Facebook Gets a Socially Relevant Status

Image: Kimberly White / Reuters

Facebook’s popularity can be leveraged for a greater good as shown by this initiative by its COO Sheryl Sandberg and Johns Hopkins Hospital. A study at John Hopkins University highlighted the increase in organ donation after Facebook users were enabled to share their donorship status on May 1, 2012. Sandberg and Andrew M Cameron, a transplant surgeon, jointly conceived this idea to address the acute shortage of organ donors in the US.

This has yielded results with 13,012 new donor registrations on the first day, a 21.2-fold increase on the average daily registrations.

India, too, faces a severe scarcity with more than 1,99,250 liver and 95,583 cornea transplant requirements going unmet each year.

With a community of 71 million active Facebook users, this initiative could be useful here too.