Sometime back 22-year-old Karthik Naralasetty saw a request on Facebook seeking a B+ blood donor for his father who was undergoing a heart surgery. Surprisingly, after two hours a new post read, “Thanks to Facebook, we found a donor for my dad!”
That got Karthik thinking that Facebook can be used to solve the issue of finding blood donors when in emergency. Soon Karthik, who was studying computer science at the Rutgers University, dropped out of college to start his own company which gave birth to Socialblood.org in June. The service connects blood donors and recipients of the same blood type through Facebook.
Says Karthik, “We launched eight groups for eight blood groups and opened it for the public. Soon, we had around 200 members in all groups combined and requests from users started coming in. The numbers started growing from then on. Now we have around 1,500 members, who are actively sharing information and responding to emergencies. And we are proud to share, we saved a three-year-old kid’s life.”
Even though there are hundreds of websites which connect blood donors to blood seekers but there is none which has utilised social networks. Which means it has zero cost involved to run the initiative.
“The platform is based on Facebook framework so it’s very easy to scale the project. Currently, we are working on a location-based model to make this a global initiative. So now we are raising funds for the project as we have to buy server space to manage the amount of requests,” he says.
However, the biggest challenge still lies in fighting the fears associated with blood donation. “Some feel donating blood will make them weak while others feel the process transmits diseases like AIDS. So we are also planning to launch an awareness campaign that addresses these issues,” he concludes.