Skip to main content
Research in Brief Home

Increasing Organ Donor Registrations with Behavioral Interventions

Published: 2021

Nicole Robitaille
Associate Professor & Distinguished Research & Teaching Fellow of Marketing

Key Takeaways

  • Organ donor registration can be increased in explicit consent environments using altruistic motives
  • Timing matters. Posing altruistic questions and offering streamlined information at specific moments proved effective in changing behaviour.
  • These mechanisms may also reduce the time a visitor spends waiting to register at a centre, increasing customer satisfaction and efficiency while minimizing cost
  • Strategies to increase organ donation need not be expensive or labour intensive

“If you needed a transplant, would you have one?” Simple questions like this can have a remarkable impact on the behaviour of potential organ donors and potentially save lives when posed at the right moment. Demand for donation continues to increase while supply remains relatively low, with thousands on wait lists. In countries like Canada, where organ donation is determined by people opting in, rather than countries with presumed consent policies where individuals are automatically donors but can opt out, organ registration remains low despite the large majority of Canadians indicating support for donation.

Previous work has focused on factors impacting attitudes and intentions rather than actual behaviour. Nicole Robitaille and her co-investigators conducted a field experiment at ServiceOntario centres in Canada, assessing the impacts of behaviourally informed promotion interventions and process improvements and addressing the lack of understanding around methods of increasing actual organ donor registrations. Translating previous studies, which emphasized the possible effectiveness of altruistic motives on donation, the researchers designed their experiment to investigate in-person behaviour, focusing on three perspective-taking prompts.

The group’s research on leveraging behavioural science demonstrated that particular low-cost, precisely timed, scalable interventions and streamlined customer service significantly increased registrations in contexts with explicit consent systems. In particular, the most effective strategy involved prompted perspective taking through reciprocal altruism. Three types were predicted to elicit prosocial behaviours: imagine other, imagine self, and reciprocal altruism, and were translated into intervention strategies that saw registration rates rise from 4.1% in the control group to 7.4% in the best performing condition. Bringing experiments on altruistic motives out of the lab and into

The group’s experiment demonstrated that simple marketing solutions were effective in prompting desired behaviour, overcoming the intention-action gap in organ donor registration. Not only does this research recommend public policy improvements, but the evidence generated has positive implications for other non-profits who deliver promotional materials as part of achieving their objectives.