Every 16 hours, a New Yorker dies waiting for an organ transplant.

Getting more people to register to become organ donors is simply a matter of life or death. While support for organ donation as an idea is strong, it’s an uncomfortable topic mainly because of its association with mortality, leading to low donor enrollment. In fact, New York State was last in the country (50th out of 50 states) in percentage of residents registered as donors.

Fortunately, it goes against the DNA of New Yorkers to be last in anything. Instead of dwelling on

mortality, we placed our focus on hope and tapped into New York pride to reverse the organ donor crisis that was damaging New Yorkers and New York. We leveraged New Yorkers’ pride in their city through a campaign around “Long Live NY.”

We teased the idea with unbranded subway posters, to entice the media, and they definitely generated significant media interest. Over the course of the entire campaign we received over 1.29B PR impressions. Then, an attention grabbing and highly emotional animated film directed by Oscar winner Laurent Witz launched, as well as the 2015 Cannes Shortlisted ‘Signature’ print.

Results were strong, and potentially lifesaving. Donor enrollments increased 33% vs. the prior 15 months, exceeding our goal of 20%.

Since each donor has the potential to save up to eight lives, the campaign may help to save thousands of lives. (Source: https://www.unos.org/data/)