@BloodDonorsIn - a story of how the power of Twitter's 20 mln population across various parts of India was harnessed to build a community focussed on matching blood donors with patients in need, a vital social need. This is a rare many-many community on Twitter, with an anonymous founder and around 170K members. A real-time empathy network, @BloodDonorsIn is a community on the lines of Lennon's Imagine,with strangers unconditionally helping others across boundaries of religion, ethnicity, language etc.

1. how the power of Twitter helps save lives around the country

2.  It was the early days of social media (Facebook was valued at $1
bln), and a contrarian thought then finally resulted in the
@BloodDonorsIn network on Twitter, after an earlier attempt on
FB.
 Instead of the normal networking with friends, the objective was
simply to create a network where strangers could help each other
 It was safer to leave money out of the picture, so the currency
chosen was blood – how to match blood donors with patients
across the country
 Blood donation is a serious problem in India
◦ even Tata Memorial in Mumbai, the largest blood bank in the country,
faces a shortage of platelets
◦ blood is highly perishable, with a shelf life of 46 days, so many doctors
insist on fresh donations
◦ in smaller towns, brokers step in during such crises to exploit the
situation profitably.
 The network was operated anonymously for a number of reasons

3.  In a conceptual sense, the social structure here is quite different
from the typical one-many interactions that are common on
Twitter
 What started as a modest attempt at creating a group of blood
donors is today a bustling many-many community, probably the
largest worldwide on Twitter
 A full-fledged platform with different entities operating on both
the supply and demand sides of blood donation
 There are no “followers” here, as there is no person being
followed - only members of a purely online group working
together
 The only common thread linking all constituents is the goal –
and some of them have also teamed together offline to work
more effectively
 There are members from every continent who’ve joined us,
perhaps just to express solidarity – the primary countries being
the US, Pakistan, Singapore, Australia

4. 1. NGOs – primarily in posting blood donation requirements
2. Other Twitter groups – there are a number of smaller groups in the
same cause such as @BloodDonorsCG etc., and they post and RT
requests
3. Thousands of ordinary individuals, who largely RT requests
4. Celebrities such as Harsha Bhogle, who is a very committed contributor
5. A large number of journalists such as Sachin Kalbag, Nistula Hebbar,
Abhijit Majumder etc. help through RTs
6. Politicians across the spectrum such as Shashi Tharoor, Derek O’Brien,
Jay Panda etc. also help out when tagged
7. About a thousand extremely committed volunteers who spend a lot of
time and offline effort – liaise with hospitals, persuade friends, family,
colleagues etc. to donate in response to requests on the handle
8. As Admin, I send out blood donation requests in a templatized format
to maximize response, and help build the community by announcing
milestones, achievements, as well as create mini-celebrities from
amongst the motivated volunteers

5.  Started in 2008, there was an extremely slow beginning,
with less than 1000 members after three years
 However, the momentum has picked up now, with a 400%
growth in the last calendar year
 We’ve crossed 150K members this month, and to give you
an idea of the momentum:
◦ the first 50K members : 65 months
◦ the second 50K members : 11 months
◦ the third 50K members : 3 months
 We took around four years to reach 5000 members, and
now we add almost that many members every week
 The average weekly RT reach is between 8-12 mln, which
is extremely high relative to the size of the handle
 Ranked 99.92 percentile worldwide on Retweet rank
(retweetrank.com), as almost every tweet here is a request
that is retweeted

6.  While the metros dominate, with calls from donors
sometimes in minutes of a tweet being posted, we’ve
fulfilled requests from towns such as Bagalkot, Mancherial,
North Lakhimpur, Ongole, Bhavnagar, Warangal etc.
 We once fulfilled a request in Tonk – the donor was a real
hero who took a 3 hour bus journey to donate! He got to
hear of this from a friend in Bangalore.
 Using Twitter, requests crisscross the country to finally
reach a donor, and these messages move extremely
rapidly across strangers
 As the number of members grow, the requests do too
from all over the country - from more and more small
towns
 We’re not in the mainstream yet, and in most cases, a post
on our twitter handle is a last resort effort by the patient’s
family, so a donation here is in most cases a life-saver

9.  This is a very different type of online community – complete strangers
helping each other unconditionally with a rare display of connectedness
and empathy
 This moves across the usual divisions – there are no religious or regional
boundaries, as can be seen from just a sample of the tweets
 “Bridging social capital” at work here, as opposed to the narrow, tribal
instinct of “bonding social capital”
 Here we have a much broader radius of trust, with extremely
heterogeneous groups working together, unlike the more common
clannish bonds of religion, language, ethnicity, political leanings etc.
 Harsha Bhogle has contrasted the atmosphere in this community with
the negativity that’s common all over the online space
 One volunteer has written in that this is a daily sanctuary from the world
outside
 And perhaps counter-intuitively, many volunteers as well as donors have
written in expressing gratitude for the opportunity to help
 Visit @BloodDonorsIn to feel the difference !

10. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam
@BloodDonorsIn