Facebook announced a new feature to make it easy to find blood donors for family and friends. Facebook is working with nonprofit organizations, health industry experts, potential donors, and people who have used Facebook to find blood donors to ensure that feature is useful for people in India.
Facebook made this announcement using a post written by By Hema Budaraju, Product Manager, Health and Ritesh Mehta, Head of Programs, South Asia.
We think we can help — by finding ways to more efficiently bring blood donors and people in need together. In India, this drives thousands of people to request blood donors on Facebook each week. Our research suggests that when people have better information and tools, they’re more willing to donate blood — and it’s easier for people who need blood to find donors.
Feature Availability
Feature will be rolling out from Oct 1st, 2017 — National Blood Donor Day — facebook users in India will be able to sign up as blood donor. Once the feature will be live, facebook users in India will see a message in their news feed for sign up. User can also edit their profile to sign up the feature. All the information will be kept private by Facebook and default privacy setting will be “Only me”. However, user can share this on their timeline.
Feature will be available on Android and Mobile web first, as these are the widely used platform in India. Company hasn’t spoken about iOS platform yet.
How can a seeker contact to donor
Seeker will not be able to directly contact to donor. But, whenever a seeker or an organization will need a donor, they will make a special type of facebook post. Then, facebook will show notification to nearest donor about someone needs blood.
Donor can verify the information and if he/she is satisfied, then he/she can directly contact to the seeker via WhatsApp, direct call or Facebook messanger.
The person who needs blood won’t be able to see any information about the donor, unless the donor explicitly provides it when he/she reaches out to the person in need of blood.
This feature may raise the awareness about the blood donation and hope that right seeker will get right blood for their loved ones.
People in India can go to facebook.com/donateblood to learn more and sign-up to be a blood donor.
