The Impact of Social Media on Organ Donation, Thanks to
Helene Campbell
Helene Campbell is likely someone you’ve seen on TV in the
last year. She underwent a double lung transplant in Toronto in the spring of
2012 and became a international sensation through her use of Social Media to
raise awareness on organ donor registrations.
At age 20, Helene was diagnosed with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) and required a double
lung transplant. In the Globe and Mail article titled Transplant Hope – Use Social
Media to Save Lives, Helene writes how this diagnosis changed her life,
and the financial impact this transplant had on her and her family. To raise
money, her friends started a website for Helene, called A Lung Story,
and raised money to help cover the costs of her family’s move from Ottawa to Toronto for
care.
This website was just the beginning to how Helene, her
friends, family and her story helped become a social media sensation and
helped do a world of good to raise awareness and registrations to be an organ
donor.
According to the Globe and Mail article, A Lung Story
quickly gained attention, and after local Ottawa media coverage, attention and
traffic increased to over 30,000 views in just a three month period since it
was created. The website was not only telling Helene’s story, but encouraging
site visitors to register to be an organ donor. As traffic and interest was
growing in Canada and abroad, A Lung Story added links to Canadian and
international registries for organ donation. But the best was yet to come.
Seeing the potential to spread the message even further, a
video was posted on A Lung Story in January 2012, encouraging the public to use
social media to contact Justin Bieber and ask him to help raise organ donation
awareness through his massive social media presence and followers.
The video itself began to
garner attention, and according to Campbell’s article, resulted in 326 donor
registrations that day alone (about six times the daily average of new donor
registrations).
Justin Bieber, with his 16.5 million Twitter followers,
responded days later and Helene’s story was suddenly everywhere thanks to social
media – her website got over 30,000 page views from over 122 countries in 24
hours as per Campbell’s article. That alone is a testament to the power of
social media to spread the message.
But social media was not done with Helene Campbell’s story
yet – culminating with Helene making an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in February 2012. Again, organ donations
registrations were impacted with over 700 new donor registrations on that day. On
her website, Helene has a page titled "Helene's story in the Media" which lists
countless references to her story and her campaign. This level of visibility and
public interest would never have been possible without her tapping into social
media and using this tool to communicate.
Since then Helene’s website continues to use social media to
increase awareness on becoming an organ donor. Presently her Twitter feed has
over 16,000 followers, and A Lung Story’s Facebook page is highly active. In
summer 2012, Helene began a new social media fueled campaign called Be An Organ Donor Dance Challenge
- challenging the public to create and share dance videos where they ask their
friends and families to register to be an organ donor and to give blood – again
using social media as a tool to get people from across the continent and even
the world to communicate and share in a common positive cause.
I think that Helene and her supporters are pretty brave and
a savvy folk – brave enough to share her struggle in it’s entirely with the
online world, and savvy enough to know how to tap into social media to bring enormous
awareness to a worthy cause. Thanks to Helene’s blogs, her Twitter challenges
to celebrities, her engaging presence on Twitter and Facebook, Helene truly
caught social media’s attention. It’s refreshing to see such online tools, so
frequently used for very mundane and perhaps self centered purposes, be used to
make such an impact on organ donor registration and raising awareness to such a
broad and far reaching audience.
Well done, Helene! Now, readers, let's use social media one last time to prove Helene's efforts have yielded results. Click on the link below to register in Ontario to be an organ donor.
HI Jaime.
ReplyDeleteI agree at how useful social media was for this. Organ donation is a such a good cause but never really gets media attention unless it's a slow news day. I learned a lot about the disease and transplant procedure. When you think of needing a transplant, you just think of the actual transplant but not all the costs involved with waiting, treatments and relocation expense that come with it. I also found out that having a signed donor card isn't enough. Registering with trilium gift of life letsthe right people know the right information at the the right time. They also have all the stats on how long the wait list. I was surprised that kidneys and liver were the number 1 and 2 most sought after and hearts were a very low number. Hearts seem to get more media attention. Also it wasa fascinating read on the idiomatic puulmonary fibrosis, I had heard of systic fibrosis,but not her ailment.
It's too bad organ doantions don't keep up as a daily interest.
Jaime, this is a well written blog! Social Media can have such a tremendously positive impact, and stories like Helene's are a perfect examples. It is simply amazing what this young lady did to capture attention, money donation and a movement to donate your organs. Her age I would suggest has something to do with tackling her message through social media, but it's her bubbly, energizing, positive and beautiful spirit that drew us all in and kept us looking for her next chapter. It's fantastic that even though her journey of getting an organ donated is passed, she keeps using social media to better society and increasing organ donations, as they are definitely needed. She increased our awareness and did it in a clever, TODAY, way of doing it, via social media.
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