iGive:  The fundraising tool with creative flair

How often have your donors expressed a desire to do something ‘more’ for your organization, but you didn’t know how to get them started?

Have you ever wondered if each one of your supporters could get an additional person to support your organisation, how easily the impact you make could be doubled?

Have you ever wished for an easy way to convert people’s “wanting to give back to society” to reality?

GiveIndia’s online fundraising tool – iGive – can help you do all this and more.  iGive is designed to help individual and organisational fundraisers reach out more easily to their networks for support.

GiveIndia pioneered online donation in India in 2000, and was one of the first worldwide. GiveIndia has channeled over Rs 5 crores to close to 200 non-profit organisations, through the Internet. The iGive fundraising tool was set up in 2007, just before the Delhi and Mumbai marathons, to help marathon runners reach out to their friends and family and raise funds for their chosen cause. Over Rs. 50 lakhs was raised by individual runners in 2007 alone!

Beyond the marathons, iGive has kept on running. Over the years, iGive has been used by fundraisers to raise resources in other creative ways, at a variety of events and purposes, such as birthdays, weddings, or death anniversaries.

Says Raj Kalakota who raised funds for the NGO Child Aid Foundation through an iGive page, “I wanted to do some good for society and give a chance to family and friends to donate.”

iGivers Tahira and Ritwik write on their wedding page, “Everyone's been asking what we'd like as a wedding gift. What we would actually like would be if you could donate through this page to Ashwini, The Gudalur Adivasi Hospital, as our wedding gift. All the good karma generated on our behalf would be the best gift you could give us. Really :-)”

In addition to creating novel ideas for individuals to support causes, iGive also plays an important role for those in the development sector. NGOs without websites and payment gateways of their own find iGive to be a rather nifty tool. Instead of spending time and money in the development and maintenance of a site of their own, they choose to go down the iGive route to meet their financial needs.

By offering all aspects of fundraising online – from spreading the message about the cause, to transacting, to receipts for donations - iGive saves NGOs the hassles of fundraising, letting them concentrate on spreading their mission instead.

The success of iGive has motivated Give India in 2009 to start an online fundraising challenge – The India Giving Challenge. This event sees fundraisers, who may be individuals, NGOs or corporates, reach out to their network of family/friends/colleagues/employees who in turn reach out to their networks, thus building a community approach to fundraising. The motivation to raise funds? Top fundraisers get rewarded for their efforts in turn, through a matching grant from  GiveIndia, for fundraising in different categories during the course of the event. The second edition of the event saw over 9,000 donors get involved in the challenge.

All that’s needed to get an iGive page going is to ask the organisation for whom you wish to raise funds to complete basic listing formalities with GiveIndia. It’s that simple. So if you know someone passionate about a cause, someone looking to celebrate their birthday differently, someone who doesn’t want a photo-frame to remember their wedding by, or someone who just wants to do some good old giving-back to society, l et them know about the pit stop that will meet all their fundraising needs – iGive.

Tarika Vaswani looks after Internet giving at GiveIndia, has written this article for Raisers' Ask