Fundraising: The Key to Sustainable Scaling

A conversation with Anu Prasad, Founder and CEO of India Leaders for Social Sector (ILSS).

Gautam John, CEO, Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, in conversation with Anu Prasad, Founder and CEO, ILSS, discussing the significance of fundraising as a key driver of sustainable scaling — fundraising strategies, building trust through partnerships, and what it takes to grow social-sector organisations beyond the founder.

Transcript

This transcript was generated with AI-assisted transcription and may contain occasional transcription or speaker-attribution errors.

Speaker 3: Good evening everyone, very warm welcome to this webinar titled Fundraising the key to sustainable scaling. Firstly, thank you so much for taking the time to come and attend this webinar. Before we actually formally start introducing the speakers for today, can I take the opportunity to talk a little about ILSS.

Next slide please. So ILSS as an organization we aim at building the leadership talent and capacity that India’s social sector needs in order to create catalytic impact at scale. We do this by developing inspired leaders and this we do in order to have deeper social impact and also at scale.

Next please. It’s my pleasure to introduce Gautam John to you. Gautam is the CEO of Rohini Nilkani Philanthropies.

Prior to this he spent several years with the Akshara Foundation building the Karnataka Learning Partnership and Pratham Books building their open source publishing model. Before working in the non-profit sector he was an entrepreneur for six years and graduated from the National Law School in 2002. Welcome Gautam.

Next slide please.

Speaker 4: Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 3: And in conversation with Gautam will be our founder and CEO Anu. Anu was the founding member and Deputy Dean of the prestigious Young India Fellowship at Ashoka University and apart from a lot of things that she has done she was also has been a consultant with the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation and continues to be a mentor to a lot of young people from within the sector and she writes extensively on topics related to leadership talent and entrepreneurship. Welcome Anu.

Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 3: Next slide please. Before we actually go ahead and start this discussion this will be a one-hour session where the first 30 minutes will be a conversation between Anu and Gautam and which will be followed by 30 minutes of Q&A from all of you. So I’d request everyone to please use the Q&A tab to send in your questions which Gautam will answer.

So without much ado I hand it over to Anu and Gautam.

Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you so much Adil and Gautam delighted to be in conversation with you yet again. So thank you so much for doing this.

This has had a huge response this you know this this webinar has had a huge response so I do think that fundraising is on our minds of a lot of non-profit leaders today and rightly so. So Gautam really as a context question broad question you know in the last decade how have you seen this landscape evolve? You know what is some of the markers there and more importantly for the Neelakini Foundation from when you began to today how has been what have been some of the markers in your journey in the philanthropy that you feel have been important learnings for you all as you developed your philanthropy at the foundation?

Speaker 1: Thank you for that Anu and thank you Adil for the very generous introduction. To the first point on fundraising being an important topic it is. I think there isn’t enough of it going around there isn’t enough of it as a high enough appetite for risk and innovation and there certainly isn’t enough of it at higher levels of patients.

So if nothing else I hope what we can anchor in this session is the necessity for funders of all kinds to be able to support the innovation and risk and be a little bit patient for outcomes because social outcomes are non-linear and we require some amount of patience for those who emerge over time. But to your question on the landscape I think the landscape has been in a fair amount of flux over the last decade. The one thing that is undeniable is the wealth in India that has grown and there has been some expansion of expenditure on social causes.

I think some of the data we have indicates that private spending has reached about 13 billion dollars in 2022 which is up about one percent from 2021 and while that’s a significant number I think it’s important to remember that we kind of lag both in quantum but also in proportion. The OECD average is about 21 percent of GDP on social expenditure. India is about just under 10 percent and the NITI Aayog zone target is of 13 percent and of this only five percent is private philanthropy while the rest is public sector spending.

In terms of the various forms of capital that have come into India we’ve all been able to acknowledge that the corollary of India growing stronger and more wealthy is the fact that as India’s GDP expands the rich north will shift their funding to geographies of greater need Africa, South America and there are related regulatory issues as well. So that has definitely decreased and I think the one thing that a lot of foreign capital was able to support was a patient institutional building or patient system at work and it’s something that Indian philanthropies need to step up to do. The second one is really something that’s more recent right, I think it’s the growing size of the problem.

While India has been absolutely phenomenal in putting people out of poverty over the last decade, COVID-19 kind of threw a lot of people and the numbers are fairly large back under the poverty line and you know to most of us it’s an invisible impact because of the concentrated effects of COVID-19 on the rural population and rural economy. So yeah what we’re seeing in India is that India’s most vulnerable are the most vulnerable they have been in decades despite our immense progress in many fields. Our base physical and digital infrastructure is phenomenal but really institutions and individuals with surplus wealth have the opportunity to drive us back on track by giving more, by giving faster and by giving smarter.

