NGOs are new to CSR, corporates want them to present biz proposals, say Impactify founders

Sudeep Gupta and Joy Sharma go back 25 years — same school, same class, same engineering college. So, it was fitting that they got back together again, to found Impactify, an endeavour to build a bridge between NGOs and corporates (and help match CSR to the right social sector programme). “We’re essentially showcasing the marketplace, all of these projects, to all the corporates we’re working with now,” say the founding partners. With over 1,000 non-profit organisations on board, and data uploaded of 2,800-plus projects, all mapped to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, this startup is starting to make a real ‘impact’.
Growing to make a difference

If you don’t have a way for a small organisation to grow bigger, and become a Pratham or a Goonj, then the sector will never have the kind of impact that it should. To build an organisation you need good people, but you also need strong systems and processes and tools, and that’s been completely missing. So, that’s where the focus of Impactify has been from the get-go — our purpose is to essentially build stronger organisations in the social sector, otherwise the impact is not going to happen.

Relearning the ropes

When getting aid from individuals, it was all about appealing to their softer side. Now, CSR is a new beast for NGOs. Today, corporates are saying, “Give me a business case,” and NGOs are thinking, “What’s that?!” It’s a new skill that NGOs are learning — the top few have learnt, but how do we get the others to learn? We have to build the capabilities, and so, we’ve digitised the entire workflow. Now, it’s a journey of getting more people to start using this, but a lot of hand-holding is required to get NGOs to start using this.

The data gatherers

We have week-by-week reporting, which is like live data from the ground, and that reduces the reporting burden on both (corporate & NGO) sides. The data gets aggregated in a single place, where you can find out about the projects, both in terms of the money that is being utilised on the ground, and the status of implementation. We’re not taking on the burden of ensuring the data is there, we’re taking on the burden of giving you a medium to do this — we’re not doing it for them, we’re helping them do it themselves.

Journeys to fulfilment

There are these ladies in Bangalore who call themselves the Bangalore Birth Network, who do some really interesting work. For new mothers, they have trained nurses and put them in hospitals. They offer almost a call-centre kind of support system, providing nutrition for the newborn and for the mother, and help on how to get through the first few months. They mostly work with government hospitals. And we were helping them to dream bigger and do more — but they just wanted Rs.12 lakh. They say, “This will cover our expenses for the next year, this is all we need.”