Facebook rolled out its organ donation feature because of a decision by top management. After frontline medical professionals raised the urgent need to change public awareness of organ and tissue donation, executives agreed that the reach of social networking services should be put to use, and the project to boost donation gained momentum.
Facebook's Organ Donor registration feature grew out of a chance meeting in 2011 between Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Andrew Cameron, a transplant surgery professor at Johns Hopkins University, according to foreign media reports on the 4th. Cameron, a Harvard classmate of Sandberg, said at an alumni gathering that many people say they support organ donation but few actually sign up as donors. He then proposed using the touchpoints and reach of Facebook, where vast numbers of users share their daily lives.
Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder who is now chief executive of Meta, also had a strong interest in transplant issues. He had learned about the situation facing patients on transplant waiting lists through his then-girlfriend Priscilla Chan, who was a medical student at the time, and he had closely watched his mentor, Apple founder Steve Jobs, extend his life after a liver transplant. Sandberg launched the features after about a year of development. Once corporate technology and customer networks were turned into a channel for organ donation, they not only amplified public interest but also translated it into action.
Facebook's success became a turning point in using private services woven into daily life — smartphones, pharmacies and patient portals — as conduits for sharing life. Starting with version 10.0 of iOS, released in 2016, Apple added an organ donor registration menu to its built-in Health app. Instead of visiting a separate website, iPhone users can sign up as organ, eye and tissue donors with the U.S. national donor registry managed by the nonprofit Donate Life America. The information users enter is not stored by Apple and is sent directly to the national registry. Private companies have used their customer touchpoints and technology to the fullest to improve access to public-interest information and make it more efficient.
When it introduced the service, Apple explained the背景 by noting that about 120,000 patients in the United States were waiting for a transplant and that a new patient was added to the waiting list every 10 minutes. According to the Health Resources and Services Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 109,817 people were on the U.S. transplant waiting list as of the end of July. The number of people waiting has fallen from a decade ago, but one new patient is still added to the list every seven minutes and an average of 12 people a day die while waiting for a transplant.
Epic Systems, a medical software specialist, pushed into a touchpoint far closer to the clinical setting. It teamed up with Donate Life America in May last year to add organ donor registration to MyChart, its patient portal, and registrations through MyChart topped 20,000 in December alone. The response was explosive compared with the roughly 11,000 monthly registrations that had come through the main online channels of the existing national registry. In the six months after the service was introduced, cumulative registrations through MyChart exceeded 130,000. MyChart is the service patients use to check test results, book appointments and communicate with medical staff. Offering donation at the moment patients are most attuned to their own health and illness, and linking them to immediate registration, is seen as raising the likelihood that intent turns into action. Experts noted at the time that only half of the medical institutions using MyChart had adopted the feature, leaving even more room for it to spread. What these cases have in common is that companies provide technology and platforms users can easily access, while public-interest organizations handle the registration process and information management.
Offline spaces have been used as well. Walgreens, the large pharmacy chain, has set up organ donation counseling and sign-up spaces inside its stores since 2014. Customers who come in to buy medicine can hear an explanation and register as donors right away through a dedicated website; cumulative registrations through the Walgreens campaign page topped 20,000 as of 2023. Harley-Davidson dealers across the United States hold charity rides with organ donation groups to promote donor registration and raise funds. A ride to raise awareness of organ and tissue donation, started by a Harley-Davidson dealer in Texas, was held for the 15th time last year. Rather than a uniform campaign run from headquarters, it is a case of grafting brand-specific assets — the strong bonds among riders and a regional dealer network — onto the sharing of life.
"Rather than leaving organ donation to individual goodwill alone, we need efforts to change both the system and the environment so that people naturally think about donation and take part in it in their daily lives," said Kim Dong-yeop, standing director of the Korea Organ Donation Association.