So that’s broadly the landscape from where we see it. Yes there’s a lot of detail in terms of UHNI giving, HNI giving, CSR giving but this is a broad landscape of what we see.

Speaker 2: But Gautam what about your philanthropy, what has been the philosophy of the Rohini-Nilkini philanthropy and how has that evolved over time?

Speaker 1: It’s a good, it’s a good question to acknowledge that the Rohini’s philanthropy has existed far longer than the former Rohini-Nilkini philanthropy’s foundation has and over the last 30 years her philanthropy has kind of evolved through her own story and she tells it best. But I think in particular it’s the ability to be able to see change from the vantage point of a social entrepreneur rather than a philanthropy and Rohini’s engagements with Nadrik and with Argyam etc have kind of helped us evolve our own thinking from projects to platforms to philanthropies and to recognize that great outcomes are only possible when great people engage in great work and that institutions that need to be built rather than projects be funded. So to that extent you know at least for the last 20 years the thing that has underpinned our work is that we’re usually one of the first funders to most of our portfolio. We seek to give them you know early capital early in their journey for them to experiment and and de-risk their work so that later funders might be able to come in.

We haven’t necessarily changed that approach however more recently we incorporated as a form of section 8 philanthropy and it’s meant that we have to be extra cautious not to fall into the trap of being only funding later stage organizations that are registered etc because a lot of the work that’s valuable is often an individual toiling away so to find creative ways of being able to support some of that work as well.

So yeah I think the most significant part of our journey in the recent past has been you know the reflections from our partners. One is how do we enhance core support and while most of our grants are core support we’ve recognized that partners believe that we need to help support organizational capacities as well in particular talent comes up so often and the three other rules that have come up very very often for us and we recognize is something that perhaps only philanthropy can support is really fostering networks and collaborations. Some of this work is you know is is deep meaningful without immediate returns and could be seen almost as self-indulgent work but it’s a vital investment to make in supporting civil society organizations to emerge potential collaborations and platforms for peer learning for all of these things to happen and I think that’s a role that philanthropies need to play more often we’ve been consciously doing so.

The fourth one is really strengthening engagement both within the portfolio and across portfolios and philanthropies and the last one is really to be able to support organizations with more and more specific technology requirements because that’s coming up. Many more organizations seek to engage with technology but talent is unevenly distributed and to be able to bridge that gap.

Speaker 4: I’m actually facing some technological challenges on my laptop it’s continuously switching on and off so. Anu, you’re on mute. Can you hear me now?

Yes.

Speaker 2: Okay, so I’m sorry I’m facing a lot of issues with my laptop suddenly I don’t know what’s happening so it may just completely die on me I just I don’t know what’s just happened to it but you know when you talk about being very aware of how what are the challenges some of the you know social purpose organizations face when trying to scale their impact and like you said project versus you know funding versus institution building. So what and you mentioned some of the ways of addressing it yeah sorry and you mentioned some ways of it but could you you know specifically talk about how have you had certain organizations built scalable you know what has that journey been?

Just some examples and Adil, I may have to have you take over because my laptop’s really acting up so if I yell SOS at some point you might just have to take over but Gautam, I was dying to ask you this question.

Speaker 1: Thank you. I believe our role is of a capitalist. Most of the organizations we support operate in areas that we do not have contextual or proximate knowledge so our ability to be able to advise or influence is minimal and so we tend to be very hands-off on programmatic strategic work.

What we are able to do because of our networks is really bring some amount of social capital in learning sessions connections that sort of stuff. I think the biggest change for us has been over the years has been the fact that traditionally we’ve thought that since we give unrestricted grants we don’t really need to work on the supply side of capacity building as well but I think more and more we’ve realized that that’s necessary as well because unrestricted grants are few and far between so organizations will tend to be ultra cautious in how they’re supported. For our portfolio now we do a lot more capacity building support independent of that and are also able to create containers where we bring portfolios together, allies together and a lot of collaboration and cooperation and the co-creation emerges from that. Which is why I was saying for us our role is really to be able to bring some of the social capital and networks to the table and create containers where these conversations can happen and then the support emerges organically rather than something that is being restricted.

Speaker 2: Absolutely, I want to ask you another question around relationship building. You’ve had a high trust approach to your philanthropy. What would you say have been some things that you have observed that are strong ways of building relationship with the grantees that you worked with?

Speaker 1: I think our position is that the effort needs to be on the side of the funder. We are the side with the inordinate and unequal power equation so that is something that we need to start it’s not something that is expected of our partners. But in particular I think relationships of trust are fostered and strengthened when there is open communication, when there is transparency on both sides and when we are both able to think about the problem we’re tackling rather than the quarterly report and the dashboard and things of the sort.

