My apologies for not being clear: Facebook ads is far from the only method in use for enlisting potential donors. Furthermore, families in need typically do not need to do anything because of the resources available. In my case I choose to do more because I am fortunate enough to be able to do so.

In the United States, the Be The Match Registry, operated by the National Marrow Donor Program, employs full time recruiters to encourage people to sign up for the registry. One of those recruiters, Magda Silva, has been tireless in her efforts to find new donors for my sister and others. For example she organizes marrow drives on at least a weekly basis where people can sign up to have their tissue type tested. Immediately after hearing about my sister, she worked to set up a drive a Noisebridge, a San Francisco hacker space.

In addition, transplant centers, such as the one at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance where my sister is being treated, have resources to find potential donors. For example, because our family has significant Hungarian background, the transplant center is reaching out to the Hungarian national donor program. These searches are targeted for the patient in need and carried out by doctors who are intimately familiar with the search process.

These efforts are amazing and have paid off for thousands of people in need, including my sister. The Be The Match registry is a nonprofit, supported by generous donations. The transplant center is supported by health insurance and also by generous donations. Neither my sister nor I have been required to do anything special to find donors with these resources.

Indeed, after I began the ad campaign, the transplant center found a partial match for my sister. My family and I are so grateful that someone decided to voluntarily donate their marrow for a complete stranger. We are also grateful to the registry and our transplant center for all their work that made this possible. (What's more, someone even donated cord blood that matches her, which is another, more experimental alternative.) Thank you, whoever you are!

So why bother with online ads at all?

0) When I started, I didn't know if we had a match. I could do something by using these ads, and I was sure it would not duplicate existing efforts (see below). I am lucky enough that I can afford it.

1) Targeting for my sister's marrow type. The existing recruiting is by necessity broad-based, trying to bring in as many donors as possible from as broad a spectrum of people as possible. To the extent there is targeting, there is an emphasis on bringing in minorities because they are critically under represented in the registry. If you are African American and need a marrow transplant, you are likely in serious trouble.

In contrast, I can target ads to geographies which are most likely to have people matching my sister's tissue type. For example, there are many people of Hungarian descent in Ohio, our family has a heavy concentration of Hungarians, so I can target ads there.

2) Potential to scale up. Despite the best efforts of the registry and transplant centers since 1988, only 7MM people total are signed up in the U.S. registry. The in-person drives I mentioned above typically bring in between 30 to 200 people per drive. Roughly 12K sign up per month, principally through in person drives, with a smaller portion through the web form.

This means if you don't find a donor immediately, the chances that a donor will appear while you wait are small. The promise of online ads is that they could potentially scale up better than in-person drives -- with a large enough advertising campaign, we could acquire more donors per month than is feasible with current methods. How large a buy is needed of course depends on the conversion rate (i.e. signups for the repository) of ads. That conversion rate is one of the things I am learning through this experience.

I do not mean to suggest that ads could or should replace the traditional in-person methods. Certainly they will not. What they can do is offer an additional tool to attack this problem (and hey, maybe an effective way for some large advertising company to donate in-kind to a good cause).

Does that address your concerns? Again I'm sorry for not being clear that this is not the only method available to our family for finding donors. Don't hesitate to ask any follow up questions.