Origins of The Dragonfly Effect

Whenever we speak to people about The Dragonfly Effect, they always ask:

“What was it that made you want to write a book together?”

There were three underlying reasons why we started working this book: first, Andy’s experience in marketing and harnessing social media to build brands suggested that the social space presented new and fundamentally different opportunities to both reach and engage people; second, Jennifer’s research on happiness, which shows that what people think makes them happy isn’t really what makes them happy; and third, most importantly, the story of Sameer and Vinay.

Two young men were struck with leukemia (AML) and a potentially life-saving bone marrow transplant was unavailable because there was no match for them in the registry. Their friends first struggled from the shock of the news then swiftly directed their energies to what they could do to affect Sameer and Vinay’s outcomes. They worked to secure bone marrow matches for both men by taking a highly methodical, businesslike approach that heavily leveraged social networks.

We encountered this remarkable, tireless team of people who pulled out all the stops in an effort to find a bone marrow match for their friends and in the process, added substantially to a bone marrow registry that’s since helped thousands of others. Their story, and the tools they developed to reach their goal, are described in the book.

Sameer and Vinay’s friends came together not just to support them and their families in their time of need, but to focus and mobilize on the singular thing they could collectively do to save their lives.  Necessity, urgency and sheer brilliance combined to cause them to create a program that they couldn’t have contemplated were the stakes not so high. They turned the near-impossibility (1:20,000) of a bone marrow match into a statistical likelihood (24,000:20,000), ultimately leading to matches and transplants for both men.

Their inspiration, commitment and focus on a goal would by themselves made this story worth documenting. Social media’s role, enabling the team to reach into the hearts and minds of orders of magnitude more people than they personally knew, without mass-media dollars, and cause them to take life-saving offline action made us feel required to publish it.

Every aspect of this story screamed out to us as something that needed to be shared, and shared as widely as possible. We studied it to understand and document how and why it worked, and extended and generalized their methods and the methods of other efforts into a toolkit that others could pick up, adapt and deploy for themselves.

That’s how The Dragonfly Effect was born.