Recycle Yourself
Donate Life America is a nationwide nonprofit focused on increasing the number of organ, eye and tissue donations to save and heal the lives of patients in need. Their regional division, Donate Life Northwest approached DHX with an interesting challenge. While they had a high participation rate in the 30+ demographic, they were having difficulty connecting with and attracting an audience of 15-29 year olds. Through our research process, we discovered the reason for this discrepancy—the 15-29 year old audience simply felt indestructible and as a result, the idea of making an organ donation just wasn’t on their radar screen. The Donate Life brand desperately needed to find a new approach for communicating its important message in a way that resonated with a younger demographic. DHX developed a multi-layered strategy for solving this problem, starting with positioning the idea of organ donation in terms that were more relevant to the 15-29 year old target group. While our research demonstrated that the idea of organ donation was foreign to this audience, the idea of recycling was something that they quickly understood and wholeheartedly embraced. Using the recycling idea as a metaphor, we created a robust microsite called Go Recycle Yourself (gorecycleyourself.com). This provided a great platform for presenting the concept of organ donation in a way this target audience could more easily relate to and connect with. NEXT, we developed an interactive Facebook game called Scalpel Pal, educating this younger target of the importance and simplicity of organ donation—in a fun, entertaining and thoroughly engaging way. RE:SULTS. Our Facebook game went viral, with interaction catapulting from just a few hundred in the first week to more than 7,000 in a month. As a result, the number of organ donor registrations in Oregon reached an all-time high—with over 91,000 new donors registering within the first month of our campaign. In addition, gorecycleyourself.com remains the #1 lead source for new sign-ups to the organ registry. Although these tools were originally intended to support the donation efforts of Donate Life Northwest’s regional office, they became so popular that Donate Life USA adopted these tools as part of their nationwide effort to reach a younger demographic.