Indian NGOs have come a long way in terms of raising funds for
charitable causes. While most major Indian NGOs have a fairly good web
presence since the past few years, GiveIndia and GuideStar India
has emerged as mature online platforms that allow online donation,
fundraising and linking potential donors to the correct charities.
Until recently, NGOs in India have had a tough time raising funds
though traditional channels like personal appeals, expensive advertising
banners, seeking famous brands mascots, hiring committed volunteers who
can spread the message, holding events and so on.
But fundraising trends are now changing and NGOs in India are using social media to raise funds – Here is how…
How is social media being used in India to raise funds?
Mint
quotes an example of how a 23-year-old engineer working for Teach India
wanted to raise Rs. 50,000 for buying academic materials to teach his
students. He simply set up a pledge on GiveIndia in 2011, posting
details about the funds he wanted to raise. This pledge was a part of
GiveIndia’s India Giving Challenge, a 6 week online fundraising event in
which participating NGOs and corporates set up fundraising pages
online, outlining their causes and goals. By utilizing the sharing
option on Twitter, Facebook and GiveIndia’s own database, they reached
out to friends, family, acquaintances, stakeholders, clients and donors
to seek donations.
To facilitate and promote donations, GiveIndia gave out limited
‘matching’ grants, on a daily and weekly basis. Dhaval Udani, CEO of
GiveIndia states that this event was amongst the first of its kind in
India in terms of scale and its use of technology for fundraising. It
also marks a shift from the traditional methods of ‘giving’ that have
been used in India until now. He says,
Since this event started in 2009, it has nearly doubled the total funds generated
and seen a substantial increase in terms of the number of participants.
It further reported that Teach India was one of the champion
fundraisers only because of their effective use of Facebook, Twitter and
other online social networking tools.
Udani stated that Teach India utilized Facebook very well for the
challenge. They went up from providing only 10 referrals to more than
1000 per day to the GiveIndia site.
“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.” - Dhaval Udani, CEO of GiveIndia [Source]
On the other hand, Surf Excel celebrated the 2011 Joy of Giving week
through a unique social media initiative by contributing products to
NGOs, as the HUL website reported. Users were asked to visit the Surf Excel Facebook page. For every ‘Like’, Surf Excel donated Rs 11 worth of goods requirements to charity organizations around Mumbai.
Users could also go to the ‘Make a difference with Surf Excel’
section and invite friends or upload a badge on their profile picture
to inadvertently promote the cause and display their support. HUL
employees were personally involved in the distribution of goods to the
NGOs generated through this unique form of social media fundraising.
Images, videos and testimonials of their experience were posted back on
the online Surf Excel community to maintain and increase traffic.
Similarly, many other Indian NGOs are using social media to leverage promotion and fundraising.
Other social media techniques that Indian NGOs can use on social media to raise funds
Here are a few interesting ways of using social media techniques to
raise funds and promote awareness of charity campaigns. Some of these
that Indian NGOs can start using are:
Active Twitter usage:
Some NGOs in India that use actively Twitter to promote their events are
Active Twitter usage helps in making donors believe that the NGO is consistently going something good.
Crowd Sourcing:
Crowd Sourcing
is a technique that allows customers, employees and stakeholders to
supply ideas, designs and features for a business’ products or services.
In India, The Joy of Giving Week has also been successful in using crowd sourcing for fundraising for other NGOs.
Online Coupons:
With the coming of age of coupon and deal sites
like Snapdeal and Naaptol, they can become platforms for listing
special vouchers and deals, the margin of which would be given as
proceeds to NGOs. The popularity and large visibility of such sites can
also help in promoting a charitable cause.
Deadline-driven appeals:
Instead of having generic open ended donation campaigns and
volunteering initiatives, the use of social media pages can help NGOs to
fix countdowns and limits for campaigns that can be tracked. Social
media pages can help in reminding potential donors about a certain
campaign in an interactive way, which can in turn, further last minute
donations.
Apps:
Although challenges such as having different local languages or
inadequate access to Internet are still being dealt with by NGOs to use
social media to raise funds, using mobile apps for charitable
fundraising is the next thing to watch out for in India. Samhita,
an online philanthropic platform for supporting other NGOs states that
using apps to improve operations for NGOs working on specific community
based projects has big potential.
Fundraising and online charity in India has come of age and Indian
NGOs can and are using social media for a variety of objectives – from
online promotions, recruiting volunteers, increasing campaign awareness
to fundraising of course. More innovations in this area are awaited in
the future.
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