| An online portal to match people for blood donations may save countless lives |
| By Randa El Tahawy |
| Ever received messages asking for urgent blood donations and didn’t know whether the email, Facebook wall post or BBM broadcast was true? If you’ve ignored these messages because of doubts about their reliability, you don’t have to feel guilty about it anymore. A new website, law3andakdam.com, gives would-be blood donors confidence that their donations are going to those who really need it. Law aandak dam is a colloquial term that literally means “if you have blood,” but has come to mean “if you have a conscience.” There really couldn’t be a better name for Egypt’s first online platform that matches blood donors with patients based on location and blood type. The site’s founder, Hisham Kharma is a 31-year-old creative director and music producer who works closely with the advertising agency Promoseven. The young entrepreneur also produced an album, First Voyage “World Fusion Chillouts” in June 2010, making it onto the bestseller lists at Virgin Megastore after the first week of its release. Drawing upon his background in computer science, Kharma created the site with partner IT company Shuratech and design help from his own soon-to-be-launched think tank, thinkk. “The idea of this project, even the logo, was [shaped] in a way that it would look modern and trendy; we wanted to tackle this serious issue and turn it into an easy, accessible thing,” he says. Kharma came up with the idea after having trouble finding a blood donor for a family member in need of a rare blood type. The point was further driven home when chain messages pleading for blood donations for strangers practically flooded his phone and social media accounts. Egypt seemed in painful need of a way to match donors and patients. “I really like technology, gadgets and [the internet], so I wanted to mix all of these together for a good cause. The name was catchy [due to] the double meaning. People in Egypt need something provocative to pay attention,” says Kharma, adding that he encourages everyone who has creative ideas to just go ahead and implement them. According to the Ministry of Health, blood donations have dropped 50 percent since February in the wake of the January 25 Revolution. Demand has risen, however, with a jump from 1.1 million units last year to about 1.4 million. Kharma wants to close the gap. Just one click will direct donors and patients to a registration form to fill in the details necessary for a match: blood type, location and whether or not they want to be included on the public listing. Once that’s done, the information is added to a database to start the matching process. “Automatically, once [the blood recipient] clicks on the submit button, it sends an email and a Facebook notification to a matching donor. [Through a very simple process] it matches donors and recipients based on location and blood type,” explains Kharma. The potential recipient and donor can contact each other to coordinate when and where to set up the blood donation. At press time, the site was in a soft launch phase as Kharma and his team are still establishing a broad database of donors. Even so, within the first week of the soft launch they received 4,000 hits without having done any marketing. Social media such as Facebook and Twitter have helped spread the word about law3andakdam, and requests for donations are already coming in. “The [Twitter] followers and the people who are part of the [Facebook] group are always ready to help people. After the Maspero clashes, in 15 minutes, the number of our followers increased because [there was a great need for]blood, and we were making announcements and telling people where to go to donate,” says Kharma. The site is expected to officially launch in a month’s time, as Kharma explains that they want to have a fully operational site that matches people automatically and gives recipients plenty of viable donor options to choose from. Eventually Kharma wants to have a list of new requests for blood donations appear right on the home page, in addition to integrating these requests as plugins on other websites. “These things take time,” he says, “and of course in order to have a website that has a meaning there has to be enough donors.” |
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