21 Feb, 2009
Save A Life: Why donate blood Chopaal’s way
Posted by: yaser In: Startups| Undesireable Sound
There has been a latest frenzy triggered by cheap sms that I get a lot of SMS about someone needing blood. Most of them are just forwarded sms for the “greater good”. Upon observing it closely one could easily conclude that this is quite an inefficient way of doing it. I consider calling someone from my personal list and asking him to donate blood a lot more efficient. However SMS medium in this case is not totally worthless (We will come to that later).
I always felt that there is a dire need of a platform where one could efficiently arrange for blood donation. A medium where one could send “Targeted Blood Donation Requests” to people who have actually opted to donate blood. Something of the sort which could mimic manual lists (a common practice by many student organizations) in an efficient manner, removing intermediation in very effective and anti-spam way. There are a lot of questions to be answered while doing so,
- Who is going to ensure User’s privacy.
- Manual List ensure anti-spamming by introducing a moderator or a person who has the list(like in case of many institutions UET, FAST etc.).
- Avoiding useless echo of information to people who only consider forwarding it to be their job.
- Keeping it a short, simple and efficient process.
- Taking full advantage of automation.
- Keeping it cost effective yet speedy and reachable.
There are couple of websites that do this stuff and I have nothing against them but in order to bring this to a common person in the quickest possible manner and to bridge this gap a mobile solution is required. Chopaal has recently taken the responsibility to use the platform they have to come up with a solution that could incorporate all these things.
1- User can signup though sms or mobile.
2- User can create or join already Existing Tags.
3- User send SMS to a tag and its forwarded to all Tag members (User is charged only for one SMS he/she sends by the Telco whereas Chopaal remains free).
During a recent discussion with Chopaal’s CEO Asim Fayyaz he revealed that being the largest SMS network in Pakistan and connected to the youth throughout the country they plan to launch a social movement for blood donation by creating blood group tags for big cities and asking people who are willing to donate blood to join those. They are going to connect people through prioritized Tags where people can help each other in blood donation.
He further explained that trusted by more than 30K users and being one of the few legal advertisement platforms available in the market there isn’t any spamming issue. Users can communicate to each other directly without knowing the phone numbers so privacy aspect is convincingly covered. As people willing to donate blood will be joining the relevant tags so it will be highly targeted. User is not charged for anything so its cost effective and as its SMS based so its reachable even through the cheapest mobile phone out there.
I find it pretty impressive even though there is still room for improvements (User can’t really update their status if they are not available for blood donation but they can achieve it by leaving the tag if they find the requests annoying and join it again after six month break period). they have created Tags for all the blood groups for 3 major cities (Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad) but you can create your own for your city. Some of the tags are as folloows (rest are on the same format),
lhrApositive, lhrABnegative, isbOpositive, khiBnegative
So what are you waiting for. If you are a blood donor or running some donors network in an educational institute or personally, know some friends who does so, you can join Chopaal by going to their website www.chopaal.pk and you can invite your friends through their website or through sms (type “invite tagname phone number”and send it to 033-CHOPAAL-5 i.e. 03324672255) and start donating blood “Chopaal’s Way”.
No related posts.
Recent Comments