PHILADELPHIA, PA – Gift of Life Donor Program, the vital link between organ donors and patients awaiting transplant, is pleased to announce the winners of the 2025 Students Save Lives College Challenge. Fourteen Pennsylvania and New Jersey colleges participated in the challenge, registering 704 people as organ and tissue donors – making College Challenge history in a landmark year of advocacy. Those individuals have the potential to save more than 5,000 lives!
Each organization was tasked with holding a donor registration drive and special event while using social media to promote organ and tissue donor registration.
Students from the Paul Dannelley Chapter of Public Relations Society of America (PRSSA) at Susquehanna University won first place with their Hues for Hope campaign, engaging more than 500 students in campus activities. The week-long campaign consisted of a slew of events that reached more than 10,000 people on social media. Overall, these students executed a well thought-out campaign that showed great creativity and overall, the utmost commitment to Gift of Life’s mission. It is this team’s sixth year participating in the College Challenge.
The Pennsylvania College of Technology Wellness Committee diversified their outreach and earned second place. The students brought awareness to living donation, while hosting campus events and launching an email campaign that reached 7,200 employees in eight school districts. They also had an impressive social media reach gaining dozens of new followers. Third place goes to the Communications and Ethics Course at the University of Scranton for their use of social media and strategic table sits, optimizing engagement by choosing locations with frequent foot traffic. Their efforts led to more than 200 students signing up to become organ donors.
Pennsylvania College of Technology Wellness Committee registered 265 people to become organ donors, the most of any school involved in the challenge.
The annual competition invites organizations and clubs at universities and colleges across Gift of Life’s region to help increase organ donor awareness and registration among students, faculty, and staff on campus. The impact of an organ donor is tremendous. One organ donor can save the lives of up to eight people, and a tissue donor can improve the lives of about 100 others. Registration for next year’s College Challenge opens in Fall 2025. Reach out to Dwendy Johnson at djohnson@donors1.org for more information.
About Gift of Life Donor Program
Gift of Life Donor Program, founded in 1974 and headquartered in Philadelphia, is the federally designated organ procurement organization (OPO) for the eastern half of Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware serving 11.3 million people. It works with 124 acute care hospitals and 12 transplant centers in its region, as well as more than 100 transplant centers throughout the country, to provide the most comprehensive array of services available in the U.S. to the donation and transplantation community. Thanks to the generosity of its community, Gift of Life has coordinated 14,860 donors and 41,140 organs for transplant, the most of any OPO in the country since the inception of our national donation system in 1988. Overall, Gift of Life has coordinated more than 62,000 organs and more than two million tissue transplants since its founding. One organ donor can save the lives of up to eight people and a tissue donor can improve the lives of 100 others. Learn more and sign up at donors1.org.