So in particular the conversation that we love to engage in most often and anecdotally I’ve heard our partners say the same as well is that we engage in an annual learning cycle with our partners. What did you do? What was the outcome?

What was unexpected about it? What will you do differently? And our hope is that over the three to five years that we support our partners at the start that the rate of change of surprise so to speak goes down, that they have a better sense of the actors in their landscape, the interactions between these actors and the incentives and where their solution or their approach fits in the landscape of the systemic nature of the problem.

So trust building for us really is a conversation. As somebody said your conversations just determine your relationships and so it’s that conversation we recognize that we sometimes struggle with adequate bandwidth to be able to hold meaningful conversations but we’ve gotten better at it and really you know we find that that’s where the value really emerges from our relationships of trust. Last one is also to recognize for us that the relationships do not need to be from the foundation to the grantee alone.

The grantee-grantee relationship and the partner-partner relationship is really important. So being able to facilitate a many-to-many relationship is really important because we trust each other as a community and we see our partners and our grantees as part of the Rohini Nilikani or the Nilikani Philanthropies community and so that trust is also really important.

Speaker 2: Gautam, you do realize that it’s a very very evolved patient high trust philanthropy that you you are a part of which is a little rare. So how much of a role do you feel like you need to play in the philanthropy ecosystem of because you know this is a emerging ecosystem where you know we’re hoping to attract more and more younger philanthropists to be to be giving. So how what is the role you all are playing in evangelizing some of the learnings over the years that you know and how’s that been?

Speaker 1: You know I have this joke I tell very often right that in the first few years I said I would work as a representative of philanthropy and then eight years on I say I work at Nilikani Philanthropies and recognize that I’m fortunate to work at a place where the thinking is a little bit of an I’m being an outlier but alongside that I also know very clearly what does not work in terms of being able to share our learnings with other philanthropies and foundations and individuals.

Where we’ve really landed is the fact that we will be accountable to the public and to our partners and to our principals by publishing widely what we learn and know so that when someone is looking or when someone is curious they may find it. My sense is there is no other way that when someone makes the internal journey to recognize that social problems are complex we need to be able to let go of control. We need to be able to trust our partners who are proximate more then they might get curious and they might find other approaches of ours of which ours might be one of which they come across.

So there’s no prescription at all. Our influence is minuscule. We publish and I think that’s our primary accountability mechanism.

Speaker 2: Anything that you in the last few years you’ve seen as very innovative approaches to fundraising that are interesting and exciting that you could share?

Speaker 1: I think the ones that always stay with you are the ones where someone has done enough of homework about why this could be of interest about and because we take a portfolio approach why this could be a valuable contribution to x portfolio at Rohingya Philanthropies or in other cases people have come to us and said you know we collaborated with six of your partners we should be a part of your portfolio. So it’s really finding that sweet spot between telling me why this is a good opportunity and articulating that this is a missed opportunity so far for the philanthropy has been really powerful.

I think to also acknowledge that there are so many more sources of funding now right between you know these crypto funds and retail fundraising. So many organizations have built really really strong, excuse me, resilient fundraising models that tackle all of these. The ability to parcel out pieces of your work so that different kinds of capital can understand it.

The ability and I think this is something that’s crucial the ability for leaders to be able to hold on to their values and approaches they care about most deeply within the organization but to tell the story in ways that it can meet a variety of funders in different spaces where the funders are rather than expect the funders to make that journey even though I think they should but to recognize that everyone’s on a journey and so there’s a particular kind of leadership that’s able to hold on to the core values and approaches of their work yet meet funders where they are and tell the story through lenses that funders might appreciate. But that bridging the gap between what the funders expecting what the organization wants is something that the leader and leadership at organizations needs to be able to bridge.

Speaker 2: You know one last question Gautam on what you know what is holding organizations back you feed from all the various organizations you’ve met in because you’re as the CEO often that you know you’re dealing with every kind of challenge and I always say that the toughest role is the founder CEO of a non-profit because this talent is a challenge you know funding is never easy. It’s just not a very enabling ecosystem even while there might be pockets of philanthropists who are high trust patient that’s not normally the case especially with funding from CSR it’s also you know there’s a lot of you know other compliance related. So what do you feel you know when you see and you’ve seen various organizations from early days to you know setting building institutions what have you felt have been some of the things that have had to shift in the minds of the CEOs do you think you know things like getting strong governance boards understanding the need to diversify their funding strategy adopting technology all of these things are you know because it’s not intuitively there you know you sometimes I know that I need to sometimes decide on how much control today as the founder I need to have and how much I need to focus on other things.

So what are some of the things you feel hold non-profits back or social enterprises and you know and what do you think would you know how can they overcome this. So you know this is coming from the institution building lens when you’re building an institution versus running a program that journey you know how what is how’s that mindset shift that needs to help.

