Inspiring action: Bitrise and Blood Agents join forces to mobilize blood donations in Ukraine

War, conflict and suffering in the world can leave us feeling powerless to make a real difference. That's exactly how the team here at Bitrise felt when our neighbours in Ukraine faced their darkest hours. So, when an amazing Ukrainian organization, Blood Agents, contacted us about using Bitrise to develop a new blood donation app, we jumped at the chance to support their mission of providing life-saving blood wherever it is needed most.

Recently, we had the privilege of speaking with the Blood Agents team—Oleksandr Hryshchenko (Delivery Manager, volunteer), Oleh Oladko (app tester, volunteer), and Yevheniia Viazovchenko (Project Team Lead, volunteer)—to learn more about their mission, how Bitrise is supporting their new donation app, and what's next on their agenda.

Here's a recap of our conversation.

Can you share the story of how Blood Agents came to be? What inspired its mission?

[Yevheniia] Blood Agents started out in 2015 as an informal initiative to support blood centers in Ukraine. The goal was to encourage donors to give blood regularly and to make their experience as comfortable and easy as possible.

Unfortunately, in Ukraine, not every patient can rely on receiving the life-saving blood donation they need when they need it. Our goal was to change this. So, the team at Blood Agents started out by visiting blood centers to raise awareness and foster a culture of voluntary, free, and conscious blood donation. 

A few years after the initial project was launched, Blood Agents became an official non-governmental organization (NGO). Currently, we have a few employees, but most of the work is done by volunteers who work tirelessly to achieve one goal: ensuring that every patient in Ukraine has access to the blood they need, whenever and wherever they need it. Part of our work involves dispelling the damaging myths surrounding blood donation and highlighting the critical role our citizens can play in promoting it for the benefit of all.

Ultimately, I believe we all hope that if we ever need a blood transfusion, it will be available. But the reality is we can't rely on other people to make that happen; we all need to play our part.

What are the biggest priorities for Blood Agents right now?

[Yevheniia] Currently, our focus is on improving our organizational structure to scale our activities in the regions and drive up donor numbers. But to do this effectively, we need to secure stable funding. It’s essential not only for achieving our goals but also for supporting our volunteers, who work tirelessly to make everything happen. We need to avoid our volunteers reaching burnout, so keeping them engaged and motivated is crucial.

Ultimately, our vision at Blood Agents is for every regional blood center in Ukraine to have a sufficient donor base that fully meets their need for blood and its components. This particularly becomes crucial at times of war. To realize this vision, we need to foster a positive attitude towards conscious blood donation and actively promote it in partnership with Ukraine’s medical institutions.

Currently, our volunteers are busy working on a number of key programs, including:

• Enhancing the donor experience by being physically present at blood centers.
• Partnering with businesses to support operational activities and donor incentives.
• Hosting creative events to raise funds and awareness.
• Growing and maintaining our donor database.

We’re excited about the possibilities our new mobile app will open up. It will be a huge asset for all our programs and will transform how we attract, reengage, and retain donors.

What challenges led to the decision to develop a new mobile app?

[Yevheniia] For the past two years, we've relied on a chatbot called Plazma to recruit donors, provide information, and ensure a smooth and positive donation experience. However, the chatbot can't be designed as a standalone proprietary solution as it's based on commercially available messenger. As a result, we knew we needed to find a better solution that would help us scale our efforts going forward. 

The idea of building a new blood donation planner app was born out of an urgent need to address Ukraine's severe donor blood shortage. To give you an idea, Ukraine currently has only 11 donations per 1,000 people—that's far below the global minimum threshold of 33 per 1,000.

Our Plazma chatbot has worked well to date in some situations to help us plan donations and remind donors that blood is needed. However, it is far from the all-in-one solution that we are aiming for through our new mobile app. 

Currently, over 26,000 donors are registered on our database and interact with us through volunteer chat messages. We plan to gradually transition this audience to our new app and will be driving awareness and engagement through a promotional campaign.

How will the new app help you overcome these challenges?

[Yevheniia]  Our real dream is to have an app that gives everyone easy access to their blood donation records and a knowledge base to answer any questions right from their mobile phone.

We hope our new app will provide donors with exactly that. They'll be able to install it for free, and using it will be safer, more enjoyable and useful than our current solution. By giving donors a better experience, we hope this will help us grow our existing donor database significantly.

We are also huge fans of rewarding our donors, so our new app will give us a platform to do this much more effectively with gamification award badges etc. It will definitely provide a much more reliable and personal way to engage with donors going forward.

[Oleh] Our biggest challenge continues to be attracting new donors and holding on to our existing community. We also need to improve our responsiveness when we have an urgent need for donations. This new app will allow us to communicate more effectively with donors through targeted push notifications and will enable us to respond faster to changing demands.

With the current blood donation situation in Ukraine and the current state of blood banks, maximizing our efforts is essential, and I believe the new app will definitely help.

[Yevheniia]  We have an incredible team of volunteers here at Blood Agents—brilliant, passionate individuals doing amazing things in their free time. Our chats are constantly buzzing with energy and inspiration 24/7. It's truly inspiring, but the challenge is we don't have enough volunteers to meet the growing demand.

We have ambitious goals inspired by the vision of our founder Olena Balbek for transforming the blood donation system throughout Ukraine. With tight resources, we believe our new donor app will be a powerful tool to support our efforts to attract new donors, retain existing donors and connect the whole community together.

