We do not recruit sperm donors here at Concept. Instead we have sourced dedicated sperm banks with good reputations with whom we, and other fertility clinics we liaise with, have had good pregnancy/birth results.
The process is streamlined and basically the same no matter which sperm bank you use. You go on to their website and select your donor. They confirm with you/us that the donor is appropriate for your requirements. You pay them online then their lab and ours liaise and arrange the shipping and compliance with legal and quality requirements. Once you have made your selection we normally receive the sperm within 2 days.
You may wish to provide your own sperm donor rather than use a sperm bank. He may be a family member or he may be a friend, the latter being more common amongst same-sex couples. There are a couple of other considerations in these cases. The first is to account for scenarios where you, the donor and the child might meet, either together or separately. We have implications counselling for you and the potential donor to take, where you will go through these scenarios, be able to put some questions to the professional counsellor and consider some possibilities.
The second consideration is the cost and time. Donor selection involves a sequence of consultation, viral testing, counselling, donating, quarantining and retesting. All of this costs money. Sperm banks reject most, maybe 95%, of their applicants. These costs have to be added too. They address this by spreading the costs of donor selection over all the recipients. A donor may be allowed to produce 10 families in the UK but they can produce additional families in other countries too, depending on their laws. Therefore sperm banks can divide these costs amongst many but if you are using a known donor you will probably have to pay all the costs yourself.