Ontario stopped asking drivers to give an organ and asked whether they'd take one instead

the problem

Organ-donor sign-up rates on license renewal forms stayed flat despite awareness campaigns

background

the move

Researchers tested reframing the donor-registration prompt from an altruism ask to a reciprocity question — 'If you needed a transplant, would you have one?' — forcing renewers to weigh their own self-interest before declining. Ontario rolled the wording into its province-wide driver's-licence renewal form.

the payoff

In the field trial (n=3,330), new registrations jumped from 4.1% to 7.4% of renewers, an ~80% relative increase, for the cost of a sentence. Ontario adopted a simplified registration form using the reciprocity prompt province-wide in 2016.

what came after

The reciprocity prompt outperformed every other tested wording, including pure altruism appeals and process simplifications. Ontario adopted a simplified registration form using it province-wide in 2016; the researchers estimated the change could be worth roughly 225,000 additional registrations a year if sustained at scale.

filed under

The unheeded instruction

references

1. [1]Journal of Marketing (SAGE) — Increasing Organ Donor Registrations with Behavioral Interventions: A Field ExperimentJournal of Marketing (SAGE), 2021journals.sagepub.com
2. [2]Government of Ontario — Behavioural Insights Pilot Project: Organ Donor RegistrationGovernment of Ontario, 2016ontario.ca

was it genius?

same kind of clever

• 1968 · Dick FosburyFosbury jumped over the bar backwards — the rules never said which way to face
• 1998 · UK Medicines Control AgencyBritain shrank the paracetamol pack instead of treating the urge to overdose, and poisoning deaths fell by nearly half
• 1991 · Schiphol AirportSchiphol etched a fly into its urinals and cleaning costs fell — men aim at targets