Organ Donation

Other campaigns

Wall of Life campaign builds support for organ donation online

Wall of Life is a unique new online marketing campaign to encourage more people to join the NHS Organ Donor Register. It is also an exciting new way for us to acknowledge and celebrate the hundreds of individuals who sign up to the register every day.

The Wall of Life application allows supporters to upload their photo to a mosaic pixel ‘wall’ to help build up the image of toddler Louisa McGregor-Smith who received a life-saving heart transplant in 2007 when aged just 5 months.

Supporters can also create a personal profile to sit alongside their photo and include a short comment explaining their motivation for joining the register. Anyone who joins the wall is actively encouraged to forward the Wall of Life link to friends and family to encourage others to join the register. Visitors to the site can zoom in and out of the mosaic image and there is a search function so they can find themselves or people they know on the wall.

A social networking application or ‘widget’ has been developed to support Wall of Life. Supporters can upload this application to their profile on sites such as Bebo, Facebook and MySpace to help further promote the campaign. The ‘widget’ link goes straight to the individual’s photo on the live Wall of Life website. Supporters can also add a link to Wall of Life on blogging sites such as Twitter.

“The Wall of Life campaign is primarily aimed at young people as NHSBT market research shows that over 30% of people on the NHS Organ Donor Register joined when they were aged 16 to 25. However with up to 60% of the UK public now online, the campaign has the potential to reach a much broader audience,” says Angela Burton, NHSBT’s marketing & campaigns manager. “We are encouraging users to forward the Wall of Life link via email to their friends and family in order to spread the campaign nationally and internationally.”

The Wall of Life campaign is being promoted using the media and a new leaflet, recently distributed to GP practices, libraries and pharmacies across the UK.