Our Annual Report for the financial year 2007-8 is now available for all our donors, NGOs and other stakeholders to read.
As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions.
Copied below is a note from our Annual Report that talks about the difficulty of measuring the impact of the work GiveIndia does. We think you'll like reading it:
"Putting a number to the impact on people's lives is always a difficult challenge for an
organisation like GiveIndia. Thousands of donors choose the way they would like to reach out and make a difference. This could range from providing a meal for Rs1,200 which has an immediate, tangible though minor impact on say 30 children for a day, to sponsoring billboards and campaigns for Rs10,000, that have the extremely difficult-to-measure impact of influencing however imperceptibly, the opinions of say 50,000 people and striking at the root of various issues.
In this latter case, the 50,000 people influenced are not the beneficiaries- it is the people affected by their resulting actions or inactions- and measuring that would be even more difficult, if not impossible. So how does one add it all up? Do we say that the total lives impacted is 50,030?
Who decides (and how) whether saving a tree today (and hence lives tomorrow), equals helping a person with disability walk today, or not? Or it is more useful to teach 100 children to read, even if without any understanding of what they read, or to make sure that 1 child gets an
education that will allow her to compete with the best in the world?
education that will allow her to compete with the best in the world?
GiveIndia's thesis, as a "philanthropy exchange", is that thousands of individual donors, exercising their own judgement through the donation choices they make, will collectively take far better decisions than any group of "experts" in development. Our belief is that a large number of engaged individuals taking collective responsibility for the challenge will have a far greater impact than a centralised use of the money they contribute.
GiveIndia therefore follows a simple approach to measure its own performance... the total volume of funds it channels to various nonprofits during a year and the number of donors it has reached out to. In due course, we hope to add the level of engagement of donors as a key additional metric. In doing so, GiveIndia ensures that it operates within a maximum cost of 9.1% of the total donations raised, and assesses its own "viability" at all times by trying hard to cover all expenses through earner income."
