Her last chance; a cry-out for help on social media.
By the end of 2018 Lotte Mertens, a 32 year old Dutch woman, felt desperate. After surviving a brain bacteria, eight days of coma and permanent kidney failure, she was in urgent need of a kidney transplant. Unfortunately her family couldn’t help her because they weren’t a match. Her last chance; a cry-out for help on social media.
Together with a friend at Wefilm, she created a video to ask her friends on social media to share her message: I urgently need a kidney donor, help me find this special person by sharing my video. Within one day her video went viral. The key was to make the question to the audience small: don’t ask a kidney, just ask to share.
The video reached 3.192.279 million people on Facebook, got over 70.000 likes on Instagram and was shared more than60.000 times. RTL Late Night, LindaNieuws, Viva were among the media that shared her story. Over 500 people reached out to her to let her know they potentially want to donate a kidney to her. The loving responses were mind blowing.
The most special response came from Anneloes, who sent Lotte a message on Instagram that she was already physically approved to donate and she wanted to help Lotte out. They turned out to be a match and six weeks later she donated her kidney to Lotte. The transplant was very successful and gave Lotte her life back, creating a bond between them for life.
Anneloes and Lotte decided to teamup with Wefilm once more. This time to create another video to thank everyone that contributed to Lotte finding her donor; from the people sharing the video, to everyone considering to donate a kidney.Ending the video with the note that there are many more patients like Lotte who are in desperate need for a kidney, asking once more to share the video to raise awareness about kidney donations.
Again many media shared their story (Koffietijd, Viva, Lindanieuws and many others) which resulted in many more anonymous donations, kidney patients starting their own campaign to find a kidney and Lotte and Anneloes teaming up with the Dutch Kidney foundation to improve the process of finding a kidney online.
