Tinder Organ Donation: Hookup App Joins With UK's National Health Services To Woo Young Donors

Now you can literally give your heart away, thanks to Tinder. For the next two weeks, the mobile dating app has teamed up with the U.K.'s National Health Services to encourage users to become organ donors, amid a recent decline in the number of such donors that has alarmed medical authorities.

A report published in July by the National Health Services' Blood and Transport found that the number of people donating organs dropped for the first time in over a decade, by 3 percent. "The decreases we see across all types of organ transplant will lead to more deaths if we do not reverse this trend," Sally Johnson, director of the Organ Donation and Transplantation at the National Health Services' Blood and Transport, warned in July, the Guardian reported. "We know there is a combination of reasons for the decreases, but we cannot hope to save more lives unless U.K. citizens talk about organ donation with their families and agree to donate if ever they are asked," she added.

Now, by partnering with Tinder, the National Health Services is targeting younger people in the hopes of encouraging them to join its organ donor registry. After swiping right to match with another user's profile, Tinder users will see the message, "If only it was that easy for those in need of a life-saving organ to find a match."

Hermion Way, head of communications for Tinder in Europe, said that the goal was to "encourage people to make and act upon a different decision to sign up as an organ donor."

As the supply of available donated organs has declined, so has the number of transplants. In 2014, a waiting list for heart heart transplants in the U.K. had 286 patients, compared to 126 in 2010 and 88 in 2007, according to the British Heart Foundation. In the past ten years, more than 6,000 patients in the U.K. have died waiting for organ transplants, the BBC reported.

Johnson, of the NHS, said the relationship between Tinder and NHS was all about "educating and encouraging people to sign up for organ donation," pointing out that signing up takes the same amount of time as swiping through a few profiles on Tinder.