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Social media changes fund-raising landscape

Online campaigns led by NGOs themselves marks a radical shift from the traditional methods of

giving

Malia Politzer

New Delhi: Praveen Khanghta teaches in a low-income school in Seelampur, East Delhi.

The 23-year-old engineer who graduated from the National Institute of Technology, Kurukshetra

works for Teach For India, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that places recent college

graduates (whom it terms fellows) in two-year teaching positions at schools attended by

underprivileged children. He hopes to make a difference in the lives of students from backgroundswhere education is a luxury or a lottery (currently only one out of 25 students will pass out from

class X; fewer still will go to college.)

Khangta wanted to raise Rs. 50,000 to paint his classroom, buy story books for the second-graders

he teaches to show them that reading can be fun, a projector and teaching tools, and fund field trips

to museums, parks and fire stations.

And so he set up a pledge page on the GiveIndia website, a facilitator organization that links donors

to charities.

Pages like the one set up by Khanghta are part of GiveIndias India Giving Challenge, a six-week

online fund-raising event in which corporate donors and NGOs compete to be Challenge

Champions.Participating NGOs and companies set up online fund-raising pages outlining their

causes and goals, then reach out to friends, family, clients and donors via email, Twitter and

Facebook to solicit donations (these people, in turn, reach out to more using the same tools).

GiveIndia gives out limited matching grants, on a daily, weekly and overall basis.

We are helping NGOs drive their own online campaign by creating a system where its fast and

simple to make a donation, while providing incentives for people to make donations, says Dhaval

Udani, CEO at GiveIndia. A defined time frame, matching grant and celebrating the Joy of Giving

spirit make it easier for the NGOs to push their donors to donate now rather than later. The

matching grant provides incentives, and allows them a low-cost way to raise funds.

While deceptively simple in principle, the event (now in its third year) is among the first of its kind in

India in terms of scale and its use of technology for fund-raising, and marks a radical departure from

traditional methods of giving in the Indian context. People generally prefer to give to organizations

that they know, through person-to-person contact, says Udani. The success of the Giving

Challenge shows that online fund-raising is coming of age.

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In the two previous years that it has run, the event has nearly doubled the total funds generated,

and seen a substantial increase in terms of the number of participants: When GiveIndia first

introduced the Giving Challenge in 2009, it successfully raised around Rs. 90 lakh from about 5,000

donors for NGOs across India, making it Indias largest online fundraising event in history. The

following year, the event generated around Rs. 2 crore from about 9,000 donors, with 150

participating NGOs and 19 companies. This year, with 15 corporate donors and 250 participating

NGOs, the event has already generated around Rs. 1.3 crore, and is on schedule to meetand

possibly surpass last years total.

The event runs till the end of next week.

Vinayak Lohani of Parivar Education Societythe reigning NGO challenge championsays that the

event has allowed his organization to raise a significant amount of money in a very short period of

time, and at low cost. Because of the timeliness of the event, people feel pressed to give now, he

says. In addition to reaching out to funders through email and telephone calls, he says theorganization has had great success by getting young, Internet-savvy volunteers to galvanize support,

and reach out to potential funders and walk them through the online donating process.

Corporate donors (this year the leaders are currently HDFC Ltd, Firstsource Solutions Ltd and

Genpact) have adopted various strategies to encourage a culture of giving throughout the week

such as sponsoring internal giving events such as clothing-, food- and blood-donation drives to

drive enthusiasm and then encouraging employees to log on to the site to make individual

donations.

Part of the strength of this model is that it unifies a large number of individual donor s for acommon cause, says Udani. The top two corporates last year each had more than 1000 individual

employees donating. While the value was also significant, we think that that having so many donors

engaged in this activity is far more important.

Teach India is one of the champion fund-raisers so far this year with a record number of individual

donors, largely because of its fellows effective use of Facebook, Twitter, and other online social

networking tools.

We would not have been able to achieve this had it not been for the volume of pages we were able

to set up, says Mridvika Mathur, manager of the development team for Teach India. Rather thanset up one page for Teach For India, we gave ownership and responsibility to every fellow. Since they

were doing it for their own classroom and their own kids, they felt a sense of responsibility and

ownership and the energy and enthusiasm was much more.

In only four weeks, more than 150 fellows set up individual pledge pages for their classrooms,

collectively generating Rs. 15 lakh to buy books, teaching supplies, and fund field trips for their

schools and classrooms.

Udani credits Teach For India fellows for a recent surge in Facebook trafficfrom only 10 referrals to

more than 1000 per dayto the GiveIndia site. Whats remarkable about Teach For India, is that

the value per donation is very small, while other organizations like Parivar might have fewer, larger

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donors. says Udani. They know how social media works, they are on Facebook all the time and

have managed to reach out to their friends and colleagues and raise a lot of money online just

through that.

Khanghta, for instance, made his goal in 10 days.

I found that social media helps a lotif just one person shares on Facebook, then many others who

have not heard about it get to know about it. For us, it becomes a very low-cost model of

advertising, he says. He has already begun buying books for his new library, and says he intends to

keep his funders up-to-date on how their funds are being put to use by posting pictures of his kids

and classroom on his Facebook page.

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