Blog Assignment: Efficient fundraising campaigns for JaipurFoot

I have been a volunteer at JaipurFoot for a long time. It is world’s largest NGO, providing limb caliper fittings to the disabled for free. So far they have provided caliper fittings to over 1.3 million beneficiaries worldwide. The organization is headed by Dr. D.R. Mehta, a renowned bureaucrat advising Prime Minister of India in his days. Dr. Mehta has received numerous awards for his work and contribution. One of their inventions named JaipurFoot, co-developed with Stanford, was named among top 50 inventions by TIME magazine in 2009.

The organization caters to roughly about 60,000 new and revisiting amputees yearly. The NGO has a very efficient cost structure and supply chain. The organization is spearheaded and funded almost single handedly by Dr. Mehta, through unpredictable government grants, interest income from NGO’s corpus and, donations, mostly through his personal network.

The challenge/goal is to turn around the fundraising from a centralized network pivoting around Dr. Mehta to a more distributed network.

At 76, Dr. Mehta is aging and is concerned about the financial future of the organization. There are a couple of ways the organization is trying to address the situation. One way is to broaden their donor base to increase the corpus and two, a likely change in business model where they charge a minimum amount for each limb caliper fitting.

First Strategy: Gathering data to broaden the donor base would be relatively easy. The organization has a ready database of their donors. The donors can be categorized into two categories largely, i.e. one time donors and repeat donors. Network analysis can be used on repeat donors to identify:

a) Influencing groups: These people can be the Hubs/Pivots to propagate the mission of JaipurFoot. They would encourage people to establish stronger ties and donations for JaipurFoot. They can be encouraged to strengthen ties with passive groups/people. These groups/people can be identified by using a combination Whole-Network and Node Centrality Measures:·        

• High number of connections (Density)
• High influence and opinion leaders (out-degree centrality)
• Connected to most important/Influential nodes (Eigenvector)

b) Passive Groups: These groups/people can be encouraged to donate more and to form ties with other outliers and sub-groups to expand the donor base. They can be identified by:         

• Outliers who are almost information sink
• Weak-Ties (≥ 2 degrees of separation)
• Identify possible factions/components within the group and adjacent sub-groups

The same analysis can be done on one-time donors.

c) Collaborative groups: Dichotomized data of one-time donors and repeat donors can be combined and analyzed to:        

• Identify collaborators (2 for connections in both sets)
• Identify non-collaborators (1 for connection in either set only)

Additional surveys/interviews will have to be conducted to understand the reasons behind particular behavior of one-time donors and hence fine tuning the campaigns further.

Based on the outcome of this research campaign groups can be formed within the organization catering to specific groups, working on improving the ties between sub-groups, strengthening the ties between outliers and groups and adding more nodes to the group.

Second Strategy: Changing the business model to charge minimum amount from beneficiaries can be difficult. Understanding the willingness to pay of the beneficiaries can be very challenging as there is no ready database available about the willingness to pay among the beneficiary amputees. Surveying them would be a challenge, as they are often located in remote parts of the country and world. They are generally uneducated with very limited access to technology. This data can be collected on ongoing basis.  Some sample survey / interview questions could be around:

• How did they learn about JaipurFoot?
• Who influenced them to use JaipurFoot caliper fittings?
• Willingness to share the cost of the limb caliper on 50-50 sharing basis?
• Willingness to pay for caliper during refitting?

This survey data can be analyzed to:·         

• Find the influencers within group and outside group who helped the amputees establish a   contact with JaipurFoot (In-Degree and Out-Degree measure).
• Identify the coordinators (Betweenness)
• Understanding the risks of changing the business model based as the NGO has been running of free for all business model since 1968. Dr. Mehta is concerned that trust and recognition among beneficiaries can be damaged easily if the risks are not analyzed thoroughly.

I’m so glad to have taken the SNA course and look forward to sharing the insights with the NGO I have long volunteered with.

Vishal Kankaria

HULT International Business School