Speaker 1: Sure, I think the first one is the biggest one for me right it came to me really when when we were trying to understand why some organizations were particularly good at retail fundraising and part of the answer was the fact that fundraising isn’t the challenge of a fundraiser it is a core business of everyone in the organization even though we might not call it fundraising. I think the idea is that organizations need to be able to build communities of support around them of which fundraising is one type of community and that communication that that’s a communication challenge and communication is not the challenge of one person in the organization storytelling is to be everyone’s job. So for us for me at least and this is my own take and it’s entirely possible it is incomplete or wrong is the fact that as a leader builds an organization is that the idea of communication and the idea of fundraising should be seen as a continuum.

Communication builds a community, community can have funders, how do you widen your networks and that’s something everyone in the organization needs to do. Unfortunately, in the traditional structured approach that most organizations tend to fall into by default communication is seen as one person’s problem fundraising is seen as another person’s problem and often the gap is bridged is not very well bridged. So I think my biggest takeaway is really that organizations yes tell your data, data is a non-negotiable where it can be measured but really tell your stories better, tell your stories as individuals, tell your stories as teams and tell your stories as organizations and tell the stories not just of yourselves but of the communities you serve and the changes you do, tell the stories of your failure because ultimately all you can do is make it easier for people to find you. I keep saying that our job is really to increase our surface area of serendipity and there’s not much else we can do.

It could sound fatalistic and I’m sure there are fundraising consultants who have a very structured approach but my takeaway is also that the very structured approach works once you have someone in conversation with you but for someone to find you is the real challenge and core calls and email blasts and all of those things have tremendously, how to say, declining rates of return.

Speaker 2: Right, well absolutely. You know I recently was listening to another philanthropist and one of the things he brought out was how we non-profits or social enterprises should have an exit policy because if you don’t have an exit policy you’re not really solving, right, and ultimately that’s the role you have to play. What is your, you know, how do you approach this because it’s not when you’re when you’re knee-deep in the kind of work we are doing and in India there’s enough and more to be done maybe for generations to come but how do you, but it’s an important mindset to have that we ultimately can we exit this because this problem needs to at some point get solved.

So you know, as a philanthropist how do you, you know, how do you bring that into a discussion when you’re talking to the people you’re funding?

Speaker 1: It’s a very topical discussion, right, I mean it comes up within the team very often. At Rohini Related Philanthropies we’re doing this really lovely podcast called Grassroots Nation which is documenting the stories of some of this country’s founding civil society leaders. You’ll see Bankar Roy, you’ll see, you know, Ashok Khosla, just so many of them and the thing that struck me was all of them are still at it.

Would they be funded by philanthropy spirit because even there is no exit strategy, right, but also to recognize that the challenges they chose to work on exist as of today. It’s not exactly like they have been resolved or gone away. Rohini often makes this point that she chose to work on water and she spent 20 years in it and then chose to exit the space which isn’t to say that the water problem has been solved, it’s to say that we have an approach, it’s to say that we have greater clarity now than we did before but I fully see the corollary is that we also work with a really young set of founders, all I don’t know what comes after millennials Gen Z, no Gen X, sorry I have no clue. And so many of them see their role to catalyze either a community or a platform or a collaborative that cares about the problem and then that leadership is vested in the network and it’s not vested in an individual but a community or a collaboration or a platform approach is something that they seek to seed and catalyze and then they no longer need to lead.

No one approach is right, I mean all approaches are valid, I just think that we’re seeing the emergence of a new way of thinking among younger CSOs which also is a little bit of a response to fragmented resources, challenging landscapes to work in. So you know in those scenarios how do we be nimble, how do we build alliances rather than choose to be one large institution. So it’s also responding to the existing, how to say, carrying capacity of the social purpose ecosystem in India.

Speaker 2: One last question Gautam before I hand it back to Adil for audience questions. Any organizations that you have, that you could share that you have been particularly, you’ve seen their journey and their innovation or their the way they built their relationships and growth that you could share that we’d love to hear from. It’s always good about Ashoka University.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I keep saying that you all should really write the case study because everyone seems to think that and we’ve chatted about it that Ashoka has this, the Ashoka fundraising plan has this magic sauce and while it did have some social capital persistence makes such a difference and sometimes I’m like the secret sauce is persistence. It’s true of so many things in life and there are many organizations that do a good job, all organizations in our portfolio have clearly done a good job because they still exist. It would be unfair and incorrect for me to single anyone out but I think really for me and you’re a far better place to answer this and expand on it is the idea that fundraising is a communications challenge firstly.

Secondly, it is an organizational challenge, it’s not one person’s problem and thirdly, there is tremendous value in the power of compounded relationships persistence.

