Extend Your Hand

In Brazil, around 69,000 people wait to receive an organ transplant. On September 2009, ABTO (the Brazilian Association for Organ Transplant), pharmaceutic company Novartis and a number of partners wanted to raise awareness to the importance of organ donation in the blogosphere.

ABTO needed to harness the bloggers undisputed talent to spreading information, and use it to tell readers that becoming an organ donor was a simple gesture, one that can extend someone's life. The best way to do that was to motivate bloggers to post, and do it in a way that creates empathy and a sense of community.

To spread the word about donating organs in the relevance-based platform of blogs, AgenciaClick created a campaign based on donation. Not of organs or money, but of content. The idea being to emulate, in a blogging context, the process of organ donation. Bloggers who took part in the initiative would "donate posts" to one another, not knowing who would receive them. Thirty of the most influential Brazilian bloggers were invited to "extend their hands" and donate a blog post for the campaign. The blog posts they submitted were stored in a database. After donating their content, they received an embed code that should be posted on their blog. On the National Brazilian Organ and Tissue Donation Day (Sept. 27), the frame code would randomly pull from the database a post that was donated by someone else, and display it on the blog's timeline.

ABTO and Novartis' action drew the attention of blog readers nationwide. The campaign's website got more than 27 thousand unique visitors during the campaign. Bloggers who hadn’t been invited to the post-donation event also grabbed the campaign seal and embedded it on their own weblogs. The seal was embedded by 744 bloggers.