Are You an Organ Donor? Now You Can Let Your Facebook Network Know

Mark Zuckerberg drew inspiration from Steve Jobs and a dinner date with his girlfriend to come up with Facebook's newest feature: the organ donor option that lets users reveal to their networks if they're organ donors or not.

The feature was rolled out earlier this week with the goal of helping the more than 114,000 people who are currently waiting for a heart, kidney, or liver transplant. You can also opt to include a story about what made you want to be an organ donor which will be posted along with the announcement on your timeline.

If you aren't an organ donor, then the organ donor feature will proceed to direct you to a link of your appropriate registry.

We never could have anticipated that what started as a small network would evolve into such a powerful tool for communication and problem solving. We want to make it simple. You just put in the state or country that you’re from, so that we can help link you to the official registries.

-- Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO

The response to the new option has been positive, with the Donate Life California registry reporting an 800 percent increase in organ donor registrations since the new feature was rolled out.

As of 12:30pm today, the Donate Life California registry has increased its online donor sign ups by nearly 800% from yesterday thanks to this mornings announcement of the partnership with Facebook! Thank you Facebook!

-- Donate Life California

The feature is currently available only to users from the US and UK, but Facebook plans to expand access to users from more countries in the coming weeks.

Article by Hazel Chua
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