World Cup + Twitter + Facebook = Crowd funding

As the Indian cricket team charted its month-long course to the historic World Cup win in Mumbai on Saturday, another small team in Chennai was scripting its own success story, tapping the excitement around the event for a cause.

Chennai-based micro-lender Rang De was perfecting the art of “leveraging the excitement,” to put it in the words of its co-founder and chief executive, Ramakrishna N K.

With zero expense, Rang De raised almost a million rupees in a matter three days using social networking tools Twitter and Facebook. The magic ingredient: the average Indian’s passion for cricket and their innate desire to do something good.

While most of the pledges and investments came from the regular cricket fans, some of the better known contributors included Nachiket Mor, former chairman of the ICICI Foundation, Srinivasa Adepalli, senior vice-president, corporate strategy and marketing, Tata Communications and film-maker Nagesh Kukunoor of Hyderabad Blues fame.

Adepalli’s justification was simple. He planned to buy an LCD television if India reached finals, but decided that investing through Rang De was a better use of the money.

When Rang De tweeted about a pledge that came in for `100,000, Adepalli responded to that and pledged to match the initial pledge with his own money.

Unlike better-known micro-lenders such as SKS Microfinance or Spandana, Rang De helps individuals to lend small amounts to other individuals using the platform that it provides. Its tagline — micro-credit, for the people, by the people — literally explains the concept.

At the bank-end, Rang De partners with NGOs to identify and provide small loans. At an interest rate of a little over 8%, the cost of micro-loans given by Rang De is much cheaper than that of other micro-lenders.

As the World Cup cricket tournament started, a senior executive at the firm’s Hyderabad branch casually asked the co-founder couple — Smita Ram and Ramakrishna N K, who left their corporate jobs in the UK to start Rang De in 2008 — if they could put the excitement around cricket to good use.

Brainstorming sessions that ensued resulted in a game plan, which called on all Rang De volunteers to reach out to their friends on Facebook and start a campaign — World Cup Fever — that called for wacky pledges and offered prizes for the wackiest ones.
The simplest of pledges could be something like, every time India hits a six, I pledge to invest Rs100 through Rang De.

“We didn’t really open it out on Twitter for everybody until India was in the quarterfinals. Then we started making a conscious effort to catch people’s attention by tweeting about the wackiest pledges that came in through emails and our Facebook page,” said Smita Ram, who is the chief operating officer.

“The name Rang De was decided after a lot of thought. It goes back to the patriotic struggle for Independence,” says the micro-lender’s website www.rangde.org. “We believe that a similar movement with the same kind of urgency is required to address poverty in India.”

If American billionaires Warren Buffet and Bill Gates were canvassing Indian billionaires to encourage philanthropy among the top echelons of India’s wealth pyramid, Rang De has swung the pendulum to the other extreme to successfully show what a technology-inspired grassroots movement can do.

Whether Rang De’s success too will be a historic one and spawn something greater, only time will tell. For now, the team is ready to make the most of the Indian Premier League that kicks off on
April 8.