Ensuring Social Impact
Social Monitoring by involvement of the youth. Involving and creating awareness in the CSR sector.Providing Humanitarian support
About You
About You
First Name
Harsha
Last Name
Mukherjee
Twitter URL
twitter.com/Harshamukherjee
Facebook URL
About Your Organization
Organization Name
Ekjaa
Organization Website
Organization Country
India, AP
Country where this project is creating social impact
India, AP
Is your organization a
Non‐profit/NGO/citizen sector organization
How long has your organization been operating?
Less than a year
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Innovation
Entry Form title
Ensuring Social Impact
Select the stage that best applies to your solution
Start-Up (a pilot that has just begun operating)
How long have you been in operation?
Operating for less than a year
THE NEED: Describe the need for your solution and the size/dynamic of the community (ies) you will engage
Connecting the donors with right beneficiaries has always been a challenge. We connect them via online mode, CSR-Corporate mode, events arranged to raise awareness. Apart from that we do social monitoring by involving the youth and citizens of the nation. We provide CSR Consultation to raising awareness about CSR in Mid-sized companies in developing nations which is an essential requirement. Humanitarian support is also a major highlight that we provide to our end beneficiaries.
THE SOLUTION: Please explain what your solution offers and how it is innovative. How will you put your solution into the hands of users or beneficiaries? Be specific!
Providing CSR solutions to one side of our end beneficiaries to providing financial and humanitarian assistance to other side of our end beneficiaries (NGOs and SIOs). Apart from that we do social monitoring to ensure effective utilization of funds by involving more youth and citizens of the nation.
THE MODEL: Walk us through a specific example of how your solution makes a difference through use of information technology and media
By using IT and Media we create awareness about our project thereby attracting more donors on the site as well as getting more quality projects to raise funds and also involve more people in our social monitoring processes.
THE MARKETPLACE: Who are your peers and competitors? What challenges could these players pose to your success or growth?
Presently by getting Charitable and MFI model on the same platform we have the first initiator advantage. In charitable model there is Justgiving.com and in MFI model there is Kiva but none of them are providing both the solutions together and so we stand out and are the first initiators in the social sphere.
I would also like to mention that there are no organizations providing HYBRID Solutions and we are the first one to initiate.
Social Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
FOUNDING STORY: We want to hear about your “Aha!” moment. Share the story of where and when the founder(s) saw this solution’s potential to change the world.
Harsha Mukherjee while completing her MBA had a strong inclination to work in the social welfare sector but in a different way. She discovered the problem to connect the donors with right beneficiaries, efficient utilization of funds, humanitarian support and involving more corporate specifically the mid-sized segment to large size segment in India and providing them CSR Solutions which has never been thought about before. Thus by providing them CSR solutions we also create awareness about the various projects that we raise funds for, have a knowledge exchange with the respective Corporate about their requirement.
Apart from the Charitable model, there is a lend model which serves different set of end beneficiaries. SHe decided to make a demarcation between whom can we lend and whom can we donate on the online sector to the industry sector.
Specify both the depth and scale of your solution’s social impact to date
We have collaborated with around 20 NGOs in different parts of India and are working on pre-disbursal monitoring of each. Apart from that, we are working at the grass root level with our SIOs.
What is your projected impact within the next 1-5 years? Is your idea replicable? If so, how?
The Idea is highly replicable and we are already working on that in other cities.
Winning entries present a strong plan for how they will achieve and mark growth. Identify your six-month milestone for growing your impact
Six-Month Tasks
Task 1
Raise funds for immediate project requirements.
Task 2
Get around 5-10 mid-sized companies on the board.
Task 3
Provide Humanitarian support to NGOs.
Now think bigger! Identify your 12-month impact milestone
International Operations
12-Month Tasks
Task 1
Provide funds to NGOs from Africa to Latin America across the globe.
Task 2
Set up social monitoring processes wrt to projects undertaken.
Task 3
Involve and encourage more youth participation in the positive development of the society.
How many people have been impacted by your project?
Fewer than 100
How many people could be impacted by your project in the next three years?
More than 10,000
Sustainability
Explain how your company, program, service or product is structured
Non-profit
What barriers have hindered the success of your project to date? How do you plan to overcome these and other challenges as you grow your solution?
The volunteers dedication to the project and creating awareness about CSR in our country is a hurdle we are facing. We are planning to collaborate with organizations which provide volunteers like AISEC for dedicated and sincere volunteers and research more before providing solutions to the corporate.
How do you see the information-technology and media sectors shifting over the next decade? How will your solution adapt to and/or drive that changing environment?
IT and Media section is the key to our success, in the upcoming years I see them presenting more informative news to the people like social ventures.
Failure is not always an option. If your solution fails to gain traction in the next two years, what other applications of the idea could you explore?
Failure is never an option. I would still strive till I get the traction. Dreams and desires are not to be given up they are supposed to be continued in high and lows and that's why they become your reason of existence in this world.
Expand on your selections, explaining how you will sustain funding
Ours is a success based model, thus in order to keep operating we ahave to prove ourselves. Gradually we would shift to a membership model which would ease our operations and still maintain the quality. Since we are at the initial phase membership model would not be successful, thus we need to prove ourselves and our processes.
Tell us about your partnerships
We presently have 2 media partners since we are in the initial stage. Youth Ki Awaaz and IndiaCSR both prominent in our sector and aligned with our objectives.
