Philanthropy: Tapping the online world

Srini Swaminathan is on a mission. Over the next four months, the freelance teacher from Chennai will participate in five more marathons, two half marathons and a cycling tour in India and abroad to raise funds for the Haji Public School in Jammu and Kashmir’s remote Breswana village. Helping the 35-year-old achieve his goal is Milaap India, a crowdfunding platform, an online space where people can create campaigns to seek funds for business ventures, education, medical assistance and social causes from, well, the crowd.

“Since late 2010, I have participated in over 15 marathons and 16 half marathons for campaigns focused on education and health,” says Swaminathan. In September, he ran the first of the six marathons as part of the school initiative, in Norway.

In his fourth fund-raising attempt and the third through crowdfunding, he hopes to raise around ₹ 2.6 lakh in 90 days. The money will be used to buy stationery, shoes and uniforms.

The two are among the growing crop of young individuals who are using crowdfunding to raise money for social causes. Among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) too, the platform is gaining popularity, albeit slowly.

“About 40% of our campaigns are led by individuals seeking donations, while 35% are by NGOs,” says Ketto’s co-founder Varun Sheth. At Milaap India, about 60% of such campaigns have been led by individuals over the past one year, the rest by NGOs.

The rise and rise

Sheth says 40% of the transactions on crowdfunding platforms happen through social media, indicating that people are comfortable giving online. Within two years, 20% of all giving in the country will happen online and this figure will go up by another 30% within 10 years, predicts the “Online Giving In India: Insights To Improve Results” report released in September by not-for-profit Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) India.

One of the emerging constituencies when it comes to giving, the report notes, are young people. This trend has also been highlighted in management consulting firm Bain & Co.’s 2012 “India Philanthropy Report”. It says the younger demographic (under 30) has a strong inclination to give back and tends to make a large first donation online.

Crowdfunding’s popularity owes much to the simplicity of the process and the cost involved in starting a campaign. “You first have to fill in your details (personal information, goal amount, duration of the campaign) on the website, then we verify the information (the process can take from 3 hours to four days) and, if everything’s in place, we start the campaign page. It’s really that simple,” says Ishita Anand, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of crowdfunding website BitGiving, which charges 10% of the total funds collected as fee, the same as Ketto. Milaap India charges 5-12%. “We provide assistance in amplifying campaigns with the right kind of messaging, by publishing articles through partner sites, and digital and social media promotions,” says Tannaz Daruwalla, head of marketing and brand partnerships at Milaap.

What has also helped crowdfunding gain traction is the transparency it offers in the management of funds. “One of the prime concerns of a donor is where his/her money is going and how it is being utilized. This platform provides every detail about the movement of a donation through alerts on the campaign page and via mail,” says Anand.

The ‘it’ crowd

While starting a campaign page might be easy, its success depends largely on presentation. “About 20% of the campaigns are not able to raise the desired amount because of lack of engagement, and also because people are still trying to figure out how crowdfunding works in their ecosystem. We give what is collected to the charity (or NGO), after deducting our fee and penalty amount (5%),” says Anand.

Every successful initiative needs a “wow” factor. Campaigners have to present powerful images and provide regular updates via blogs, photographs, mails and videos, to make the page compelling. “Moreover, in crowdfunding, we have noticed a higher propensity to contribute when the campaign is already seen to have raised an initial nominal amount. This is why we encourage our campaign owners to actively fund-raise within their networks to support the cause as a first course of action,” says Daruwalla.

What works is a great personal story, “something that captures the potential campaign supporter’s imagination, makes them feel involved and ties in with what’s relevant in their lives”, says Karthik Nagarajan, national director of content and social media at advertising firm GroupM.

The virtual messengers

From natural disasters to social causes, social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have become instrumental in generating awareness, raising money and sometimes changing lives.

On 23 September, a Delhi Metro passenger posted a picture of Harendra Singh Chauhan, a class IX student, sitting outside a station in Noida, near Delhi, studying under a street light, with a weighing scale next to him. He would charge for weight checks and use the money to fund his studies. The post went viral and five days later, Uttar Pradesh chief minister Akhilesh Yadav handed a ₹ 5 lakh cheque to Chauhan.

Something similar happened in the Capital in August. The 36-year-old animal welfare organization, Friendicoes-SECA, put out a distress call in the form of a Facebook post, saying paucity of funds might force it to shut down. Diva Sharma, a class XII student, saw the post and started a Facebook page Project Petsafe on 24 August. Through it, Sharma organized bake sales, music concerts and face-to-face meetings to raise funds for Friendicoes. “I approached my family, friends and school and put up posters at various locations. Within three days of starting the page, we collected ₹ 1 lakh,” she says.

Friendicoes also started a campaign on BitGiving called “Let’s Save Friendicoes From Shutting Down”. “On the first day, more than ₹ 10 lakh were raised. The response was overwhelming; the last time we saw such a reaction was for the Nepal earthquake relief,” says Anand.

