A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog entry about the Organ and Tissue Donation Campaign my Communication class was putting together. Organ and Tissue Donation Awareness month began on April 1st and my class’s campaign went into effect on April 6th, when classes resumed for spring break.

While the campaign has only been going on for less than two weeks ((12 days to be

The Theme of Our Campaign

exact)), it has been extremely successful so far. Our goal is to get 1000 people to sign up to be donors by the end of the month, and we are well on our way with over 750 donor cards signed!

One of the more successful ways our class has been able to disseminate information and facts regarding Organ and Tissue Donation, tell people when and where are events are taking place, and reach out to students on campus has been through the Internet. The “Web Development/Viral Marketing” team has been made the Internet a vital tool in running a successful campaign.

The “Web Development/Viral Marketing” team’s job is to create a website , Facebook “person,” and Twitter account. The website contains our campaign objectives and goals, general information and facts about Organ and Tissue Donation, and lists our events. The Facebook “person” has hundreds of “friends” who attend our university. This allows the class to easily dispense information regarding Organ and Tissue Donation, create invitations for the events we are hosting, and post pictures and videos that will help get our campaign message out. The Twitter account allows our class to reach an enormous amount of people. Our Twitter account is not only following many people, but it also has many followers! This allows us to share facts and advertise our events to hundreds, maybe even thousands of people.

This past week, I spoke to one of the girls on the “Web Development/Viral Marketing” team about the three websites her group is in charge of. She told me that her team put the least amount of effort and work into the creation of the website. She then pulled up the website to show me how little work they did on it. I asked her if this is because her team was not familiar with HTML formatting or because they did not have time. She told me that her group decided to put all of its efforts towards the Facebook and Twitter accounts. She explained that since the campaign is geared towards students at our university, she wanted to make sure the Internet aspect of the campaign was also geared towards students. She believed the best way to do so was to work tirelessly on the Facebook “person” and Twitter account, not the website. Her team assumed college-aged students were more likely to go on Facebook or Twitter instead of a regular website.

I cannot say that I was surprised that the “Web Development/Viral Marketing” team put its efforts towards Facebook and Twitter. Social networking sites are extremely popular with college-aged students and seem to be replacing the traditional website. I think this was definitely a smart move of the team, and I am curious to see if other classes working on this campaign in the future will take the same approach. After all, it has proven to be extremely successful so far!