Welfare organisations harness power of one with cloud funding

It is past 10pm and the local trains are a little less packed than the peak hours. Rising above the din, a deep-throated voice calls out,

“Namaskar, I am professor Sandeep Desai and we run an organisation to educate poor children. We have two schools, in Iraniwadi, Goregaon, and in Zadgaon, Ratnagiri,” and adds, “If you donate food, it will help the person only for a while, but an education can help them out of that life.”

Soon after, as he walks down the aisle with a donation box, the collections start pouring in. “We don’t say no even if the contribution is a rupee. The spirit is what counts, not how much the person is giving,” Desai says.

When he took to begging on Mumbai’s suburban trains, his family, friends and even colleagues at the charitable trust he runs were aghast. “But I believe that no route is small if the cause is an honourable one; I wanted to raise funds to build a rural school. The response has been overwhelming,” says Desai.

But the good professor’s micro-financing approach, although more time-consuming and seemingly tedious than finding a deep-pocketed donor, is becoming a norm in the welfare sector, especially after the recent recession shrank many a donor’s purse.

The gradual decentralisation of the fund-raising model to make it more focused on individuals rather than rely heavily on corporate benevolence is epitomised by one of the largest non-profits in the country. “Currently, 70% of our funds come through corporate donations, and 30% from individual contribution. In another two years, however, we aim to turn this ratio around,” says Chanchalapathi Dasa, vice chairman of The Akshaya Patra Foundation.

The Bangalore-based NGO provides mid-day meals to 1.2 million children in eight states across India, incurring a daily expense of Rs25 lakh. How does it manage to raise so much money? With internet penetration rate of only 10% in India, online donations, which constitute a major chunk of funding for welfare organisations in western countries, cannot drive the funding strategy here. Hence, the focus, according to Dasa, is on telemarketing and ground activities.

“We pitch for Rs2. So, whether the person is earning Rs15,000 or Rs5,000, it is not wallet-straining. But the cumulative amount makes a big difference,”he says.

The people-based approach is also proving effective for smaller non-profits. Ananda Pawar, who runs a community organisation
for welfare of the elderly at Lower Parel’s BDD chawls, says he has found it easier to ask people living in the same community to make small donations instead of chasing big donors.

“We organise a bhajan programme in different chawls every weekend which draws a huge crowd. We started keeping a donation box at the venue asking visitors to contribute for the elderly from their community,” Pawar says.

“To maintain transparency, we began announcing the collection amount, but it ended up making people feel competitive and now each chawl tries to outdo the other.” Though these funds are by no means enough to support the entire intervention strategy, they have given the locals the pride of doing their bit for their own.

Professionally run NGOs are also harnessing the power of one by borrowing management skills and exploring unconventional fund-raising avenues. Trained NGO telemarketers have started working the phones in the hope that your response to a call for a cause will be different to the one for investment options.

Then there is the cause marketing strategy in which the Re1 margin on a variety of consumer and lifestyle brands is transferred to welfare organsations. For example, of the Rs99 you pay for a pack of a product, Re1 goes to an associated NGO or a cause.
Enriching the NGO’s web content — cause-related images, relevant case studies et al — serves as the perfect recipe to stir that emotional chord.

Besides, social networking websites with discussion pages and fan groups are also being tapped by welfare organisations to create a web buzz around a particular issue or cause.

But there is still a long way to go before individual philanthropy really takes off in the country. Dr Vidya Rao, head of the department of social welfare administration at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (Tiss) insists that this change in the welfare narrative is still largely urban.

“Smaller units in rural areas do not have access to computers, the media or often even a phone, forget creating a website,” she says. “I would say micro-self help groups are a better option there,” she adds citing the beesi system in Mumbai slums and small towns and villages in which members pay a fixed monthly amount, draw chits, and claim the collected sum every month.

But as the voluntary sector fine tunes its pitch to realise the Marxist ideal of ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’, there are many who are already sold on it.

One day when Desai was going from compartment to another collecting funds from commuters, he got a call from Salman Khan. The flamboyant actor said, “Kamal kartey ho professor saab, aap to duniya palat rahe ho,” and chipped in Rs4 lakh for the rural school.