Health IT, Startups

Body part clicktivism: Startup experiments with social media to change organ donation (Updated)

#DonateMyParts = organ donation via social media.

This post has been updated from an earlier version.

Instead of waiting until you renew your license be an organ donor, what if you could one day register on social media such as Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram using a hashtag?

That’s the idea behind a pilot by ORGANIZE, a nonprofit that seeks to simplify the registration process for organ donation.

The main thrust of the New York nonprofit, co-founded by Greg Segal and Jenna Arnold, has been to create a centralized registry that accepts registrations for 37 states.  When someone visits ORGANIZE.org to register, the first question the user is asked is their zip code, which informs the nonprofit which state the user they are from.

ORGANIZE uses the questions asked by that state (a relic of the DMV system, but not a requirement of law), and auto-completes that person’s registration for them into their state registry, the company said in a statement.

In a phone interview a few hours after ORGANIZE won Stanford Medicine X’s design challenge, Segal likened its approach to Clicktivism — a derisive term to describe online petitions and the like used by those who think it reduces activism to a passive exercise. But he noted that its long-term goal is far more direct and impactful because having a centralized website, combined with people using social media to boast about registering to be an organ donor, will lend itself to national campaigns for organ donation.

“The ice bucket challenge was one step removed from action,” Segal said. “This is more direct.”

Of course, there have been organ donation initiatives before, even national ones, but there’s inevitably a lag time.

So far, since its launch in 2014, it has helped register an impressive 500,000 people as organ donors from organic growth, according to Segal.

Update In reference to the pilot, Segal clarified that the company is not letting anyone “register their intent” on social media.  “We are using hashtags to allow streamlined ways for people to communicate their donor wishes to next of kin.”

He doesn’t expect the company’s approach to appeal to everyone, but it wanted to add another option to the mix.

Photo: Greg Segal accepted the Medx Design Award at Stanford Medicine X

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