Increasing sign up rates to the Organ Donor Register is a key to reducing the number of people dying each year due to a lack of available organs for transplant. The Behavioural Insights Team has been working with NHS Blood and Transplant, Government Digital Services, the Department of Health and DVLA to increase the number of people on the NHS Organ Donor Register.
Our approach was to find a salient moment to prompt people to sign up to the register, and then to test which form of prompt was most effective.
We used the point at when people had just completed registering for a driving licence or renewing their vehicle tax to trial 8 different prompts on over 1 million people to see which message was more effective at encouraging registrations.
The most successful prompt significantly increased sign up rates. The results show that it is likely to lead to around 100,000 additional registrations in a year. More details can be found in the report, which highlights the benefits of rigorously testing communications, and also shows some surprising results.
The report was picked up in the press, including this article in the Independent.