Speaker 2: In our fundraising program which is a very successful program we launched in the middle of Covid, it’s on its seventh version now. I think we have two mantras, one is that no doesn’t mean no, it means not now and so keep engaging and the other is that if you don’t ask the answer is no. Because I think it’s more than anything else persistence and this continuous engagement, more than anything it’s a mindset shift.

Nobody likes to fundraise globally, it’s just how do you overcome that and when you talk about Ashoka, I was smiling because the idea of the fundraising program came to me because I am from Ashoka University and from day one and even today Gautam, my radar is up when I meet H&I and sometimes I have to stop myself talking about Ashoka University and talk about ILSS because we were so geared to talk about Ashoka University.

Nobody asked us to but it was almost like a passion project for everyone in the team. So you know this thing about it being a fundraiser’s job or a CEO’s job, of course it is their job for sure and it’s definitely 50 percent of the CEO’s job if not more but it’s everybody’s job because ultimately if you want to achieve your dreams you have to raise money and raising money there’s no other way. You could have the best dreams, the best execution, you don’t have money, you just can’t do it.

So I think it’s you know I think it’s dawning on more and more people. There’s enough money in India, I always joke about I mean it’s not a joke but it’s the truth that all our temples and religious places are showing us that there’s a lot of money out there that could maybe come to you know organizations doing seminal work but and so there is a pie that can potentially move towards the social sector. Thank you so much Gautam and Adil, I’m going to hand over to you for audience questions.

Speaker 3: Thank you Anu and thank you Gautam, I think that was a lovely discussion, I really enjoyed myself and so informative. We are now going to get into the questions that our audience has been asking, very interesting questions. So Gautam, you need to put your mittens on for these ones.

The first question is really a very interesting one, it’s a question in the minds of a lot of organizations looking for funding. When organizations approach funding organizations like yourself, what are some of the things that you’re in the lookout for that hey, I’m definitely funding this organization. At the same time, what could be some of the red flags for you to not fund an organization?

Speaker 1: I can’t speak of the red flags because the red flags are usually later but to recognize that most organizations that are fortunate enough to have capital to be able to disperse as grants or other nations receive a tremendous volume of incoming requests and very often people try and find a way to stand out. So they will use big words, large graphics and the converse is actually what’s really valuable. Tell me why I should say yes to your email, which essentially means that you know what the foundation you’re approaching is doing.

The BCC email just is impossible to work with. You know what the foundation is doing, you know their areas of interest, you know their other grantees, you know why you think you make a compelling case for why you would be a good fit for them and then you offer to follow up with more information. I mean ultimately it’s that, my fundamental point of view is that most philanthropies rather all philanthropies and grant-making organizations.

Our goal is to say yes to as many as we can but part of the challenge is the top of the funnel is that wide and the end of it is that narrow and it’s not an easy trivial challenge. I worked for nearly a decade in the development sector and my big takeaway was so hard to work with donors and funders to get money out of them and on this side of the table sometimes I’m like it’s really hard to get money out of the door as well which was a bit of a learning for me. So reducing the burden of processing is something that’s really valuable and leading with why we’re a good fit and you have to reckon that you know something that is hard to see but something I want to say is that very often people will try and find a way to fit a round peg into a square hole, we fit because ABC and the truth is unless it’s exceptional it’s not going to work.

So you’re better off focusing your efforts on foundations that fit better rather than taking this extremely wide approach. The other one is also because of the magic of the internet and webinars and all of these things donors speak a lot now, funders speak a lot at a lot of events. Trying to figure out what they’re saying, what they’re interested in, the areas they’re focusing on, what strategy we might be taking, we’ll find a lot more information right now.

Last one is please don’t use strategy to write your proposals and emails, it’s really obvious.

Speaker 3: Sure, thank you for that answer Gautam. Next question is from Suja Sukumaran, I work for an NGO but I found that getting the contacts for fundraising and CSR is not easy. What are the recommendations for non-profits regarding approaching philanthropies for fundraising?

How does one get the foot in the door, whom do we contact, how do we go about it?

Speaker 1: So I think most foundations now have an email address and that they respond to, like we would respond to almost every email we get. There are organizations like ILSS etc. where you might go to for support and you know capacity building, they’ll be able to do things like that.

10 years ago there weren’t as many intermediary organizations, it was purely the power of your personal networks that would get you a foot in the door, that’s no longer the case. I mean in our case like if we have to decline an opportunity, people make no holes about writing to Rohini and Amban saying but your CEO declined my listing, it happens. And so the information asymmetry is something that has definitely reduced and something that so many organizations are working on, whether it’s Dasraj Giving Time, Convergence Foundations, Accelerating Indian Philanthropy, the asymmetry of information is getting better and I hope that it means that more and more people from outside the known networks will get supported.

