Center for Social Innovation

Published: June 23, 2009

In part 2, Dayal Gaitonde presents the strategy of helping Sameer Bhatia. Bhatia, 31 years old and married just one year, received his diagnosis of leukemia, while visiting Mumbai, India, in May 2007. Doctors told Sameer, who did not respond to chemotherapy and radiation, that a bone-marrow transplant was necessary.

For Caucasians, there is an 80 percent chance of finding a matched donor in the NMDP register. Of the 6.8 million registrants, however, 20 percent are minorities but only 1 percent 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 by making their messages bold, crisp, and human, using many channels. Third, they engaged by making Sameer knowable, by telling his story authentically and vividly, making his story personally meaningful to even strangers. Fourth, they enabled action by creating a clear call to action in all communication, 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/