Highlights – CSB Blood Donation Drive
We covered the area around the Crescent School of Business (CSB) campus, speaking to hawkers, vendors, auto drivers and even a couple of tea shops to put up our poster showing the details of our Blood Donation Camp. Since it was for a good cause, save for a few nose-in-the-air shops, no one denied audience and gladly up put our posters up at various vantage points in the heart of Chennai city. Buildings we would have otherwise thought to be deserted turned out to house hundreds of employees in them. With just a couple of days to go, we had very little time and lots of ground to cover. We decided to implement several of our b-school classroom lessons by forming teams and allocating responsibilities like responsible students.
To make sure we would be identifiable during the day of the event, we even made ourselves T-Shirts emblazoned with logo of Crescent School of Business. It was nice of our staff to pitch in and get a few for themselves. We had invited as many people as we could. Our teams were ready, the stage was set.
The day was August 24th. It was time – our very first blood donation drive at CSB. We were on the CSB floor at 8AM, adding some finishing touches to our décor and getting the various forms, certificates, and refreshments ready. Right from the entry into the building, the elevator lobby and the college entrance all the way up to the Donor Beds and back, we had our students in place. We made sure there would be no hiccups. To make up for lost time, we took turns to walk around the block to make sure passersby knew about the event at our campus.
It was fun to see people stumble to the 3rd floor of the building and stare dumbfounded at our college. Not many knew of a college being here, and of course were wowed by the place and the infrastructure. We had over 50 people walk in to donate blood that day. Thanks to the Lions Club members, none of the donors felt uncomfortable at any point of time. Thanks to them the event ran smoothly.
We learnt a lot from the exercise, about people, about marketing the event and most importantly about the time it requires to rope in a large audience. We were lauded for pulling off a good job by the management and staff, but deep within, we knew we would someday in the near future play host to a similar drive and that time, we will be better and make sure we get double the people we had this first time.