The last one to get a foot in the door is really peer referrals and a lot of our partners come by peer referrals. An existing partner says why don’t you look at and that often carries a great amount of weight.

Speaker 3: Thank you, Gautam. Gautam, you spoke of how things are very different from what they were 10 years ago. So this question is actually very akin to that and it is, how do traditional methods of fundraising differ from newer, more innovative, modern approaches, keeping in mind today’s sectoral landscape?

Speaker 1: I don’t know if that’s a binary and I really don’t know that’s a binary because the fundraisers of old were the same as the fundraisers of today. I believe that the fundamental fundraising is communication and storytelling and that’s a skill that’s age-old. Now, sure, technically there are many more things.

Do you want to post a tweet or whatever, what do you call it, or an exit? Do you want to post an Instagram story? So the mediums will definitely vary.

The fundamental ability to tell a story doesn’t. So I think the big changes for us are really around the ability for organizations to democratize storytelling within their organizations, the ability for data collection to have far, where necessary, far greater fidelity, far greater frequency. But I don’t know if those are as important as the fundamental value of seeing fundraising as the outcome of building community and storytelling and communications as a way to build that.

Speaker 2: You know, Gautam, I just want to jump in here and share that, you know, about five years ago, I’d actually attended a sort of a dialogues around in the social sector around marketing and whether it was a force of good or not. And I was actually, I was coming in from the private sector at that point. I mean, I hadn’t really been here that long and I was, I thought, why was this even a debate?

But I was interested to, I was, it was interesting for me to experience that there were people who strongly felt that it, you know, selling or marketing or, you know, sort of, it was not the way to do it. You do your work, but you don’t and projecting and so on. But for us, and I mean, Ashoka was a classic example of the social media story.

We never had advertising, but we really put out a lot of our content on social media, LinkedIn, all that. And even ILSS really, but that journey has also happened. So I do feel like there was a conservative sort of very, it was another school of thought, which sort of looked out.

And today, when we talk to our, some of our NGOs, younger NGOs, they often ask us for board members who understand branding, marketing, digital, how to put our face forward. And that’s an actual requirement people are acknowledging. And I think that’s a shift I’ve seen, you know, that I didn’t, that I was surprised wasn’t quite there five, six years ago, there was a, there was at least a debate on whether you should have marketing and branding was now clearly NGOs are asking for it.

So I think it’s great.

Speaker 1: We have a fundamental pillar on this, we call it humble, not modest. We have immodest ambitions, but are humble in our approach. Similarly, we are not modest about asking for money.

But we can be humble in our approach. I can see how that has had to evolve over time. The idea of Dana, all of those things, right?

But no, and more importantly, I think the value of branding and marketing and storytelling and communications isn’t just about money. It’s about leadership, how do you attract new people to your cause? How do you find your next line of leadership?

How do you create opportunities for people to engage with you in non-monetary terms? How do you, and remember, none of this is being done for ourselves, we’re doing this on behalf of communities we seek to serve. So the value underlying all of this, and the principles underlying all of this are sacrosanct, and I firmly believe in the ability of leadership to negotiate that.

Speaker 2: Adil, I just want to ask one more quick question, if you don’t mind, I’m being a little, please go ahead. Gautam, have you worked with, you know, you’ve worked with many organizations, but have you ever worked on the area of succession? I know I’m digressing, but is that something that’s come up in any of your portfolios or you don’t believe in going there?

Speaker 1: No, you know, it’s not something that’s specifically come up, but we’ve now seen several cases of leadership transitions that have gone all right. And I think it’s something that we have talked about internally, and in particular, to recognize when it’s a founder leader that’s transitioning, that inflection point is not merely a milestone on that organization’s journey, it is likely the start of an entirely new journey. And so to treat it accordingly, so that the preparation for that transition is not two months, it’s perhaps two years.

In particular, to recognize that founder leaders will often mold an organization in their own image. And when the next leader comes in, that there could be several points of disconnect. And so that preparation needs to take time, which also means that donors need to be able to fund money to support all of these transitions.

But broadly, on transitions, we haven’t, we haven’t seen very many of them. But the ones that we’ve seen, we recognize that in particular where it’s founder, where it’s founder, CEOs that are transitioning, there needs to be a lot of work done to align the organizations to values around the institution, rather than around the leader alone.

Speaker 3: Thanks, Anil. Next question is very interesting. Bhavani Kumaran says, almost all the second line leaders in my organization are below 35.

How do we as a younger second line go about building community for fundraising and building capacity? Right, my answer would be obviously join the ILS’s fundraising program. But yeah, Gautam, your take on this?

Speaker 1: I think a lot of it will be around the culture of the organization. Is fundraising seen as a separate thing that only some people need to do? Or is fundraising seen as a whole to the leadership journey, and the leadership across the organization?

