I agree that registering for organ donation after death helps but does no direct harm. But I think we need to have a high bar for including an activity in the typical cache of activities that EAs promote to others. We want the act to be similar to other acts that have near-maximal impact. Donation fits that bill because once you start donating anywhere, you can switch to other donation targets that have a big long term impact.

For organ donation, though, I don't think it really gives you ideas about anything that can be done that has any real long-term significance. If you go down the organ-donation vertical, you might end up with kidney donation, or with extreme ideas about self-sacrifice. This kind of ideology is really catchy --- It brought Zell Kravinsky mild fame, and was the main object of the book Strangers Drowning. But I don't think that's the main way that long-run good is done. I think doing long-run good requires mostly a more analytical or startup mindset. If you do things like live kidney donation, I actually think you might do less good than working for the week of your operation, and donating some of that to a top longtermist charity.

I get that my claim is that the second-order effects outweigh the first-order ones here, but I don't think that should be so surprising in the context of EA outreach --- we need to carve an overall package --- that gets people to do some good in the short-run, but most-importantly, that builds up a productivity mindset, and gets people to do a lot of good over the longer term.

Post-mortem donation is fine, but being asked to sign up for kidney donation would be severely trust-destroying for me.

Summary: Maybe groups should do this, but there are a lot of things groups should "maybe" do, and this doesn't seem like a clear best candidate.

4. It takes approximately 333 donor registrations to counterfactually increase the number of actual organ donors by 1, which suggests low tractability. ("[O]nly 3 in 1,000 people die in a way that allows for organ donation.")

I agree with others here that EA groups should try activities that:

1. Do a significant, easily quantifiable amount of good;

2. Address important problems;

3. Have some EA motivation; and

4. Give people a chance to talk about their EA worldview with non-EAs.

I think organ donor drives hit points 2 and 3 well, and aren't too bad on 1 or 4 (the impact isn't easy to quantify and organ donation isn't an EA cause area, but the topic is at least clearly positive/altruistic).

But even if a donor registration drive is a reasonable candidate for group activity, is it really better than other available options?

Examples:

• Promoting some important piece of local legislation (there Open Phil-related ballot initiatives in at least three states before the 2016 election).
• Any of the other opportunities mentioned in the EA Volunteering group (including research and assistance with writing projects).
• Other "classic" forms of volunteering that seem tractable/neglected (e.g. helping at a local shelter, manning an emotional support hotline)
• Learning skills that might help them make a bigger impact later (not just skills related to research or other "EA" pursuits, but also things like CPR or "how to administer Naloxone")

This is far from a complete list.

I don't know how good these things are compared to donor registration drives, but it seems like a group should examine a few different options before deciding to carry out an activity. Or, if they don't have confidence in their ability to estimate impact (or time to do so), they may just want to choose an activity based on other features (e.g. how well it will help the group bond, how convenient it is, how appealing it will be to new members, how well it ties into EA).

Meta: I'm concerned about the amount of downvotes I see that aren't accompanied with any justification. Consider that there is a lot of information value in a negative judgment. I imagine that the author would be very happy to hear about this, and more generally, I imagine that EA as a whole would skill up a *lot* faster if downvotes came with instructions.

I agree that this has the potential to be highly impactful and it's definitely neglected. The fact that it can piggy-back on increasing exposure to non-EAs about EA topics makes this more persuasive, even if it the number of people helped might be small.

My only question would be whether that spare volunteer capacity could/would be used to persuade/train/target people within the DMV - since they are in a position to greatly increase the number of people who sign up by spending only an extra 2-3 seconds nudging people toward a yes, since it's a standard question for the driver's license application. I've read a study somewhere about how this was surprisingly effective - but I do realize this is a significant change in trajectory, but good to point out nonetheless.

I also see a potential upside of having more people wonder what other neglected topics can have outsized effects, thus a great lead-in to EA topics. If this were to become another cause area, it could garner some momentum, possibly enough to pressure some officials to contemplate an opt-out system, rather than the current opt-in system which would theoretically rid us of this shortage with only a nudge.

I'm always of mixed opinion about organ donation. Yes, it seems straightforwardly beneficial, but it's also at odds with surprising things. For example, I'm signed up for cryonics, and this means it's very import I not be an organ donor both because my organs would be unusable after perfusion and because if I were an organ donor and was willing to accept a lower quality preservation by possibly not having my regularly circulatory system in place to help with cooling, it would still be a bad deal because doctors would hold on to my body for an unspecified amount of time in not necessarily ideal preservation conditions for my brain before maybe releasing me to the cryonics team hours or days later.

This would effectively mean pitting organ donation and life extension, at least in part, against each other within EA. Not necessarily a blocker if people think more organ donation among people who don't sign up for cryonics is worth it in expectation over, say, getting more people signed up for cryonics, but it's worth factoring into the calculation.

6. For signaling and credibility reasons, I think it's generally good for EA groups to run activities that have very concrete, public, measurable impacts. This scores well on all of those (e.g., # of donors registered).

[7] ...especially if groups have underutilized volunteer capacity.

I would say it's worth doing for this reason alone. One reason group volunteer activities are often so ineffective is that the real point is social bonding over a shared altruistic project. EA groups could use more of that feeling of camaraderie and discrete accomplishment that doesn't generally follow work on the most effective causes. Since I think it's worth finding more activities that new people or low-commitment people could do to get started or that would boost morale, I don't think it's necessary to justify something like this solely in terms of direct effectiveness. Activities like this can really strengthen ties in the group, which are a huge multiplier the group's and the individuals' effectiveness.

Also, this is just my observation, but I think getting people to do easy things like giving up their organs after death creates a sense of altruistic buy-in that leaves them more favorably disposed toward greater altruism later.

I second concerns about making organ donor registration drives an EA "thing," but I think it would probably be a nice idea for individual groups to do of their own iniative, especially if they think it would be good for them socially.

While individual registration drives are well-intentioned, they attempt to solve a high-dimensional infrastructure problem with a low-leverage solution. The true bottleneck of organ transplantation is institutional and regulatory friction. Instead of chasing manual signatures, the EA community should advocate for a paradigm shift toward Web3-driven sovereign frameworks. We need to build a system where the protocol utilizes Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) to verify medical consensus like brain death and legal identity instantly—ensuring absolute cryptographic privacy without exposing sensitive personal data. By deploying Smart Contracts on a decentralized ledger, the allocation process can execute automatically in real-time the exact moment an organ becomes viable, eliminating human bias or black-market intervention. This entire biometric network could be governed by a specialized DAO, creating an immutable, cross-verified, and transparent bio-resource pipeline. EA should focus on funding these algorithmic breakthroughs rather than expanding a broken, analog waiting list.