Strategist at Be The Match, said the team uses Sprinklr for daily social listening reports, where notices are sent out to the organization about some of the top trending posts from influencers in their space.
Another important feature in Sprinklr that is helping the team do their work is the ability to use a customized dashboard, which brings in mentions of a donor match, but also secondary and tertiary mentions that relate to Be The Match.
“They might not be spelling us out as an organization yet, but they're talking about their need to find a match on the bone marrow registry or the blood stem cell registry,” Pena said. “They're talking about what we do, but they're not mentioning us. So we're finding ways through Sprinklr to pull in those conversations.”
Quicker response times. Proactive engagement. Expanded outreach. And a 14K boost in new registrations from social media — all in just a single year. That’s the Sprinklr difference.