venkat
Venkat Krishnan N.
Director- GiveIndia
The blog has been very quiet of late -- for two reasons -- the author was unavailable to post and GiveIndia has been busy working on a new site.
Way back in May, we asked you to take a guess about the cost of fundraising and conducted a little poll on our site. More than 50% of the people who responded guessed that the cost of fundraising was between 10 - 20%. GiveIndia is happy to report that our cost is 9.1%!!
Read the letter below written by our Director to all our users explaining GiveIndia's costs and a change in how we will go about recovering them:
This mail is to share with you that GiveIndia has migrated to a new website yesterday. While no changes have been made to the look and feel of the site or the user experience, we have made a lot of changes in our backoffice processes to try and improve the quality of service we provide you.
This contribution of 9.1% of the donations will help us recover most (but not all) of our operating costs, thus helping GiveIndia get closer to self-sustainability, so that we can continue providing you the support to make your donations to trusted organisations. Do note that even after this, GiveIndia will continue to incur deficits that will be grant-funded. As and when our costs are lower than 9.1%, we are committed to reducing the percentage we retain for ourselves. GiveIndia's financial statements are available online. This includes transparent disclosures of our cost structures, so that you can make an informed judgement on our operations. Our financial statements for 2007-08, which are audited pro bono by Deloitte, are currently under preparation and will be available online by early August 2008.
We would also like to inform you that 9.1% is far below fundraising cost benchmarks anywhere. Most secular International and Indian fundraising agencies spend anywhere between 25-50% of the donation amount on fundraising and advocacy/ promotion. Even websites that offer only a "pure transfer" facility without offering any NGO due diligence/ assurance, or feedback reports on how the donations are used, charge anywhere between 5-15% of the donation amount. We are able to keep our costs relatively low, thanks to a highly committed team of staff that works at a fraction of their "market rates", a large band of very dedicated volunteers, zero outlay on Board members and our deep belief in the need to keep ourselves as "thin" an organisation as possible.
We have chosen to seek contributions for our own costs directly from you, our donors, rather than from some large funding agency. We believe that you, as a valued donor, will continue to "force" us to be as efficient as possible and set higher standards for us than funding agencies would, and we value that pressure.
We look forward to your continued and strong support in our endeavour to get more and more people to give back to society and to support the wonderful work of the organisations listed on our website, while keeping ourselves as thin, transparent, efficient and professional as possible. We need your help in strengthening the culture of "giving", and in providing opportunities to the less fortunate in an India where the gaps continue to widen at a frightening pace.
Please don't hesitate to write to us if you have any questions, doubts or suggestions.
regards
venkat
Venkat Krishnan N.
Director- GiveIndia
venkat
Venkat Krishnan N.
Director- GiveIndia
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I am a senior army officer and was reading the book"Stay hungry stay Foolish", and the first chapter i read was about mr venkat and about Give India and was fasinated.I want to do something for the society but dont know HOW?In my service I have seen poverty at close quarters & feel its time to give back.Your site is informative and somehow makes me beileve in you'll. take care