Despite being a huge country, India faces a chronic blood shortage. Delhi alone faces an annual shortage of 100,000 units. This shortage would easily be met if just 2% of young, first-time donors donated. Because statistics show that young, first-time donors eventually become donors for life.

Except many Indian youths are unwilling to donate due to Aichmophobia: fear of needles. How did we address this fear barrier?

We used the power of music. Indian youths love hard rock. Hard rock songs involve a lot of screaming. So we asked them to overcome their fear of donating blood… by screaming for their favourite rock and roll band.

Together with India’s most famous rock and roll band, Parikrama, we turned these recorded screams of fear… into screams of joy: An original Parikrama rock ‘n’ roll song that featured the screams of the blood donors which debuted at the concert.

A month before the first concert, BloodConnect reached out using both online and offline media to spread the word about their upcoming blood drive: The 'Scream Out Your Fears, Scream for Rock and Roll' blood drive in collaboration with India's biggest rock and roll band: Parikrama. This generated huge amounts of interest amongst the Indian youth.

On the day of the actual blood drive, Blood Connect installed scream booths everywhere on campus at Delhi's prestigious student university: IIT (India Institute of Technology). These scream booths allowed students to record their screams of fear before they donated their blood.

Every blood + scream donation = 2 tickets for the concert happening that night.

The 'screams' were collected and passed to Parikrama 3 hours before the start of the concert. Together with the band's resident DJ, they mixed the donors' 'screams' into an original Parikrama song..which they debuted at the concert itself.

It was Blood Connect’s most successful blood donation drive ever in 10 years. Facebook likes went up by 50% upon announcement of the collaboration with Parikrama.

1,800 units were collected at the first blood drive from FIRST TIME DONORS, the highest recorded number of first-time donors in Blood Connect’s history.

With the success of the first blood drive… it then rolled out to 8 other cities across India.

16,000 first-time donors pledged to donate 4x a year = 64,000 pints of blood = 256,000 potential lives saved annually = Donors for life

Full crowd turnouts at the ‘Scream Out Your Fears, Scream for Rock & Roll’ concerts across 8 cities

250 chairs broken across the concerts