A Professional’s Perspective: Erica Jensen, Be The Match Senior VP
The Be The Match Registry is the largest and most diverse of its kind, and saves hundreds of thousands of patients around the world battling blood cancers and disorders. Many may wonder what goes into managing such a large and impactful organization, so we interviewed Mrs. Erica Jensen, a Be The Match executive team member, to get the inside perspective on Be The Match and showcase what life looks like for a Be The Match employee. We asked Mrs. Jensen a variety of of questions from what day-to-day life looks like in her career to how the coronavirus pandemic has affected the donation registry and Be The Match as a company. Below are the highlights from our interview showcasing Mrs. Jensen’s responses. For the full interview, watch the video below! To learn more about Mrs. Jensen, visit the Be The Match Executive Team page to read her bio.
Full Interview
Interview Highlights
Question 1: Can you give us 1-2 sentences about your role with Be The Match?
It is extremely inspiring to see that this organization is not only working to save lives through the registry, but they follow each person along their journey and work to make sure that they have the best experience through this process. In the time we have spent working with Be The Match, we have seen each and every employee/volunteer show how much they care about the patients they work with and their passion to add people to the registry.
Full Answer: “My name is Erica Jensen and I am the senior vice president of member engagement, enrollment, and experience at Be The Match. Of course, I’m a marketer at heart, so we affectionately call it ME3 because we need a cute nickname to put on our logos and t-shirts and what-not. In ME3, we’re responsible for owning that entire member journey, from the first time we inspire someone to join our registry with Be The Match representatives, all the way through to when they donate, to become members, and then we say you convert to being a donor. After that, you go through your donor experience, and you come back to being a member! So previously, our group was called Registry Growth and Development and it was all about the registry, but as we realized with modern marketing and how consumers interact with all the services around them, they expect everything to be optimized and personalized. In order to achieve this, we have to add that to our members and really give them a distinctive role in our organization. So I tell everyone we are going from having people on a list to truly feeling like valued and connected members.”
Question 2: What led you to pursue a career with Be The Match?
Oftentimes we see major national organizations working in a variety of ways to reach people. This organization is unique in that they work to reach every single person— people of multiple ethnicities and backgrounds—allowing this nonprofit to strive for success in their goal to provide equal outcomes for all their patients.
Full Answer: “I spent most of my career working in different corporations, whether it was the services like a bank, or I spent 15 years at General Mills, which is a local organization here that sells cereal, like Cheerios, Lucky Charms, Totinos Pizza Rolls, all that. Just a plethora of shelf-stable and frozen foods. General Mills is a great organization, and we talk about in marketing, you know, your people who are classically trained, so it was great having that classically trained experience. But it is very different when you are selling a Totino’s Pizza Roll and are trying to add purpose to your organization. You’re trying to add purpose to your product. Of course, at the end of the day, it tastes good and it’s affordable that why people buy it, but all marketers and all brands now, they’re trying to add a higher level of purpose. You see that in all the work coming out in brands like Dove. I was looking for a higher level of purpose, and I got a call from someone to join Be The Match. And it was the commitment to finding equal outcomes for all that really committed me to join the organization because I had encountered lots of for-profit in non-profits towards the tenure of my career, and really working to change disparities and work for underserved communities always ends up being for a specific department or it ends up being for a time period, but Be The Match had made driving equal outcomes for all the core of what the organization was. It was our vision and it surpasses all other things that we have and is clear and key across all our verticals. That was really inspiring and felt differential for me. When I came here, Be The Match make decisions that aren’t the best for making money but it’s the best for making sure we can serve our patient population and drive up equality, which was really powerful.”
Question 3: What does a normal day look like in your life?
While many only see the outside perspective of what Be The Match is and how it works at donor drives and community events, this allowed us to see the other side of what it takes to help run an organization like Be The Match. Countless employees just like Mrs. Jensen work behind the scenes day in and day out to help ensure a smooth experience for all donors, and make sure that all of the underserved communities are represented and advocated for.
Full Answer: “I have a lot of meetings, there’s about 120 folks that report to my organization, and they’re split into several different areas. We have our team here in the US and then BTM Mexico and BTM Puerto Rico, which are also part of our team. Unfortunately, I spend a ton of time during the day in meetings with folks in my organization, partners, agencies, viewing creative, talking about ideas, doing drive work and drive registration, understanding how we’re going to get additional funding for our member activities, and then my favorite part is I get to spend some of my evenings attending events, whether it be on calls with folks like you all or I’m doing a town hall speech in Atlanta tomorrow with 7 Cali commissioners, and we’re gonna be getting the word out about the registry. Being able to attend galas and events or initiatives and activities that really support our mission.”
Question 4: What goals do you have for Be The Match?
This goal is one that we believe is extremely important and something we all hope for when volunteering for Be The Match. The goal is to have all eligible people to join the registry so when needed no one has to struggle to find a match due to their ethnicity. We believe that with Ms. Jensen and everyone in Be The Match’s efforts, we will be able to transform the registry.
