Using social media to drive organ donor participation

[Christopher Boyer]

Even though more hospitals and health-care organizations want to embrace social media as an extension of their online marketing efforts, they often neglect aligning their online activities with the key strategic intent of what they are trying to accomplish. Social media is comprised of a number of online locations (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) where patients gather to socialize. Due to this perception, most health marketers are not sure the appropriate way to market through these online social avenues.

I recently interviewed Chris Bevolo, president of Minneapolis-based healthcare marketing firm Interval. He not only is an expert in healthcare marketing, branding, innovation, consumer trends, and patient experience, he also blogs, Twitters, and hosts a podcast on healthcare marketing. In short, Chris understands social media marketing because he engages in social media.

We discussed a campaign that his firm created with his client, Lifesource, a non-profit organization dedicated to saving lives through organ and tissue donation in the Upper Midwest. This campaign is a social media marketing effort designed to encourage men to participate in organ donations through the website: www.HalftheMen.org.

Chris Boyer: Can you briefly describe how this effort took shape – is www.HalftheMen.org the primary marketing vehicle? Was your client initially intending to use social media?
Chris Bevolo: While a blog is part of the effort, we considered the entire initiative an integrated campaign. Unlike other integrated campaigns we do, however, this effort has no paid advertising - it’s based solely on interactive content and social media channels. So the HalfTheMen.org web site is the foundation, which contains a blog, stories of campaign Ambassadors (men who have a strong connection to the cause of organ and tissue donation), videos and more. That’s supplemented by a strong presence on Facebook, ongoing Twitter communications, live events and more.

Focusing on using social media was the original charge from the client. LifeSource, the organ procurement organization for Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota and parts of Western Wisconsin, had not yet adopted social media fully and wanted to explore ways to leverage these tools to help with the cause of raising awareness about organ and tissue donation. From there, we built a fully integrated campaign.

Boyer: Why did Interval ultimately decide to opt for a pure social media marketing approach for HalftheMen.org? Did you consider demographics? Content and messaging?
Bevolo: As noted, this was the initial goal of the client - learning to use social media to help their cause. Of course we believe in the power of social media, and were excited to explore ways to help LifeSource use these tools for such a great cause.

While part of the engagement was teaching the LifeSource staff about social media and its uses, when we started considering how to specifically use SM to help increase the number of people who register to be donors, we took a standard approach to a marketing campaign. We started by selecting a target demographic - men in Minnesota aged 45-65, who for any number of reasons, register at a lower rate than the general population. Our point was to use social medial to address a real “business” challenge.

Of course, the segment we selected isn’t the most intuitive for social media, but that just made the challenge more interesting. In another example of more standard thinking, we created a classic campaign “theme” - Half the Men - to provide a cohesive element to the campaign itself. Rather than just using SM to spread the word about this issue, we knew we still had to break through the clutter and give people a reason to pay attention.

Boyer: Is HalftheMen.org part of a larger awareness campaign that LifeSource is engaging in?
Bevolo: LifeSource is constantly raising awareness of organ and tissue donation, and typically has a number of initiatives going at any one time. The Half The Men campaign needed to consider those other initiatives, most of which were smaller in nature (one-time events, for example), but the campaign itself is a stand-alone effort.

Boyer: What are you trying to accomplish with the site? How will the client measure success?
Bevolo: The stretch goal is to raise the number of men age 45-65 in Minnesota who are registered as organ donors from 47% of the population to 50% (the average for the general public). Thus, “Half the Men.” While that sounds like a small percentage, that would equate to more than 13,000 net new registrants, which would be a massive increase over two months (the length of the campaign), based on data from past initiatives.

But we’re measuring success in a multitude of ways, with more than five dozen different metrics, from total new registrants to unique visits to HalfTheMen.org to the number of campaign tweets that are retweeted to the number of new fans for the Facebook page.

Boyer: What successes have you seen so far?
Bevolo: The campaign is still less than halfway through, but we are noting some great results even now. For example, the Facebook fan page (called DonateLifeMN, which is the brand name for the organization’s efforts to raise awareness for organ donation) went from 42 friends before the campaign to more than 300 in just the first two weeks of the campaign. One of the challenges with measuring the ultimate metric - the number of new registrants - is that even though people can register online at DonateLifeMN.org, historically very few people do, still opting to register when they renew their driver’s license. There’s a lag in reporting for that data, but that will give us a better idea of how much of an impact the campaign is having in that area. In the end, it would be a very pleasant surprise if we actually hit that high of a goal, but even if we fall short, we’ve already achieved success by helping LifeSource begin using social media and building a solid foundation of followers for future efforts.

Do you feel HalftheMen.org is part of a larger movement by healthcare providers to embrace social media in different/new ways?
I’d like to think so, yes. To their credit, LifeSource isn’t afraid to try innovative approaches, and they were willing to dive headfirst into social media in a way many hospitals and other providers wouldn’t. But to be fair, promoting a cause through social media is an easier risk to take than putting your organization’s brand out there and getting it wrong. Even so, hopefully this will serve as a case study of how any healthcare-oriented organization can integrate social media into their ongoing marketing and communications efforts.