What Are the Challenges in the Indian Philanthropic Sector? How Does Giveindia Address These Challenges?

1. What are the challenges in the Indian philanthropic sector? How does GiveIndia address these challenges?

The first main challenge for the Indian philanthropic sector is the fact that although India has the largest number of NGO’s worldwide, only very few of these have the budgets and the reach to effectively entice people to support philanthropy. Give India needed to attract more high net worth individuals to start giving more of their weekly income to philanthropic causes. HNI’s gave only 3.2% of their average weekly income to charity compared to 9.3% in the US. This is an area Give India should target and aim to improve. In the past, wealthy family owned businesses had been known to give generously to NGO’s however in recent years these family’s had begun to set up their own charity’s and trust and therefore their donations to the NGO’s fell. However now a new breed

Give India decided that they would target individuals rather than corporations in order to combat some of the challenges above. They felt there was a more personal touch with individuals giving rather than corporations and the public often felts there was a business objective behind many donations. Give India made sure there were stringent measures in place to ensure that all NGO’s on the system were credible. As there were over 3.3 million NGO’s actively looking for donations in India at the time, Give India had scrutinised over 5,000 NGO’s before handing any donations over to them. They wanted to develop a giving culture in India rather than just maximising their donations. They felt that by creating this culture would have more of an impact on philanthropic causes in the long run and get their donations percentage closer to that of the US

2. Has GiveIndia optimised its SEM program? What metrics can be used to evaluate the SEM program? What are your suggestions for improving the number of donations from the SEM program?

Give India has definitely not optimised its SEM program, it is performing very poorly as you can see from the figures in the appendices. (Bannon, 2007) suggests a number of metrics which can be used in order to determine if your SEM program is being run effectively. See Appendix 2 for a full view of the metrics used to evaluate Give India’s current performance. Suggestions for improving; Give India should look at what keywords are returning the highest probability of a transaction and then increase the bid on these keywords to ensure that they become more visible. These keywords seemed to have the biggest impact on donors and made them more likely to donate. The keywords with the lowest probability of transactions should therefore not be bid on; these resources could be used