How to organize a drive
Here's some information on how to schedule a marrow drive.
- Find a location where you can setup couple of tables and few chairs. Location should be preferably be indoors or at least covered. It’s best if you know if a gathering of some sort is going to happen where lot of people will turn out.
- Contact appropriate agencies SAMAR for east coast and AADP for west coast, Asian Marrow for south west and setup a date and time with them.
- Campaign about the drive in local community - send out emails, put printed flyers and posters (see samples) at places of interest.
- Have couple three people to help you during the drive when people show to sign up.
- During the drive, talk to interested people explain them the situation
Here is what I usually say.
"You might have heard of Nirali on TV or via emails. Nirali is currently suffering from a rare type of Leukemia, a rare type of blood cancer. The only hope of her survival is to find a bone marrow donor. The only problem chances of a match is very rare, about one in a million, mainly because there aren't many Indians or Asian's registered on the national registry and only an India can help another Indian. That is why we are doing this drive right here to sign up as many POTENTIAL donors as possible. The registration process is extremely simple. All you have to do is to fill out a form and give a sample of your saliva. It will take 10 minutes of your personal time but you could actually save a child's life. This is completely free, no cost involved. It’s a pure donation all it cost is little bit of you personal time."
Some of the other facts that might come handy while persuade people
- When a Caucasian is looking for a match they find 15 matches on an average where as opposed to an Indian they might find one match or none.
- This can happen to anyone at any age and god forbid if you get into similar situation then this will be the only registry that will come to rescue.
- There is no such registry in India and when an Indian kid is looking for a marrow match this registry is the only resort.
Volunteer functions
- Talk to people at booth
- Help people fill out the forms
- Pre screen the forms filled out by people
- Help people take the cheek swab test.
Here are some more useful links.
Sample and Posters
Nirali Poster
If you have further questions
