Facebook Has Launched A New Application To help People Donate Blood In India

Facebook will soon launch an application that will assist blood donors to get connected with recipients. This social networking platform will soon roll out a new feature designed for its second-largest user base (India) to make it easier and faster for people, blood banks and hospitals to connect to blood donors to recipients whenever needed.

As reported by The Hindu, under this move which is getting started from 1 October-Country’s National Blood Donation Day, Facebook users in India will be able to sign up to become willing blood donors.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had posted on his wall: “In an emergency, people often reach out to their community on Facebook – asking for donors, organising donation groups and checking local blood banks. Every week across India, there are thousands of posts from people seeking blood donations. Like many countries, India doesn’t always have enough donors to provide everyone with reliable access to safe blood.”

Hema Budaraju, who is the Product Manager, Health at Facebook said, “All information such as blood group, whether they have donated blood before, among others, will remain private and set to ‘only me’ by default, but at the same time people can choose to share their donor status on their timelines.”

She further added that many countries in the world including India have the shortage of safe blood and there are not enough people donating blood to meet the demand of people who need it, in many cases, this leads to patients and their family being responsible for finding donors to replace blood in the blood banks or hospitals.

“So we spoke to blood banks, small and large hospitals, health industry experts, non-profit organisations, potential donors, and people who have used Facebook to find blood donors to get a complete understanding of the ecosystem and the challenges to make sure that what we are designing will be useful to people in India.” Ms Budaraju said.

Facebook will enable people and organisations over the next few weeks to get in touch with the donors in an easy way, where the individuals and organisations in need of blood would be able to create a particular post with information such as time, name of the blood bank or hospital, contact number and so on.

Ms Budaraju further explained that Facebook would automatically inform blood donors who may be nearby once a request is generated. Donors can then contact the requester directly through Messenger, WhatsApp or a phone call, however, their information will not be available to the requester unless the donor himself/herself explicitly provides it.

Back in 2012, Facebook conducted a similar drive to sign people up for organ donation. And its News Feed alerts to register to vote were shown to have helped get 2 million people registered, as reported by Techcrunch.

Facebook has an enormous capacity to push people to do good. The Logical Indian community appreciates the humanitarian initiative taken by Facebook to help people survive and give them a new lease of life through this feature.