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Abstract
There is a substantial gap between those people in the United States who identify as being favorable toward organ donation (~90%) and those registered as donors (~30%). A growing body of evidence suggests Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices are effective sites for facilitating higher organ donor registration rates on a national scale. The goal of the current study was to determine the utility and sustainability of a message immediacy approach, which draws from theoretical concepts such as priming and cues to action. Message immediacy requires individuals be: (a) exposed to a message that prompts an action, (b) in an environment where a prescribed action or behavior can be enacted, and (c) favorable toward the promoted behavior or action. Thirty-four Michigan counties, divided into three implementation groups, received campaigns in October (Group 1), November (Group 2), and December (Group 3) of 2009. Registration rates for three to six months after campaign implementation indicate that the on-site message prompts almost doubled registration rates in DMV offices. Additionally, preliminary cost-effectiveness evidence suggests message immediacy offers a relatively inexpensive campaign strategy.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Gift of Life Michigan for their help and support with this project, as well as the Michigan Secretary of State's office. A previous version of this paper was presented in May 2011 at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association in Boston.
Notes
1. The DMV campaigns discussed in the literature review were separate and independent from the present study. The present study reports all original data, not a subsection of previously reported data.
2. Few researchers have used the umbrella term of message immediacy, thus extant research has focused primarily on applied behavior analysis, cues to action campaigns, etc. The concepts might also be linked to social marketing principles, such as product and placement, but original conceptualization of the project did not consider the social marketing perspective. The term message immediacy is used because it seems to appropriately encapsulate a strategy that is often reported but rarely labeled consistently.
3. Because of time constraints with Gift of Life Michigan, branch offices received materials at some point in time in each of those months. Some counties in Group 1, for example, received materials in early October, whereas others did not receive materials until mid-October.
4. The increase from the two months prior (September to October) to the Group 2 campaign beginning was also examined and found to be statistically significant, z=5.36, p<.001, r=.04. One explanation for this would be early or unreported distribution of materials to certain branch offices.
5. Effect sizes are reported as r-values for convenient comparison to the meta-analysis of other organ donation campaigns (Feeley & Moon, Citation2009). Original data for calculation of other effect size statistics is available from the first author.