A Mid-Year Report from the Executive Director of IPA

Written By Alex Counts

The India Philanthropy Alliance entered 2024 with bold plans and high hopes. The previous year we had successfully piloted India Giving Day while also establishing ourselves as an independent nonprofit after five years of incubation under very generous terms from Indiaspora. We intended to follow up with a second India Giving Day campaign that leveraged all the brand-building and learnings of the first year, while putting the distraction of setting up organizational systems behind us. I am pleased to say that our 501c3 is fully established, the India Giving Day campaign was a tremendous success, and we are on course to meeting or exceeding almost all of our remaining goals for the year.

Before I summarize our most important achievements and learnings through the end of July, let me thank our board, especially its chairman Deepak Raj, our hardworking staff, the India Giving Day Steering Committee, our Ambassadors, National Co-Chairs and Youth Leadership Council, and IPA’s growing group of financial supporters that now includes the MacArthur Foundation and has been anchored by the Rural India Supporting Trust (RIST).

India Giving Day 2024

Our goal for our sophomore campaign was to at least double our results from the pilot year, 2023. In almost all respects, we far exceeded that goal.

  • The $1.37 million raised by 25 organizations in our inaugural India Giving Day increased to $5.44 million benefitting 33 listed organizations in our second year.

  • The number of donations increased from 1,031 to 1,770. (And we understand that many organizations not listed on our website leveraged the excitement around India Giving Day to raise additional money for their missions, which we love.)

  • The number of self-identified new donors increased from 463 in 2023 to 666 in 2024.

  • The number of Peer to Peer Fundraisers increased from 36 to 181, and the amount they raised grew from $61,160 to $457,423.

  • The number of events held around the country to celebrate and observe India Giving Day grew from 4 in 2023 to 42 in 2024. (And we believe that there were additional events that did not report to us.)

  • Campaign social media impressions increased from 5.29 million to 8.43 million.

  • Our public relations firm won two awards for the second year in a row for their social media work related to IGD.

Since early June, we have been preparing for our third campaign that will culminate on March 14, 2025. We expect it will exceed our second one in every possible way!

Youth Essay Competition 2024

During an early IPA board retreat, members identified a common priority: engage young people in our work, especially second and third-generation Indian-Americans. One of the tangible projects to emerge from that decision was to launch a national essay competition in 2020. Each year dozens of middle school and high school students have submitted essays about what they believe to be the key issues facing India today and what we can do to have a positive impact. Their stories include what philanthropy means to them, and how American philanthropy can benefit India. We have published the top essays every year since then and featured the top authors at a national convening, hosted by Indiaspora, where they have presented their ideas to leading philanthropists, business leaders, and nonprofit executives. The winners in each age category were flown to the Summit to present. In each case, their families accompanied them to the convening.

We are pleased to report a record number of submissions this year: 110. The judges are currently reviewing the essays so that the winners, runners up, and finalists for this, our fifth annual competition, can be announced in the fall. The winners will be flown to the Indiaspora Summit being held in Boston at the end of October.

Welcoming New Board Members

IPA elected two new board members in January: Brij Kothari of Planet Read and Ushree Roy of Vicente Ferrer Foundation USA . They began contributing immediately. The two organizations they lead do incredible work to benefit India. Within IPA, Brij has been very active in shaping a new initiative of ours related to donor education, and Ushree and her colleagues had one of the most successful peer to peer fundraising campaigns among all 33 organizations participating in India Giving Day.

IPA Webinars and Town Halls

This year we planned to have at least two new webinars in our "Critical Dialogues" series, and to pilot monthly virtual town halls. (Webinars are open to the public, while town halls are invitation only, where those organizations represented on our board and in our major campaigns take part.)

Our first webinar on Artificial Intelligence for Social Good was a big success, with three leading experts sharing their wisdom. IPA vice-chair Minoo Gupta moderated the session, and Nishant Baghel of Pratham gave closing comments. Our featured speakers were Sunil Wadhwani of WISH Foundation, Kalika Bali of Microsoft Research India, and Suhel Bidani of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Our second webinar is scheduled for September 9 and will feature Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus speaking about the role that sports can play in social change, and how his ideas were incorporated into the Paris Olympics.

We had two town halls in the spring that were well-attended and well-received. The first was titled "Hot Legal Topics for Nonprofits" that focused especially on the issues facing U.S. organizations that raise funds for work in India. The second was on how A.I. can help make nonprofits run more effectively and efficiently, particularly in terms of fundraising.

In the fall, we are planning virtual town halls on compliance issues in India, good philanthropy practices and trends, and how Indian nonprofits can scale their innovations globally.

Communications and Thought Leadership

IPA continues to emerge as an important thought leader in the world of cross-border philanthropy and solidarity. In the lead up to India Giving Day we had the following articles by or about IPA published with the assistance of our amazing public relations firm, Gutenberg.

We continued to publish our newsletter every other month to highlight the good work of leading India-focused nonprofits and how people can get involved in supporting their work.

NGO Services Including Training on Major Gifts and Online Giving Audit

The IPA team is always trying to add value to nonprofit organizations working to improve the lives of people in India. For example, we have a monthly webinar on best practices in securing major and mega gifts from donors that began in July 2023. We also offer, for a small fee, an audit of any organization's online giving process by describing the experience of being an online donor and benchmarking it against other nonprofits. We take calls all the time from nonprofits seeking our guidance or connections to peer organizations. Several IPA WhatsApp groups have become important forums for sharing good news, market intelligence, best practices, and important trends.

Works in Progress: Technology-in-Development Working Group & Good Philanthropy Practices

We have launched a "Technology-in-Development Working Group" that is working to define a strategic, value-added mandate to help the sector grow. We are also working on a statement of philanthropic best practices to accelerate donor education to ensure maximum impact. You will hear more about these during the second half of the year.

Shortfalls and Lessons Learned

Not everything that we did worked well. Attendance at our monthly leaders meeting has fallen, which we are trying to understand and address. Avanti Fellows and Give departed our board, mainly due to capacity issues of their U.S. organizations. The number of donations through the India Giving Day platform increased significantly, but did not double, as we had hoped. Several organizations that participated in India Giving Day did not meet their fundraising goals for the campaign.

The main lesson from both our many achievements and our handful of setbacks are that building a community of organizations trying to achieve similar goals in the same geographic area takes time, effort, risk-taking, trust-building, patience, experimentation, and continuous learning. At the same time, ours has been a rewarding journey and we continue to learn more every day about how to support and advance the work of outstanding organizations working in India.

Conclusion

IPA is committed to creating breakthroughs in American philanthropy to India, mainly through bolstering leading nonprofits that mobilize human and financial resources  in the United States to benefit vulnerable people and ecosystems in the world's largest democracy and most populous nation. We will continue until the job is done, and we commit to doing this work joyfully and collaboratively.

Alex Counts
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