Tinder Wants You To Donate Your Organs


 
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By Daniel Roberts

Swipe right. Nothing is sexier than donating an organ to someone in need.

At least, that’s what popular dating app Tinder is hoping its users believe. The company has partnered with the National Health Service in England to make it easier for users to register as organ donors.

The NHS hopes that Tinder - whose user demographic is the ideal target group for the NHS - can help it raise awareness of the long wait times for organ donations.

“While a third of the UK population have registered their intention to donate on the NHS Organ Donor Register, millions more haven’t taken the final step to sign up,” said Sally Johnson, director of organ donation and transplant at NHS Blood and Transplant.

"Joining the register takes only a couple of minutes -- about the same amount of time as a few swipes on Tinder.”

Tinder, which oversees 26 million matches a day worldwide, has previously facilitated two separate people meeting their kidney donors. For the new campaign, called “The Wait”, it has created unique celebrity profiles featuring a pink heart logo.

“If only it was that easy for those in need of a life saving organ to find a match,” the celebrities will message to users who swipe right to them.

They will then ask users to sign up to the NHS Organ Donor Register and provide a link. Celebrities that are part of the initiative include Jamie Laing, from Made in Chelsea, Jade Jones, Olympic Gold medallist in taekwondo, and Gemma Oaten, from Emmerdale.

“I got involved in this campaign as it’s a great way of reaching out to young people,” said Jones. “It’s also the season of giving so hopefully we’ll get even more people signed up thanks to Tinder.”

Earlier this month Wales switched from an opt-in for organ donations to an opt-out, meaning all residents of Wales are automatically signed up for organ donations. It hopes this will lead to a 25 per cent increase in the number of organs available for transplants.

This summer, the number of people on the UK donor register dropped for the first time in 11 years. The 5 per cent drop meant that 224 fewer people received an organ transplant last year, according to the Organ Donation and Transplantation Activity Report.

There are currently 7,000 people waiting for a transplant in the UK. Over 6,000 people have died while waiting in the last decade.

A spokesperson for Tinder, which is owned by Match Group MTCH -0.37% , hints that the company is open to making the same type of partnership with a health provider in the U.S. “We’re delighted to partner with the NHS to raise awareness about organ donation and help save lives,” spokesperson Rosette Pambakian tells Fortune. “We’ve had an overwhelmingly positive response from our users so far and would like to run more campaigns like this in the future.”

The initiative brings Tinder some much-needed goodwill just weeks after a brutal profile of CEO Sean Rad in London’s Evening Standard in which he discussed his sex life. After the story ran and was picked up by major outlets, parent company Match Group, on the eve of an initial public offering, made an SEC filing to distance itself from Rad’s comments.


 
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    • Editor-in Chief:
    • Theodore Massey
    • Editor:
    • Robert Sokonow
    • Editorial Staff:
    • Musaba Dekau
      Lin Takahashi
      Thomas Levine
      Cynthia Casteneda Avina
      Ronald Harvinger
      Lisa Andonis

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