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By giving just one pint of blood every two months, you can help a vampire in need! The Vampire Benevolence Association estimates that over 3,000 vampires in River City don’t know where their next feeding will be coming from and many of these will be suffering from vampiric hypovolemia as the winter approaches. You stepping up to the plate NOW could be the difference between a vampire enjoying the holiday season with his family or roaming the streets looking for a black market fix. 

As of the most recent census data, the River City metropolitan area (comprising the city, surrounding areas like the Fens and the hills of Tigris County) is home to 95% of America’s vampire population, with just over 30,000 vampire residents. This is a fact that the city takes tremendous pride in, as signified by the unanimous decision of the city council, with the endorsement of Mayor Cohn, to adopt “Ruby City” as the city’s official nickname.

But even though the city has led the nation in vampire integration, we lag behind in one crucial indicator: blood supply. As you may already know, a single adult vampire requires the equivalent of a pint of whole blood per day. The average hemotypical adult  can only give a pint once every 8 weeks. That means, in order to supply River City’s vampire population with sufficient blood, we need approximately 1.7 million donors giving at max capacity.

As the able-bodied adult population of the River City metro area is just shy of 1.7 million, it would be unreasonable to expect 100% local supply, but in fact the city falls well short of even minimum thresholds. According to a survey released this spring, a little over 25% of our adult population has ever given blood and barely 5% are approaching their maximum capacity.  In total, our current domestic supply meets only 10% of our vampire community’s needs. 

That means 90% of our supply must come from outside sources. With the exception of a few domestic pockets like Chicago and New York, those sources are international, coming primarily from the impoverished former Soviet Bloc countries of Eastern Europe. The problems posed by this arrangement are two-fold. First, it leads to a significant financial drain, as the considerable funds expended by vampires for supply are lost to the local economy and absorbed in foreign markets.

Second and more importantly from a humanitarian perspective, outsourcing supply dramatically increases the cost of blood purchasing, while simultaneously lowering the quality of the supply (as measured by red blood cell count per milliliter). This creates an environment of scarcity in which the poorest and most vulnerable sectors of the vampire community face dire challenges in securing a safe, affordable and sufficient supply. This is no small matter. Though the vampire has grown prosperous with River City, as many as 20% of the vampire community still fall under the category of “blood insecurity,” defined in terms of households who are uncertain where their daily supply will come from. As the vampire community continues to grow, this shortage may be exacerbated and may lead to a return of the social ills that plagued the earlier decades of assimilation. 

The goal of the Bleed for the Need campaign is a meaningful reduction in this shortage, leading to the economic revitalization of our city and the alleviation of hardship for our most vulnerable vampires. What does such a reduction look like? A doubling of the donor rate – from 25% to 50% of the adult hemotypical population – would be an important first step. Not only would this bring local supply to the 20% level, securing a reliable low-cost reservoir for the city’s vulnerable sector, but it would bring the city to symbolically important threshold of a democratic majority. What better way to close the book on the integration of the vampire community into our society?