How did you first discover Bitrise, and what made you decide to try it?

[Oleksandr]: I volunteer for Blood Agents, managing the product delivery for the new donation app. In my day job, I work for a large services company, and that's where I first met the Blood Agents team. 

They were attending a community event and talked to me about issues they were having with their chatbot and how they wanted to create a mobile app for the donor community. But they were finding it too complex to set it up. So, I decided to do some research to figure out how to make it happen. 

Taking on this project turned out to be a huge challenge. As there was no budget for development, all work needed to be undertaken by volunteers. Many backend developers and designers joined our team as volunteers to help create the beautiful app design, etc. However, our greatest challenge is time and resources. Many of us have other full-time jobs, so we have to dedicate time in our evenings and weekends to working on Blood Agents.

Initially, we used GitLab as our codebase version control system. We tried to build the whole continuous development process in GitLab, but it was challenging because building an Android or iOS application on the platform is not easy.

After several failed attempts, my colleague John, who works in mobile development, introduced me to Bitrise. He explained that it could help us set up a complete CD system for both iOS and Android and would cover everything we needed. At the time, we were using a Windows machine to build for Android and a MacBook for iOS, which was not an ideal situation for a small team.

Bitrise was just what we needed—it was the perfect fit for our needs. And the best bit is that it’s an all-in-one solution. It allows us to build, test, and update the app for both Android and iOS and build out code as soon as we have a new feature, all in one click. It’s been a huge win for me and the rest of the team.

How has Bitrise helped so far?

[Oleksandr] Our organization relies almost entirely on volunteers, so time is precious. We don't have the option to work on the new app for 8 hours a day or a full week, so the impact of any development delays can be huge. If one part of the process is blocked, everything stops. This can also cause a lot of frustration for our volunteers when they have other work to focus on. 

With Bitrise automation, we no longer depend on a single person to build and distribute applications when they're available. This greatly reduces the friction in the process and improves our development velocity. Previously, builds could take up to a week. Now, with one click, I can build and distribute the app to the QA team. It's as simple as that. It can be very challenging to find people who can volunteer to help me with development, so the automation through Bitrise really helps to ease the burden for me.

It's helped remove manual steps like setting up environments, building apps, uploading them to Firebase, notifying testers etc. Now, we simply update the codebase, bump the version, and with one click, everything is done—continuous integration, delivery, and deployment in one solution. This is by far the most valuable benefit for us. 

Now, we can manage a release in one day compared to at least a week before, and that was when everything ran smoothly. I can cover several operations, including mobile testing and delivery, within one integrated solution, which is great. Everything is seamless, and the detailed documentation means anyone could run a build from scratch without any previous experience. 

[Yevheniia] When the team started using Bitrise, they were so excited, and I thought, "Wow, this is so easy." I'm so glad I reached out to ask for help; I honestly never expected a company like Bitrise to offer a solution like this for free. I couldn't believe how quickly the team responded to my request, and grateful for their generosity in allowing us to use the platform for free.

Working with Bitrise feels like a true partnership. We feel seen, like we're talking to real people, far from Ukraine, who genuinely want to help us create something great together. It doesn’t always work out like this in life, but with Bitrise, I’m really happy for both myself and the team that we have achieved such a positive result. Its impact on our work and mission has been immeasurable. We now see it as integral to everything we want to achieve in the future. We couldn't have got to this point without it. It's been a blessing!

[Oleh] Volunteering on projects like this can be exhausting, especially balancing the demands of a full-time job alongside it. Having a mobile platform like Bitrise has been invaluable in giving our volunteers like Oleksandr more time for other important tasks. We don’t want our volunteers to burn out; we want to keep them engaged and energized. So, thanks to Bitrise, that is now possible.

[Oleksandr] I have over five years of experience with CI/CD systems like GitLab, Jenkins, and TeamCity and have worked extensively with them. As mentioned earlier, I tried multiple times to set up a mobile CI process in GitLab but failed. With Bitrise, the process has been seamless from start to finish. All the supporting documentation is clear and logical, which has been a big help.

Now with Bitrise in place, I don't have to rely on others to build the app or spend hours fixing issues, which has been a huge plus. We're really happy with the product, the partnership, and all the support we can count on from the team whenever we need it.

What's next on the agenda for Blood Agents?

[Oleksandr] Our new app is 95% complete. Thanks to the Bitrise platform, we have successfully set up our CI/CD and release strategy. We have also configured connections to the App Store and Google Play platforms to upload the app automatically. We have been able to do all of this with minimal resources, just a small team of two volunteer developers. As Yevheniia said earlier, there is no way we would have been able to achieve all of this in such a short period of time without Bitrise. 

At this point, all the primary tasks for our mobile app are covered. We are already on the cloud and working on enabling our push notification functionality. Once the app is released, we will be able to notify and request help from target donors with just one click. In the next few weeks, approximately 300 users will beta-test our app, which will allow us to make any final adjustments before releasing the final version in 2025.

We're excited to move to this next phase of the project and can't wait to get our new app into the hands of our donor community. 

The new Blood Agents app is launching in Q1 2025—stay tuned for their big awareness campaign! Every so often, you meet people who truly inspire you and leave a mark. For us at Bitrise, that’s exactly how we feel about the Blood Agents team. We're proud to support their critical work with our platform and excited to see the possibilities their new app unlocks! Learn more about their incredible work here.