India had 0.08 organ donors per million people. More than five hundred people were dying each year waiting for one. The obstacle was not that Indians were unwilling — it was that the subject was surrounded by myths, some religious in origin, most simply unexamined, and nobody was in a position to correct them at the moment a person might act.
That framing decided the campaign. A myth is not addressed by exhortation. It is addressed by putting the correction and the decision in the same place, so that someone who has just stopped believing the myth does not have to go looking for somewhere to act on it.
I led the team on this account and the pitch that won it. I was close to the planning throughout, and the execution was done by people I had hired.
Content that answered the objection, next to the button
The campaign ran on a mobile-optimised site with a Facebook application beside it. The content did the disproving: the actual state of organ donation in the country, the specific myths and what was wrong with them, stories from people the question had touched, support from public figures, survey results, articles, print, and comic strips for the parts that read better drawn than argued.
The application did the converting. It let someone register as a donor there and then, and it was built for onward motion rather than for completion — strong calls to invite family and friends, and a green ribbon a user could apply to their profile picture.
The ribbon turned out to matter more than a badge should. People displayed it with pride, which meant the campaign was no longer only the publisher talking. It had produced a population of visible advocates, each of whom made the subject sayable for the people around them. On a topic where the barrier is that nobody discusses it, a visible signal is not decoration. It is the mechanism.
A referral contest sat underneath, with the foundation donating a hundred thousand rupees on behalf of the top fifty referrers to an NGO each of them chose. The incentive was pointed at the referral rather than at the sign-up, because sign-ups were never going to be the constraint. Reach into families was.
What it returned
Over 60,000 people registered as organ donors in nine days, across the microsite, the mobile site and the application. The comparison that makes that number mean something is that an NGO working on this typically received about 4,500 sign-ups in a year.
Close to 5,000 people referred 377,500 friends and family members, and nearly 10,000 of those referrals converted into sign-ups. Around 22,874 people engaged with the page during the week, 344,356 saw associated content, and weekly viral reach was 283,820.
The figure I keep is the second one. Ten thousand of the sign-ups came from people who had themselves just signed up — which is the difference between a campaign that reaches an audience and one that recruits it.
What I would do differently
I would have built the registry, not the campaign.
The stated ambition behind this was a national donors registry, and the campaign produced 60,000 registrations toward it in nine days. But a campaign ends and a registry does not, and sign-ups collected in a publisher's Facebook application live where the application lives. The durable asset here was never the reach figure. It was the list, and the institution that would hold it, keep it current and be reachable when a hospital needed it. I would spend the same nine days standing that up, and let the campaign fill something built to still exist.