From 1995 till 2007 - About 50,000 US citizens died due to want of a suitable organ donor.

An interesting statistic - Only 28% Americans have chosen to donate their organs while 99.9% of French citizens are potential donors.

What is the reason for this striking difference? Let us explore one by one.

• Awareness? - This cannot be the reason as large number of campaigns have been carried out in USA.
• Moral development? - Do Americans believe that Doctors may not work as hard to save life of patients who have agreed to donate organs? This cannot be the reason. Evidence - Germans and Austrians share the same language, culture and are neighbors but have huge difference on this issue - 12% Germans are donors while 99.9% of Austrians are donors.

Something more important is at work behind all this - something more important than deliberate reasoning, national thought processes, or individual preferences.


The reason is - In the US, Great Britain and Germany, the legal default is that nobody is a donor without registering to be one. While in France, Austria, Hungary, everyone is a potential donor unless they opt out. This means the DEFAULT RULE works everywhere on this issue.

This is the same as Opt-In versus Opt-Out rule in a software program. As you see this rule can have serious long standing repercussions. Have you tried working with the default rule in organisational processes? It can work wonderfully for you. Comments welcome.

Best Regards,

VK

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Quite insightful !

Indeed same concept has been used in email marketing .

In many web portals ,

"opt-in" generally refers to a chec/tick box which, if filled in by the user, indicates that they would like to be contacted by a particular form of communication. Unless the user ticks the box then the organisation cannot use their details or contact them.

In contrast an "opt-out", where the default position is that the user will be contacted by that form of marketing, unless they untick the box to indicate that they would prefer not to be.

Generally Opt-out can give advantage to a company , as it would require no further action by the recipient , and on an average , company can sent out more number of mails.

But on the other side Opt-In will help company in reaching out to only targeted audience and thus higher conversion rate . So choice entirely depends on company's strategy .

Yes.. I have a strong negative opinion on this..

The companies are just playing on the ignorance of the customers.. which in fact is sad.

 

for a good cause like Organ donation, may be we can implement this.. but there should be a way to make sure that companies don't use it for their own whims and fancies..

 

In my view, the basic rule should be to have a 'default opt out' ( special permissions need to be in place for 'default opt in' )..

 

Example.. we get annoyed by the number of marketing calls that we receive just because the mobile service provider has a 'default opt in' for National Calling Registry.. we need to specifically opt out to be a part of 'National do not call registry'..