The Organ and Tissue Authority (OTA) engaged the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government (BETA) to learn more about how young adults (18-25 years) view organ donation, and to inform their annual DonateLife Week community awareness campaign.

There is a large gap between the proportion of young adults who say they want to be organ donors and the proportion who have actually registered on the Australian Organ Donor Register. Registering is important as it provides a clear indication of wishes to family and increases the likelihood that, if a family is approached to consent to donation in the hospital, they will agree. In turn, this can help more people get a life-saving organ transplant.

The project involved three stages: desktop research, four focus groups with young adults, and online survey experiment and survey with 1,382 respondents. Many young adults want to be organ donors but just haven’t gotten around to it. That is, there is an intention-action gap when it comes to registering as an organ donor. One explanation for this is that young adults overestimate how difficult it will be to register as an organ donor.

The research used an online survey experiment to test three messages to assess whether they boosted registration intentions, as well as click throughs to the registration webpage and actual registrations. The most effective message highlighted how easy it is to register. It boosted intentions to register within the next week by 7-8 percentage points compared to the alternative messages (29% of respondents versus 21-22%). However, in a separate survey question, respondents preferred other messages. Nonetheless, the report considers the experimental evidence on intentions to register as stronger evidence than stated preferences.

The OTA have since used the results of this project to inform their national community engagement program. The project report is accompanied by a one-page summary and pre-analysis plan.