To shed a light on what it feels like to wait for months, or even years, not knowing whether there is any light at the end of the tunnel we approached people waiting in line at an Apple Store, waiting for something they feel is very important. But when confronting them with the fact that their waiting line is peanuts compared to what people waiting for organs go through each day, they understood the small scale of their waiting line. By setting up a direct communication between our target audience and patience, the relevance of organ donors became clearer than ever.

We reached out to people who were waiting for something themselves: the new (and first) Apple store in Brussels. The night/morning of the opening we visited the waiting line in front of the Apple store together with Luc & Astrid, two people waiting for an organ. Both Astrid & Luc interviewed the people who were waiting, first about what would make them wait for hours just to see a new Apple store open, but finally about the fact that they (=Luc & Astrid) themselves were waiting too...for an organ. The direct confrontation made people question their 'waiting' and activated them to subscribe as an organ donor as well.

We turned this street activation into a social video and released it on YouTube. At the end of the video, the audience is urged to register at www.reborntobealive.be

The video created high social engagement: 22.826 blog shares worldwide

Social reach worldwide: 789.701 people and 100% positive engagement.

Traffic to the website x12 the day after the campaign, x2 1,5 month later.

Impact: the number of organ registrations in the first month after the campaign, was 8 times higher than normal.

Because media creativity is about finding the perfect context for your message. And that's what this whole idea centers around: bringing our message in an unexpected but extremely relevant context;

The essence of the problem of organ donorship is that patients have to wait a long time for the perfect donor organ. So the fewer people register as a donor, the longer the waiting list. What better context to create a stunt around waiting, than what has become a symbol of waiting for something you really want: the queuing line in front of an Apple Store opening the next day?

Young people are the ideal target group for organ donorship, because with their healthy bodies and organs, they are the ideal donors. However, they are also the most difficult target group to reach. Death is a far thought for them, and they have not often been confronted with the issue of somebody waiting for an organ. One could even argue that in general, they haven’t yet met any serious problems at all …

That’s why it’s all the more confrontational to compare their “problem” – waiting for a new Apple Store to open can be considered a “first-world-problem” – with what of some of their peers go through.

We decided to piggyback on a topic our target group feel passionate about on the one hand, and that is always prone to raise a lot of spontaneous media attention on the other.

Under Belgian law, every deceased person is by default considered to be an organ donor, unless he or she explicitly objected during life. In reality however, doctors still ask the family’s permission, leading to many refusals and thereby to long waiting periods for patients in need of organs such as lungs, kidneys, etc. Sometimes people die before they can receive a lifesaving organ.

The only one way to circumvent this is to explicitly state during life that you do want to become a donor. Reborn is an organization that constantly creates awareness around this topic and is permanently on the lookout for opportunities to stimulate people to sign up as a donor.