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You'd think an organ donation awareness effort would fall under the purview of the other Chicago-based AMA-- the guys with the lab coats and stethoscopes-- but, in fact, the American Marketing Association is behind this one.

The AMA's collegiate chapters are in the midst of a two-year project to improve the awareness of the need for organ donation and to increase the number of registered organ donors in the United States. Known as AMASavesLives, the project encourages AMA collegiate members to spread the word about organ donation to their friends, families and classmates via social media. The effort includes competitions among AMA collegiate chapters including the number of YouTube videos they can post for the cause or the number of people they can register as organ donors. And the project's Web site, AMASavesLives.com, includes links to each state's organ donor registration process so that site visitors can sign up immediately.

Led by James Peltier, a marketing professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and president of Applied Ph.D. Research LLC, in conjunction with the University of Wisconsin Organ Procurement Organization and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the AMASavesLives project is an effort to determine whether student organizations can develop grassroots marketing campaigns for organ donation or another cause, says Andy Dahl, the project's program director and the director of research at Applied PhD Research in Wisconsin.

"In a couple of states ... we're testing how an integrated marketing plan that includes some offline communications" compares with a solely online marketing effort and trying to determine "how this can be replicated outside of organ donation," Dahl says.

At the AMA's 32nd annual International Collegiate Conference in New Orleans last week, AMASavesLives encouraged student attendees to film more than 190 videos to raise organ donation awareness on YouTube and more than 80 attendees to register as organ donors with their states, Dahl says.

For more information on AMASavesLives, visit AMASavesLives.com.