Influence of Social Media on University Student Participation in Blood Donation: A Case of Mount Kenya University, Kenya

Abstract

This study sought to determine the influence of social media on university student participation in blood donation drives, using Mount Kenya University (MKU), Thika Campus as a case study. Although social media has reshaped how health campaigns reach young people, there remained limited empirical evidence on how students’ awareness of, and engagement with, blood donation content on social media translated into actual donation behaviour. Guided by the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Social Cognitive Theory (SCT), the study adopted a mixed-methods design combining a cross-sectional survey of 348 students (from a target sample of 378, a 92.1% response rate) selected through stratified random sampling, with semi-structured interviews of 15 purposively selected participants. Quantitative data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics (Pearson correlation, multiple regression, and Friedman’s test) in SPSS version 28, while interview data were analysed thematically. The findings showed that students had only a moderate level of awareness of blood donation drives through social media (mean = 3.57) despite rating social media highly as an information channel (mean = 4.17), and that social media engagement, rather than awareness alone, was the strongest predictor of participation (β = 0.625, p < .001; r = 0.797, p < .01), with the regression model accounting for 66.2% of the variance in participation. Facebook and WhatsApp emerged as the most effective platforms for mobilising student donors. The study concluded that converting awareness into actual donation depends on sustained, interactive social media engagement rather than one-off informational posts, and that platform choice matters for reach and impact. It recommended that universities and blood transfusion services adopt consistent, multi-platform, and interactive social media campaigns—anchored on mainstream institutional accounts rather than specialised health-club pages alone—to convert student awareness into sustained donation behaviour.