To make the most of the growing online-giving movement, Facebook has made its Donate Now button available to all non-profits. While the button was first rolled out in 2013, it was available only to a handful of non-profits that partnered with Facebook, including the Red Cross and the American Cancer Society. Now all groups that are registered as NGOs on Facebook can display the button on their pages.

When clicked, the button redirects users to the charities’ websites.

Social media, Nagarajan says, helps facilitate engagement from all sides. “While Facebook is a deeper dive in terms of information, Twitter transmits information really fast.”

A campaign by the Ice Hockey Association of India (Ihai) illustrates Twitter’s high-speed reach. In April, the Ihai started #SupportIceHockey, a crowdfunding campaign, on Twitter to raise funds so that the Indian squad could participate in the Asian Championships being held that month. “We have a national team and are begging for money.... A 20k donation will cover costs for 1 player,” read one of the tweets. Within days, the campaign became a national conversation, with individual donors sending anything from pocket money to ₹ 5 lakh. “The Ihai has a greater stronghold on Twitter in terms of followers, which is why we used it. BitGiving too offered us their platform to raise funds,” says Harjinder Singh, Ihai’s general secretary. The Ihai raised over ₹ 30 lakh from the Twitter campaign and almost ₹ 5.70 lakh from BitGiving.

LinkedIn too helps facilitate interaction between collaborators and donors. “It offers fund-raisers access to a trove of information about prospective donors, such as skills and experience, professional networks and areas of interest,” says Nagarajan, adding, “You can target them with customized content and reach out to them using InMail.”

One of the reasons perhaps that social media works effectively is that people like to be seen supporting causes. “There’s a sense of vanity attached to it. Maybe that’s why we don’t pay as much heed to the mails that silently reach our inboxes, asking for signatures on petitions or for donations. This vanity might not be good inherently, but when it comes to social causes, it becomes useful,” says Nilika Mehrotra, a professor of social anthropology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. “Earlier, it used to be seen as activism, but now it has become fashionable to support a cause. With more celebrities coming forward to support social causes, people are paying more attention,” she adds.

It’s not all hunky-dory, though. Online campaigners are often criticized for using their initiative to build brand value or promote themselves. Swaminathan, who has been at the receiving end, says: “There are people who believe that charity should be done without telling anyone. And there’s nothing wrong in it. But wouldn’t it be better if more people came to know about your work?”

The personal touch

Does the growing popularity of social networks and crowdfunding platforms mean that the traditional or “offline” channels are on their way out? Not really. The Indian chapters of NGOs like Greenpeace, Child Rights and You (CRY) and Amnesty International still swear by telecalling and door-to-door funding.

Digital fund-raising requires a considerable amount of systemic investment, believes Amnesty India’s fund-raising director Rajesh Bhattacharjee. “It has a longer gestation period. We are currently not in a position to make heavy digital fund-raising investments. Moreover, the digital fund-raising platform is yet to create a sustainable and very large regular-giving solution,” he says.

There are certain drawbacks attached to social media, says Greenpeace’s fund-raising director Binu Jacob. “Of all the social media channels, Facebook has become the most dominant and its ever-changing algorithm—which governs what you see in your feed—has prioritized companies that spend big bucks on marketing, as opposed to the organic reach one generates by sharing content with your friends.” For long-term financial contributions, people still prefer face-to-face conversation, believes Jacob.

“We would like our donors to contribute a small amount for a longer time than a large sum as a one-off. The banking system for regular contribution requires a physical form for which meeting in person is required,” he adds.

This, however, doesn’t mean that these organizations are not planning to experiment with the online space. The CAF report, in fact, notes that the sector is inclined to embrace new media for fund-raising, but adds that “they lack knowledge of the digital behaviour of donors and experience with the medium and are too bound by insufficient budgets to experiment and learn”.

Among the challenges NGOs face are inadequate staff experience and expertise, lack of funds to invest in promotional activities, and inability to track and analyse donor and online data.

So, online donations, social media and crowdfunding platforms contribute a meagre 9% to CRY’s total annual income, while 35% comes from door-to-door collections across the country and 56% from telecalling, mailers and newsletters. “We have been active in relevant social media spaces since 2005 and experimented with crowdfunding in 2014. Going ahead, we will continue to use an integrated multi-channel strategy to engage with our donors,” says Anita Bala Sharad, director of resource mobilization at CRY.

“While door-to-door and other offline methods of fund-raising have been key channels so far, we have realized the strength of social media and crowdfunding as additional ways to reach out to newer donor segments,” she adds.

Despite its apprehensions, Amnesty too intends to “proactively” build its social media presence and establish a sustainable digital fund-raising model in the coming years. “Given the dramatic change in the use of social media and smartphones, in the next two-three years digital mediums and technology will definitely be two integral components of our campaigning and fund-raising operations,” says Bhattacharjee.

Jacob sums it up: “Online commerce has gained momentum in our country, but not so in charity-giving yet. Having said so, in the near future we could see this changing.”