Using Social Media to Save Lives, Pt. 2 of 3

In part 2, Dayal Gaitonde presents the strategy of helping Sameer Bhatia. Bhatia, thirty-one years old and married just one year, received his diagnosis of leukemia, while visiting Mumbai, India, in May of 2007. Doctors told Sameer, who did not respond to chemotherapy and radiation, that a bone-marrow transfer was necessary. For Caucasians, there is an 80% chance of finding a matched donor in the NMDP register. Of the 6.8 million registrants, however, 20% are minorities but only 1% are South Asian. So if you are South Asian, the odds of finding a match are 1 in 20,000. Sameer did not find a match that he desperately needed in the registry. To make matters worse, in India, a country of over 1 billion people, there is no bone marrow registry. Sameer's family and friends focused on a single goal: to immediately register 20,000 South East Asians into the National Bone Marrow Registry. Second, they grabbed attention to making their messages bold, crisp, human and using many channels. Third, they engaged by making Sameer knowable, by telling his story authentically and vividly, and becoming personally meaningful to even strangers. Fourth, they enabled action by creating a clear call to action in all communication and tracking metrics and collective impact, and feeding those results back to the community empowered to act. This video explains how they used social media to achieve their goal and find a perfect match for Sameer. For anyone who knows someone who is going through a health challenge and wants to harness social media to achieve a goal, please view: http://www.helpsameer.org/strategy/
Recorded: June 23, 2009

Category:

Education

Tags:

• social media
• empowerment marketing
• marketing
• leukemia
• Vinay
• Stanford
• Monkey Bin
• bone marrow
• South Asian
• transplant
• minority
• donor
• registry
• campaign
• Aaker
• YouTube
• Facebook
• Twitter
• MySpace
• volunteers