Many more people want to be organ donors than have actually registered. Around 9 out of every 10 adults say they support organ donation, but only 4 out of every 10 have actually registered. The rate of registration is lowest for young adults, with only 1 out of every 10 registered.
The act of registering is important, providing a clear indication of a person’s wishes to their family, and results in an increased likelihood that if a family is approached to consent to donation in the hospital, they will agree. In turn, this can help more people get a life-saving organ transplant.
The Organ and Tissue Authority (OTA) engaged the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA) to investigate the motivations and barriers for young adults to register as organ donors, and to help inform the OTA’s annual DonateLife Week community awareness campaign.
BETA, in collaboration with the OTA, has released a report detailing this work: Improving organ donor registration among young adults
BETA’s focus group and survey results suggest many young adults want to donate but ‘just haven’t gotten around to it’. This is known as an intention-action gap.
Additionally, BETA found that inertia, the tendency for individuals to default to inaction even when they have clear intentions to act, is a key reason for the current low rate of registration. In response, BETA designed a series of messages to help overcome inertia and motivate young adults to register.
In an online survey experiment, 762 young adults were randomly assigned to see one of three messages – one that the OTA had previously used, one highlighting the ease of the registration process, and one that used humour to engage the audience.
BETA found that the message highlighting the ease of registration was the most effective in boosting intentions to register. This message helped counter the perception that many young adults hold – that the registration process is long and difficult.
These results were used by the OTA to inform the messaging of their 2021 DonateLife Week campaign with phenomenal results achieved with the campaign exceeding their target of encouraging 100,000 more registrations.
Find out more about the results of BETA’s research in the final report.