Full Answer: Oh so many, I’ll tell you my greatest ambition. So as a marketer, there is this prestigious award called I Can Lion, so you’ve probably heard of the can festival that happens in the South of France, and all the celebrities go, and it’s a big deal. After all the celebrities clear out, creative agencies and marketers come in and they hold what they call the Festival of Creativity, and they review and talk about the best work, advertising, and marketing currently happening in the world. My greatest ambition is to win a Gold Lion for the amazing work that is happening at Be The Match. Because I feel that recognition for the connection that we can make to prospective members and our current members is so powerful. There’s no other place I can think of that can give you that one-to-one satisfaction of having saved a life by something so simple, and you all know that and you think “people give blood” and you get an email saying the blood went to this area but you never know the patient it went to. If you do a lot of organ donation, you have no opportunity to witness that except for a kidney. But here is the opportunity to donate to an absolute complete stranger and change their life and every time I see a donor-patient recipient meeting and it's always the loved ones of the patient, whether it's the mother or father or their partner that holds on the most to the donor because they know the person would not have been there unless it was for that selfless act of the other person. My greatest ambition is to win one of the top most creative marketing awards. A little more practically for what I can do in the next couple of years at Be The Match is I want to transform our registry and absolutely accelerate the goal of getting our ethnically diverse audiences and ensure that we are able to get more numbers more on par with the population and the patients we serve. I also am dogged about transforming this experience that we have for our members because they should feel connected and extremely valued and constantly in the loop and know that there is so much that they can do to change a life. In my office I had emails that were posted up and they were like “Erica you are such a valued customer, we love you here are some things that you can do differently. Here’s a water bottle for us to show appreciation” and I would always tell my team, if I can get that from buying some clothes for my daughter, what in the world should people be receiving from us when we are literally asking people to give a piece of themselves to save a life, so transforming that member experience so that it absolutely comes best is also a goal.
Question 5: How has the Coronavirus pandemic affected Be The Match’s ability to fundraise, educate, and recruit?
We have dealt with seeing numbers go down due to the coronavirus on a small scale in our local community. It was shocking to hear that on a national scale we had lost hundreds of thousands of potential donors. We believe that with the help of workers and volunteers we can find creative new ways such as the ones suggested by Ms. Jensen, to bring our numbers back up.
Full Answer: It is impacting us tremendously, so first on, what it is doing for us with recruitment is we are able to drive a significant amount of it from or people who are out there in communities, in particular out there on college campuses, and are making those one to one connections, inspiring people with our missions and sharing that story and then driving action. When we had to close down all our campuses and eventually our community events, it was devastating. We lost immediately overnight almost 175,000 registry members that we had in the plan, but we pivoted and we had to come up with new ways, so we changed our emphasis from being in person to drives to being socially distanced and digital; we have launched new campaigns surrounding that and we had couch2cure that came out shortly after the pandemic started at the end of march. We had a new patient story and we have new mediums and formats, so we have recently joined tik tok. We were doing some new work on youtube and we have a new gaming partnership coming out that launched on monday. We are looking at doing a initiative with dating apps so we talked about people saying Be The Match like “where are the young people at.” For fundraising it was also equally hard. Us not being able to have events has put a damper on the funds we raised. We are now having virtual events and trying that out and seeing if it will have the same results. Trying to have the goosebumps of the moment in the room because they always do a patient donor meeting and how that will translate to the screen will be different. And then also we usually have both patients who have received transplants and donors who are mingling particularly with the people giving us funds so they can tell that in person testimony. That is a different frontier for us and it is having a negative drive on our ability to raise dollars.
Question 6: How can high schoolers get involved with Be The Match?
We are super excited to partner with HOSA and Be The Match to launch their brand new high school initiative. Recently at the HOSA International Leadership Conference, Be The Match was announced as the winner of the HOSA National Service Project partnership for the next two years. This means that Be The Match will be working with HOSA chapters across the country to raise money and add donors to the registry. Seeing the significant work we have done with our HOSA chapter and others across our state, Be The Match has decided to involve us in this partnership and we are more excited than ever to get started! To get your HOSA chapter registered for the service project, visit bethematchhosa.org
Full Answer: Yeah, so this is a brand new exciting initiative that we are launching, we are working with HOSA and we won their service award so we are going to be their service organization for the next two years and that really spurred us to create a high school curriculum and then also a high school program. Our digital registration process is going through a revision and one of the things we are looking at is how do we give people who are not quite in the sweet spot we need for donors at this moment an opportunity to have an experience with us, we can do a curriculum, partner with teachers who are the gatekeepers of schools and partner with student organizations like yours and then have people do a pre registry and have them go on and pre register so that then the moment they turn 18 because they told us their birthday, we would send them a note saying “congratulations you're legal” and among all the other things you can do you can also register to save a life. We are looking to implement that by early 2021, we are excited, so I have some volunteers to test that out and be apart of the focus group for that.
Question 7: What are the benefits of volunteering with Be The Match for students?
Working with Be The Match is a unique kind of experience that emcompasses so many different skillsets, from intercultural communication to project management. This is part of the reason why volunteering with Be The Match is so beneficial for high school students, as Mrs. Jensen mentioned, because it shows you can dedicate your efforts to a common goal which is a highly sought after skill in the world of post-secondary education.
Full Answer: We talk about how important our mission is and being able to demonstrate your ability to not only be human and part of culture right so not only just joining an organization or participating to be resume fillers and make sure you have applications that look good, what you are doing is showing you care about what is happening in this world and that you are taking a stance. I think students who are joining the organization to fight against equality is saying that we are not okay with the social injustice and how it impacted some any areas of our lives and it causes us to literally have life or death results based on people's ethnicities and that's not okay, so participating and being apart of a movement like that not only shows to the world that you care about what's happening and going on but also gives you the opportunity to build skills in terms of how do you reach out to people, how do you have tough conversations with people about inequality and its impact on different communities and lives, and how do you build a long lasting campaign for change.
