
Most of you probably make some kind of charitable donation in a year, maybe online, maybe as a response to a direct mail appeal or sometimes at the request of a friend who supports that cause. And probably, as with other services you use, you don't really stop and think "How much is this costing me? Wait a minute...costing?? I thought I was making a donation so what's this COST all about!?"
The official GiveIndia blog
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Do you know? Take a guess
Friday, May 9, 2008
On Mother's Day
On Mother's Day, most of you reading this will do something nice for your mom-- maybe a card, maybe a phone call, perhaps a meal together.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
6 doctors for every 10,000 Indians

A recent article by Simon Robinson in TIME magazine highlights the abysmally poor state of health care in India today.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Rs50 lac EVERY month!
It's a BIG milestone in a long journey! But we've made it...the GiveIndia Payroll Giving programme, that we run in partnership with the top companies of India, is now raising Rs50 lac ($125,000) per month !!
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Malnutrition -- quietly destroying the future

John Holmes, the U.N.'s top humanitarian aid official has released a statement saying that global food shortages and higher prices are more likely to cause malnutrition than outright famine, at least in the near term.
"People, particularly those on the lowest incomes, will be eating less and less well," he told a news conference in Geneva.
While it seems like good news that there will not be widespread famine and starvation deaths, malnutrition is as dangerous a problem, one that is silently crippling children.
A report on children and nutrition by UNICEF states:
* Malnourished children are much more likely to die as a result of a common childhood disease than those who are adequately nourished
* In young children, malnutrition dulls motivation and curiosity and reduces play and exploratory activities. These effects, in turn, impair mental and cognitive development by reducing the amount of interaction children have both with their environment, and with those who provide care.
* Robbed of their mental as well as physical potential, malnourished children who live past childhood face diminished futures. They will become adults with lower physical and intellectual abilities, lower levels of productivity and higher levels of chronic illness and disability, often in societies with little economic capacity for even minimal therapeutic and rehabilitative measures.
In a nutshell, children who don’t get the right food at the right age stand the risk of paying for that their WHOLE lives.
Agreed that everyone is feeling the pinch but for more fortunate people, it means sacrificing non-essential expenses to meet the rising cost of essential items. For the poverty stricken, it means not being able to give children the future they deserve.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Feedback reports - a GiveIndia promise to donors

GiveIndia promises donors who donate through us a detailed feedback report of how their money helped change a life. What many people don't realize is that this is a personalised report, as in every feedback features a different beneficiary. So, for example if you donated a cataract operation and your best friend donated a cataract operation, you both wouldn't get the same generic report of how the operation benefited a person in need. No, you would get the story of Mr. xyz and how this operation helped change his life and your best friend would get a feedback report featuring Mrs. abc and how the operation changed her life.
Our partner NGOs are responsible for collecting this information, in many cases along with a photograph of the beneficiary and sending it to GiveIndia. And then we forward it to the donor. In the 2007/8 financial year, the GiveIndia feedback team ensured that 14,000 feedback reports got sent to donors. Pretty amazing, huh?
From time to time we have situations where the NGO doesn't send us timely reports or is no longer partnered with us so doesn't keep their promise about old feedbacks that they still owe us. These "missing" feedbacks are a very small number, less than 1% but that doesn't make them less important to us. The feedback team at GiveIndia, in the last few months, has been conducting a MAJOR exercise to try and get all these overdue feedbacks squared away, and have been fairly successful at sending out dozens of overdue reports.
Just four days ago, Mr. Srikanth Kalisipudi, a donor who got his feedback long after it was due, emailed us. He said "Feedback was good and I really appreciate the team for that. Till now I was thinking the money donated has gone but now after 3 years I got a mail from you saying that the money was utilized for the cause."
So while it is obviously better to be on time than late (and that is what we strive for), it is also better to be late than never. If we didn't send him the report, Mr. Kalisipudi may have always had doubts about GiveIndia and maybe about donating to charitable causes. So, GiveIndia's promise to donors will never be taken lightly; we'll do everything we can to fulfill it.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Push for transparency
CEO of the Resource Alliance, Simon Collings recently gave an interview about NGOs and transparency. Read these excerpts:
Why is it important for NGOs to have accountability and transparency?
It's important for two reasons. First, an NGO looking for financial support is not going to succeed unless it shows evidence of the impact of its work. It has to explain use of funds to donors and funding agencies. A growing trend is that funding agencies are putting increasing pressure on NGOs to make their financial transactions and governance transparent. Second, NGOs exist because they address social problems and work for under-privileged groups. It's important to be accountable to those people too, who are the beneficiaries and will be the ultimate judge.
Why do you encourage NGOs to look for aid from local donors?
Foreign development funding is on the decline. The major focus of the G8 countries is Africa, not countries like India where there are laws and strategic governance in place. Also, if civil society is to become a major force in solving local problems, then local funding has to happen. It strengthens accountability, reduces corruption and increases impact of the development work. Many donors are not confident how their money is used, so here transparency helps gain public support.
You can read the whole interview on the Times of India site, where it first appeared on April 25, 2008.