What type of team (staff, volunteers, etc.) will ensure that you achieve the growth milestones identified in the Social Impact section?
Social Auditors for standardization, there is a dearth of them in the Indian market also in other developing nations to some extent.
Legal Help in setting up and clarifying the processes.Social media marketers.Mentors who have accomplished themselves in the social sphere for more than 15 years.
Media partners to increase awareness.
Technology partners to update and upgrade our process.
People specialized in operations to streamline our process.
More youth involvement for social monitoring, they should be well educated and passionate about this work.
Changemakers is a collaborative and supportive space. Please specify any community resources you would need to grow and sustain your initiative. Select all that apply
Investment, Human resources or talent, Marketing or media, Research or information, Collaboration or networking, Pro-bono help (legal, financial, etc.), Innovation or ideas, Mentorship.
Specify any resources you might offer to support other initiatives. Select all that apply
Marketing or media, Research or information, Collaboration or networking, Innovation or ideas.
Please elaborate on any needs or offers you have mentioned above and/or suggest categories of support that aren’t specified within the list
Summary
Define your company, program, service or product in 1-2 short sentences
The product of our company is the projects of our regional allies which range from NGOs to SIOs.The quality of them is our USP.
Identify what is innovative about your solution in 1-2 short sentences
Social Monitoring by involvement of the youth. Involving and creating awareness in the CSR sector.Providing Humanitarian support
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Comments
I seriously do. There are 100s of NGOs or activists like these and some have been proven as right and rest are proven to be followers who don't know how to channelize the money but sure know how to collect money. I've been bitten by such organizations before and am sure that they are in this "business" for purely fame and money. I'd like to see some videos of how they deal with social issues and how they actually look like because I've seen that people running these businesses often love to flaunt their designer wears or always want to have those but they are good at hollow talks.
Other issue I have is that if they have the right motive then why don't they support those NGOs which have proven track record and are already doing good jobs. Why they want to have competition because it's not business for them as they say.
Firstly, thanks for reading the post. The link http://ekjaa.org/Ekjaa/about/regionalAllies_NGO would show you the NGOs we have collaborated and have proven track record. Even after the proven track record we go by and visit their project sites.
It is sad to know about your experiences, but there is no designer wears or business in our initiative we are Not for Profit charitable organization.We work on a success based model and no charges, membership fees and all like other websites, before we deliver results.
Hope you have some good experiences in future.
I would also like to mention about Social monitoring during pre-disbursal and post-disbursal phase of every project. The CSR in our country in minimal and done in bits and pieces we are striving to provide them solution as well. Kindly read and go through our site for more details: www.ekjaa.org.
I'm thrilled to read this:
"The CSR in our country in minimal and done in bits and pieces we are striving to provide them solution as well."
Can you provide me the data of CSR in India because I'm sure that you have slightest of idea for the same and as you are stating "in our country", I'm sure that you have an idea about other countries too. I'm a European residing in India for last 7 years and I'm really sure that in India, CSR is still higher than many NGOs' acts.
Visited your website and struggled to understand the model.
Firstly, thanks for visiting the website and then commenting. Glad to know that you are in India since past 7 years but curious about the sector that you are working with.
Kindly go through the following link which would provide you with the statistics of only 500 largest companies in India and their performance of CSR.
http://www.karmayog.org/csr2010/
Let me emphasize only 500 largest companies, India being the 2nd most developing nation has a good base of mid-sized companies which are our potential market and the question to make CSR mandatory is clearly visible through various discussion forums but the initiatives are still in process and bills are still in the finalization stage.
The following discussion may interest you as well, discussion is going on below:
http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=36851&type=member&item=60313...
The large sized companies have their processes set up and still need assistance to identify the projects and conduct social monitoring. The mid-sized companies have minimal to nill activities in the social sphere. I would also add there are about 3ml registered NGOs out of which few have the requisite documents out of which again few actually deliver what they say, recognizing them is also a challenging. We have a lend model too in which we are serving a different sector of society all togther.
Great to know that you are from EU whereby CSR reporting is mandatory and Denmark has CSR implementation mandatory as well, I am sure the trend would follow. CSR in most of the developed nations is well in place but ISO26000 has yet to be finalized.
More details on CSR: There are countable number of companies which are SA 8000 certified (In India) and ISO26000 still have to be accepted and standardized as mentioned before, so that process is in the evolution stage.
Struggling with our Business model: Performance based models are used in diverse sectors and is result-driven.
I came across one excellent video on it:
http://www.fahrenheit-212.com/#/innovation/our-work/our-thinking/videos/...
Related scholarly article on performance based model:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=501082
Also note that in a start-up business model evolves continously as per the requirement, feasibility and self-sustainability of the organization as a whole. I started this with an intent to serve the end beneficiaries :-) even if the organization is just self-sustainable and delivering its objectives that should content me.
That should answer your last question. Thank you for the wonderful queries raised, it is a pleasure answering them. Also, if you are based out of India presently and are interested to join us, it would be a privilege. We are organizaing a cultural show in association with some of our organizations in this month in Hyderabad, let me know if you are inclined to join in.
Hi Harsha,
Your idea bridges a wide gap in the sector. Could you please clarify how exactly the website would connect these groups?
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