A study carried out by American researchers has revealed the enormouspower of social media as a tool to promote organ donation. In his experiments, a campaign through the social network Facebook managed to increase the number of organ donors 21 times in a single day in the United States. The results of this work have been published in the journalAmerican Journal of Transplantation.
Andrew Camerony and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University of Medicine (USA) wondered if social media could be used to reach people and encourage them to become an organ donor. To resolve their doubt, the researchers reached an agreement with Facebook so that its Timeline platform could be altered and allow users to indicate on their profile that they were organ donors. When they did, they were given a link to their official registration as state donors and a message was sent to their friends to inform them of their new status. The friends, in turn, had the possibility to modify their own status and thus the message continued to circulate, according to the US publication in a statement.
Once the researchers analyzed the online registration activity in state registries during the weeks following the start of the Facebook campaign, they found that there had been a large increase in donor registration in all states. According to the study data,On the first day of the initiative, there were 13,054 new online registrations, 21.1 times more than the reference averageof 616 records. This ‘first day effect’ ranged from 6.9 times in Michigan to 108.9 times in Georgia. Registration rates remained high over the next 12 days.
“Our research aims tosearch for new instruments to help alleviate the shortage of organs for transplantationin United States. It also indicates that social networks can be valuable tools to deal withpublic health problems“Cameron told the American Journal of Transplantation.
However, the researcher also indicates that the great growth that was experienced in the first days of the initiative decreased over time, which implies that “more work is needed to maintain virality.”
