Some consolidation is underway in India’s crowd-funding and online fundraising with the country’s largest non-profit giving platform, GiveIndia, announcing a merger with LetzChange, another online crowd-funding platform serving non-profits for sourcing fundraising for compassionate and charitable causes.
The merger will see both platforms operate under the GiveIndia brand.
The convergence is a “mission alignment” to bring synergy for scaling up efforts for charitable giving and crowd-funding, says Atul Satija, chief executive of GiveIndia. “We wanted a unified view for customer and donors, whether they want to fund a non-profit or take a cause or support a campaign,” he says.
With the union, GiveIndia also plans to invest over Rs15 crore on the combined platform, primarily focused on online subscription-based giving and scaling crowd-funding offerings.
As a part of this merger, London-based philanthropist, Vikrant Bhargava — who set up the LetzChange Foundation in 2012, will be joining the GiveIndia board. “A part of the Rs15 crore we plan to invest will comes from Bhargava’s own continued charitable investment,” says Satija, adding that there was no “economic transaction” associated with this deal, given that both entities are non-profits.
Bhargava highlights that since LetzChange is the leading platform on peer-to-peer fundraising for non-profits, while GiveIndia remains number one for raising money for different causes, campaigns and NGOs through payroll giving, or through net worth individual etc, the rationale to join is to leverage these core strengthens to support NGOs. “A lot of the NGOs are common and we are working with same set of people. So putting the two together makes perfect sense,” he added.
GiveIndia had its own independent crowd-funding product for charities, iGive, but it had not been invested for some years. Satija notes the idea to unify with LetzChange was to bring a bigger and better platform for the this.
“Increasingly crowd-funding platforms are being leveraged quite successfully by CRY (Child Rights and You) volunteers and supporters to promote and raise funds for our programmes. LetzChange is one such platform we have used, and we hope it will continue to be accessible to all NGOs post the merger,” says Kreeanne Rabadi, regional director, CRY (West).
GiveIndia, formed in 1999, has facilitated donations of over Rs330 crore from more than 10 lakh donors through payroll-giving, online giving, and subscription giving, to more than 200 GiveAssured non-profits on its platform. LetzChange serves as crowd-funding platform for more than 300 non-profits, and its services range from providing peer-to-peer fundraising tools, event-based fundraising, e-receipts, marketing and communication assistance.
Source: Mint