Catalyzing $120 Million Plus for Nonprofits

Interviewer, Andrew Milner at Alliance Magazine:
“Tell me about some of the initiatives you’ve had success with. I know you’ve worked with Dasra,  you’ve got NGO capacity building programmes,  you’ve got Project Tech4dev and Giving Pi. Are those your flagship pieces?”

Interviewee, Gayatri Lobo, A T E Chandra Foundation, India:
“I would say that one of the successes that we can take some credit for is the investment that we had made along with the Gates Foundation, Omidyar and Veddis Foundation to build out a platform called Give India. They were able to use this combined donation which was around USD 3.6 million and was just pre-pandemic, to think about what kind of investments they need to make in technology, in the right people. So, they hired some high-powered staff to be able to build out Give India as a platform. Before the investment, they were raising about three and a half million dollars. During Covid they raised about USD 120 million in a year, and they were able to raise a lot of funds for NGOs on the ground. Now they have settled at about USD 60 million. That’s a big jump, hence what I would consider a success.”

Andrew Milner:
“There’s an obvious way of measuring impact for something like that and I know you’re big on impact measurement, so how do you generally go about it where it’s less easy to see?”

Gayatri Lobo:
 “As you say, with fundraising it’s fairly easy. You can look at before and after the investment. We have actually put out a study to show that for every rupee an NGO invests in fundraising, what does it mean in terms of the return.  The lowest return that we saw was about 28 rupees and the highest was as high as 300 rupees, just by focusing on an investment in fundraising.”