About Lifeblood

Australian Red Cross Lifeblood is Australia's sole provider of fresh blood products, processing over 1.5 million donations each year. Lifeblood's work spans blood, plasma, tissue and organ matching, and clinical research, all in service of one mission: helping people. 

Each year, thousands of first-time donors begin the journey of checking their eligibility, booking an appointment, and turning up to donate. But guiding people through that process, especially the initial eligibility stage, is more complex than it seems.

The Challenge

Before donating, Australians can complete an eligibility check: a series of questions about travel history, medications, health conditions, and personal history. On the website, this quiz was losing people. Someone would hit a question they did not understand, or feel confronted by something personal, and leave.

Research with donors confirmed what the data already suggested: people were not dropping off because they were ineligible.They were dropping off because they wanted more clarity and context before continuing.

The Solution: Four years of targeted evolution

Clevertar and Lifeblood have worked together since 2021, starting with an intent-based FAQ chatbot named Jamie and building year by year: expanding its natural language capabilities in 2022, rebuilding it on a Large Language Model (LLM) foundation in 2023, and most recently extending it into the member portal and the eligibility quiz workflow in 2025.

Today, Jamie handles the kind of conversations that go well beyond simple FAQ responses.

The most impactful expansion came in 2025 with the eligibility quiz workflow. The decision to build it was grounded in a principle that holds true across AI implementations: deployments scoped around a single, well-defined problem consistently outperform broader automation efforts. 

Rather than asking "what can AI do for us? "Lifeblood asked "where are we actually losing people, and why?" The data pointed straight to the eligibility check. 

On paper, the quiz looked simple: a series of questions about travel history, medications, health conditions and personal questions. But research told a different story. People were not abandoning the quiz because they were ineligible. They were abandoning because they wanted more context about why certain questions were being asked and what they meant for their eligibility.

Questions about sexual health history, past cancer diagnoses, and LGBTQ+ eligibility were sensitive areas where an unexplained question on a static form felt intrusive. 

"No one has to do an eligibility quiz. No one has to give blood. So we have to work on the assumption that the slightest bit of friction can cause a large number of people to abandon," said Andrew Hague, the Head of Digital at Lifeblood.

Jamie was transformed to solve exactly that friction. Rather than presenting a static form, Jamie runs the eligibility check as a conversation: explaining why a question is being asked, handling follow-ups in the moment, and returning donors to exactly where they left off. 

For sensitive topics, Jamie could address the concern directly rather than leaving someone staring at an important question with no context.

The Outcomes

Eligibility quiz completion rates in Jamie reached 85%, compared to 70% on the website. That gap matters: every drop-off is a potential donor who never made it to the table. 

Over the past year (April 2025 to April 2026), 6,781 people started the eligibility quiz through Jamie and 5,442 completed it. 

Donor eligibility accounts for close to 50% of all conversations, across 38,388 interactions.

Something else happened that nobody had planned for: Lifeblood's contact centre team started using Jamie too.

"We found out about six to twelve months ago that the contact centre was using Jamie as a knowledge base," Andrew said.

"There's no way a donor is asking that, that's what team leaders were saying when they saw certain search queries. The easiest way to get information quickly is via Jamie on the website. It turned into an internal knowledge base for getting quick, contextual responses without having to dig for information."

One deployment, two audiences.

Jamie also provided critical support for Lifeblood when a National call for new donors in the wake of the tragic events of December 2025. This call for donations led to a demand spike of fifty times the regular levels as vast numbers of people stepped up to make a difference. 

Lifeblood's website struggled to cope with the sheer and unprecedented volume of demand., with several core website functions becoming unresponsive at the moment they were needed the most.

Lifeblood’s contact centre was experiencing lengthy phone queues and lines were forming outside physical donor centres as the whole service was tested beyond its limits.

Throughout the peak, Jamie remained online, working tirelessly to support the deluge of donors looking to make a positive impact.

"We already had the donor eligibility quiz in Jamie and people were gravitating towards that," Andrew said. "They were doing an eligibility quiz by the chatbot, doing a donor centre search in the chatbot, and the call to action in Jamie took them directly to the customer portal, which was working fine. So it was almost triaging people around the website."

Jamie handled approximately 15,000 interactions in the days that followed, providing eligibility screening, donor centre information, and process guidance to thousands of Australians, many of them first-time donors. 

"If you think about those 15,000 chats, if even a third of them would have picked up the phone, it was just another inundation of phone calls we couldn't handle," Andrew said.

The Insight

The organisations that get the most from AI rarely start by trying to automate everything. They find one specific, solvable problem, prove the value, and grow from there.

"Pick a pain point. Pick something solvable. That's what we did with eligibility," Andrew said. "It worked, and we've just grown it out, use case after use case."

5 years on from that first prototype, Jamie is infrastructure Lifeblood relies on: for donor engagement, for staff support, and when the website cannot keep up, for keeping the mission running. 

Behind the scenes, the working relationship with Clevertar has stayed the same way the deployment started, straightforward.

"It's an easy relationship built on a good product," Andrew said. "We don't have to have difficult conversations. Meetings are ones we look forward to. It's been a very collaborative, partner-driven way of working."

What's Next

Lifeblood is building toward an authenticated, integrated version of Jamie: one that can handle appointment bookings, reach out to lapsed donors, and guide people through the full donation journey across channels.

"My future vision is a concierge-style experience," Andrew said. "From registration to booking to post-booking to support to rebooking. A two-way relationship. You can almost have your own private donation buddy”

Excited for what's next.