Is communication seen as a communication team problem? Or is communication seen as the way we operate? Is communication within our organization as much as it is outside?

So to that extent, I think the amazing thing is that the younger people are perhaps far more digitally native and savvy and able to bring far more ideas to the table. Then certainly people like me, I really struggle with that. And so perhaps the question is, can also be reframed as how do we create the opportunities for youngsters, for young leaders, second line of leadership to be able to participate in strategy around fundraising and communications rather than seeing, flipping it around and asking what they will do to fundraise.

I think the power structure over there is very much centered in the existing line of leadership. And the question is, what are the spaces for collaborative debate, for being able to bring new leaders, for incepting new ideas from the second line of leadership into that? So I think most things that your question is really, what is the story of leadership within the organization?

Is it authentic at every level, at the level of the self, at the level of the team, at the level of the organization, and at the level of the ecosystem? If it is, then I feel like you’ll be pretty well-placed to answer any of these questions, not just fundraising one. But if the way the leadership shows up in the team and in the ecosystem is different, it can often fracture quite badly.

Speaker 3: Thank you for sharing that. The next question, actually, this is something that has come up regularly in a lot of questions that people are asking, is that, you know, old organizations that really have something to show, do have some locus stand, you know, but what about new organizations that might be promising, have the vision, have the passion, but really do not have the proof of the pudding yet? How do you look at those organizations?

And how do they approach, you know, building a funding relationship with philanthropy?

Speaker 1: Yeah, so like I was saying, that’s perhaps our remit in the areas we care about, but also recognize that the tremendous change that’s happened over the last decade, right? A, new organizations do the equivalent of startups, they do friends and family rounds. B, the explosion of incubators and accelerators and seed venture funds for social purpose organizations.

And I will say that there’s something really powerful about the incubators and accelerators for the development sector, as opposed to the for-profit sector, because in the for-profit sector, a lot of these programs and incubators don’t actually come with money, they come with gyan. And gyan will only take people so far, actually, gyan is perhaps counterproductive. Whereas in the development sector, I really like the fact that almost every incubator accelerator brings money to the table, so much so that we should adopt the hashtag, give grants not gyan.

But I think that’s really, really powerful, right? And we’ve seen so many organizations emerge from these incubators and accelerators that have gone on to build scale, build a variety of work. The other one, of course, is also the ability now to fundraise, fundraise very differently.

The rise of platforms, the rise of, you know, our digital payments infrastructure, there’s a lot more opportunity and a lot more fluidity in those spaces than there were 10 years ago. I haven’t signed one of those match funds for UNICEF in a really long time, because now it’s all digital, you don’t necessarily have to do it. Which isn’t to say that there is no value in face-to-face fundraising, there is, just saying that everything else is a lot easier now.

So yeah, I actually think this is a great time to start. And unlike most for-profit incubators and accelerators, the ones in the non-profit and social purpose space actually give you money. And like most of the ones in the for-profit space, that always stay non-profitable, we have non-profitable and high impact, so we’re doing better than them.

Speaker 3: Thanks, thanks for saying that. This is very interesting question by Suja Sukumaran. And how does a non-profit choose between scalability and short-term impact?

Is it an either or, or there has to be a perfect balance between the two for someone to be successful?

Speaker 1: I mean, I think the person who asked the question knows the answer to it that it’s both. But I think the question really is in the sequencing. I think very, very often, the challenge is really that we all care about the systemic impact, but ultimately, I also need to put one foot in front of the other.

So very often, the question that we ask is not so much, what is your impact, but what is your progress? And for us as well, in the early stages of organizations, particularly ones that care about systemic challenges, there is no systemic challenge without negotiating the value of uncertainty. Do I have the right actors?

Am I working with the right actors? Am I working, do they have the right incentives? What is my role?

What do I do? So being able to A, see the landscape for yourself and for your donors, just to figure out that, hey, we kind of know the big picture. B, we kind of know who the actors are.

We kind of know how they interact with each other. We know everyone’s incentives. And while we might be doing a tiny part of this large map, we’re cognizant of the larger landscape.

So the goal is to be able to put every step you take for immediate progress in context. There’s no guarantee that the larger systemic change will happen, but the goal is really for us to be able to give ourselves and our teams a sense of direction and purpose while being cognizant of the larger map in which we play. And to recognize that the map isn’t complete, it is our journey that fills in the blank.

Speaker 3: Thank you, Gautam. One more question, what would you, would you have any advice for nonprofits working in the access to justice space on fundraising? That’s a notion that, you know, CISR shy away, quote unquote, shy away from, you know, funding human rights, social justice.

Speaker 1: No, I think there are two parts to it, right? One is to recognize that a rising tide lifts all boats, that these, the issues of rule of law, the issues of justice, and not for them, but for us. You know, many years ago, a disability rights activist told me this thing, which I found really, really powerful.

