*Purpose: With the steady increase in the number of non-directed donors (NDDs) in the U.S. in the past decade, understanding their motivations may help better engage and support altruistic donors. While NDDs are primarily driven to donate by their desire to help others, there is limited literature on their specific motivations and decision-making processes. This study examined the experiences of 31 NDDs to identify and explore the factors that motivated them to donate.

*Methods: A trained qualitative interviewer conducted in-depth telephone interviews with participants to explore their kidney donation experiences. We carried out content analysis to create and define categories relating to the NDD donation experience, and code interview transcripts.

*Results: Participants described their driving motivations to donate within three major categories: (1) inspiration from media (absent personal connection), (2) recognition of the broad need for kidney donation, and (3) personal motivation. Twelve NDDs expressed an impersonal motivation to donate, for example watching a story on television or reading a post on Facebook about kidney donation prompted their interest in becoming an NDD. Ten NDDs mentioned that they were motivated to donate after learning about the broad need for living donation given the current kidney shortage. Seven NDDs described a personal connection related to the experience of loss or suffering in their lives that subsequently motivated them to donate.

*Conclusions: Understanding how our participants were motivated to donate may help improve current living donor recruitment strategies and help increase the living donor pool. Displaying the specific statistics of the number of patients on the transplant waitlist, or presenting a narrative with a kidney disease patient describing their life on dialysis while waiting for a transplant, may be valuable in prompting an individual to learn more about becoming an NDD. Moreover, using quantitative and qualitative approaches to deliver content and educate the general population on the kidney shortage may better increase their awareness on the need for living kidney donors which may better motivate them to become an NDD.

« Back to 2020 American Transplant Congress