Following CG&A’s success in launching April 2006’s “Donate Life Month” campaign for Gift of Hope Organ & Tissue Donor Network, Gift of Hope retained CG&A to manage an 18-month campaign on behalf of Donate Life Illinois, the statewide coalition of donation agencies. The campaign kicked off in January 2007 with the goal of both educating the public about the state’s new donor consent registry and ultimately, registering 3.5 million Illinoisans as organ and tissue donors.
	CG&A laid the groundwork for their campaign by first conducting a statewide poll to establish baseline feedback about current attitudes and beliefs surrounding the issue. In defining their target audience, CG&A created the campaign tagline “I am. Are you?” to generate a sense of community and encourage individual empowerment for those registering as lifesaving donors. Upon developing the coalition’s new website, CG&A saw a unique opportunity to create a strong social media platform to connect with supporters and advocates online while driving registrations by utilizing key tools such as a Tell-A-Friend tool, blog, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. Furthermore, CG&A immediately sought out Mesirow Financial CEO James Tyree, a kidney and pancreas transplant recipient, to chair their Workplace Partners program. The workplace outreach component of the campaign focused on “virtual donor drives” via an email template distributed to all employees explaining the need to re-register and including a link to the new registry. Recognizing the viral capability of college students, CG&A also initiated the inaugural Donate Life Illinois Campus Challenge, a one-month friendly registration competition between 20 colleges during October 2007. To supplement the effort, a series of videos starring the campaign’s mascot, Morgan D’ Organ, were produced and featured on all of the campaign’s social networking outlets to keep students engaged throughout the campaign.
	By the end of the campaign, CG&A achieved major success for Gift of Hope and Donate Life Illinois. The campaign website generated excellent traffic averaging 39,000 unique visits each month and over 25,000 registrations. Within a year, CG&A created a large network of online supporters via MySpace and Facebook, averaged 700 unique monthly blog visits and generated more than 25,000 combined views of their various videos on YouTube, ranking amongst the top search results for “organ donation.” The Workplace Partners program spurred outreach activity from over 165 corporations, organizations and associations. The Campus Challenge generated more than 5,000 registrations alone. In addition, over 26 million media impressions helped to spread the word about the importance of re-registering. Ultimately, the Donate Life Illinois campaign reached its goal of 3.5 million registrations, and more importantly, over 800 lifesaving organ transplants took place through Gift of Hope and the generosity of donors during 2007. *CG&A has earned 10 different awards for this client, including the prestigious Publicity Club of Chicago Edwin J. Shaughnessy Quality of Life Award