Illinois Students Get Creative to Promote Donate Life Illinois

Donate Life Illinois recently partnered with Best New Ad and college students/professors across Illinois to create advertisements that promote organ and tissue donation. Students were asked to create ads in three different categories (print, audio and video) that would encourage others to register their decision to be organ and tissue donors at DonateLifeIllinois.org.

Students from more than 20 colleges and universities throughout the state submitted hundreds of advertisements for this contest. The level of creativity shown from these students was off the charts. We are extremely happy with the results and are excited to share the winners with you. Here are the a couple of the finalist and winning selections in the print and video categories:

Finalist (Video) – Advanced Advertising Class – Illinois Institiute of Art

First-Place (Print) – Philip Rau – College of DuPage

 Finalist (Print) – Kevin Millar – Illinois Institute of Art 

What do you think? Post your comments on the Donate Life Illinois Facebook Fan Page. Want to see more ads? Go to Best New Ad to view all of the submissions for this project. 

Lisle Donor Awareness Day and Organ Donation News Roundup

Yesterday officially marked Donor Awareness Day in Lisle, Ill. Spearheaded by Donate Life Illinois volunteer Colette Jordan, the city of Lisle is helping call attention to the more than 100,000 people waiting for lifesaving organ/tissue transplants. In addition, Colette has pulled together a symposium (Crisis in the Community – Issues Relating to Organ Donation) at College of DuPage to engage the campus community in discussion around the issue.

College of DuPage is also flying a “Donate Life” flag all month to help call attention to the gracious donors and family members that have helped save other people’s lives. Check out this story from last week’s College of Dupage Courier student newspaper (pg. 14).

In other news, Chicago Tribune columnist  Dawn Turner Trice writes today about the importance of registering to be an organ donor.

In addition, the Southtown Star wrote a nice article this week about Angelique Marseille’s volunteer leadership and efforts to promote donation.

Big thanks to Kristen down in St. Louis as well for this great blog post and for doing what she does as a transplant nurse!

-Scott

2008 Campus Challenge Winners Announced!

Registered C.O.D. Student

With a whopping 559 registrations, College of DuPage stole the show as the 2008 Campus Challenge winner for total registrations! MacMurray College was also designated as a winner for registering the largest percentage of a school’s population.

Throughout the six-week Challenge, the seventeen participating schools managed to register 2,069 residents as lifesaving donors! When you consider that a registered organ/tissue donor has the potential to help save or enhance the lives of more than 25 people, the efforts of our participating schools could impact more than 51,725 people waiting for lifesaving transplants.

Kudos to our winners and a HUGE thanks to all of the students, student groups, faculty and staff that again helped make this year’s Campus Challenge effort a success.

We’ll have the results posted on our website this week, but here’s a glance at how our participating schools fared in the total registrations category.

Total registrations – 2,069

C.O.D. – 559
U of I – 393
NIU – 234
UIC- 186
WIU – 120
ISU – 105
Loyola – 99
Lewis – 95
Augustana – 54
EIU – 53
IWU – 37
Knox – 36
MacMurray – 35
IIT – 21
Knox – 19
Millikin – 16
SIU – 7

Great job everyone!

– Scott

2008 Campus Challenge Update – Week 4 Recap

Our 17 participating schools were back at it again last week, battling it out for a top slot in the 2008 Campus Challenge. College of DuPage remains on top with 271 registrations but watch out for the University of Illinois as they’re currently in second place with 218 registrations. The U of I’s student newspaper, the Daily Vidette, also ran a nice story today about U of I’s Students for Organ Donation chapter and their involvement with the Challenge.

Special thanks to everyone who took a moment to help out ole Morgan D’ Organ with a costume selection for Halloween by voting on our poll. We’ve got a special post to share this week recapping Morgan’s night out, straight from the big man himself.

Current Campus Challenge Standings – November 3, 2008

1,311 TOTAL REGISTRATIONS
C.O.D. – 271
U of I – 218
UIC – 143
NIU – 159
Lewis – 90
Loyola – 87
ISU – 60
Augustana – 54
EIU – 50
WIU – 44
Knox – 36
IWU – 35
MacMurray – 27
Midwestern – 15
Millikin – 13
SIU – 5
UIS – 2

This week’s Mini-Challenge revolves around a theme of “Take 5, Save Lives” – where we are asking students to take 5 minutes this week to continue to reach out and grow their individual school Facebook groups as well e-mail their friends and contacts, encouraging them to register. Hop over to our Campus Challenge Facebook group to learn more.

Until next time,

Scott