He said that the reason we should make our cities and our schools and our institutions and our public transport disabled friendly is not because they are the disabled and they require equal access. He was like, every person would be disabled to varying degrees at some point in time of their life, either because of age, or because of the, you know, some sort of degradation, or because of an accident. And there is a case for society to prepare for those immaturities for everyone.

Similarly, with issues of rule of law, should corporates care about rule of law? Of course they should. I mean, certainty of contract is something that is very, very valuable.

I think the challenge also is that sometimes we see, we see this as an adversarial kind of relationship, and it isn’t. I think there are many ways to be able to support work around improving access to justice, about improving rule of law, that are fairly secular and systemic, as well as work that is targeted, supports the vulnerable, supports the marginalized. But I think most importantly is the fact that I think we believe that the act of giving must not just change the recipient, but other communities, it must change the giver.

And that conversation is something that only social purpose organizations can have. By reporting on your impact, 30 people out, 30 under trials out of prison, reduces the ability for the people who gave you the money to imagine the change in human lives that they have caused. So that conversation is something that we really need to build.

Because if we’re able to change the people who give the money, if we’re able to expand their worldview, their consciousness, the very act of them giving will get them to give more, will bring their friends. And I think that is our role, as people who also shadow the social purpose organization universe, to be able to tell the stories that allow people to see themselves in it so that they might be able to support it as well.

Speaker 3: Thank you. Thank you so much, Gautam. Last question, I promise.

And this question is very, we cannot stress enough on the importance of being able to tell your story well, right? The good storytelling that really communicates the vision of the organization. I know you mentioned Ashoka, right?

But here are some orgs that have written in, they really want to know what are the elements of that good story, you know, that they can incorporate in their own pitch and in their own story. So as to, you know, successfully be able to secure what they’ve set out to do?

Speaker 1: I don’t have an answer. But I do have a direction. A, it should be authentic.

B, it should be from every level of the organization. And C, they should be cadets. I think some organizations are good at two or two of these three, some at one of these three, very few at three of these, all of these three.

And I think the important bit for me is really the fact that you’re periodic about it, not every week, but every quarter, some periodicity, because like Anu said, well, three months ago, I might have said no, it might have just been the wrong time. So that’s really, really important. It’s an investment of time.

I agree. But at some level, it’s really the work that we need to be able to do, right? To give, to give the holders the capital, the ability to see themselves in this work, to be able to see why this is important, or to find them at the moment in time, and they’re saying, I wish I could, and then your inbox turns up, your email turns up.

So you don’t have to be exhausted. Nobody’s going to read a 2000 word email. But something that’s, you know, regular, something that tells the stories from all levels of the organization, and something that tells a variety of stories.

Speaker 3: Anu, you wanted to say something?

Speaker 2: So Gautam, actually, it’s very interesting that it was Rohini who actually coined the whole Samaj, Bazar, Sarkar as a narrative for the importance of, you know, the interplay between all three. And I always keep thinking about different societies and in my head, I’m like, here Bazar is really uppermost, and maybe then some Sarkar and then some Samaj. But I, ideally, all three.

So just can you elaborate along, because that’s the underpinning of a lot in the way you all, you know, see the role of civil society as a key pillar, you know, for well-being. So just a little bit, you know, for the audience, could you talk a little bit about the Samaj, Bazar, Sarkar, and how you…

Speaker 1: Yeah, we don’t see Samaj as a key pillar, we see it as the foundational pillar. In a sense that it is Samaj that has ceded authority to the Bazar for efficient economic transactions and to Sarkar for efficiency in regulation and things of the sort. So the legitimacy rests with the Samaj.

We also see that, you know, at least our point of view is that it is only Samaj that has the legitimacy to be able to retread the fabric between the three. Because these institutions, these structures were created for the… Did my video freeze?

Speaker 2: Yes, it has.

Speaker 1: At what point did it freeze?

Speaker 2: No, but you were in the middle of saying something.

Speaker 1: Oh, okay, sorry, it froze for a minute. No, so I was saying that the idea is that it is Samaj that has the primary place in this structure and has created the markets and the state for its own benefit and efficiency. But it is Samaj that can then hold them accountable to issues of equity and equality as well.

So to that extent, we tend to focus on putting Samaj, which is either citizens or communities or both, at the center of our work. And that’s something that we definitely look for when we consider new pieces of work. I mean, the book is a free download.

So if you want to drop the link in there, you can do that.

Speaker 2: I’ll drop the link of that wonderful book. It resonated, every page resonated for me deeply. I think it’s, you know, joining me and, you know, this book has really gone deep into understanding and also celebrating civil society in a way that is not being celebrated enough.

I feel, you know, I think these are our real heroes, people who are working in the most challenging environments to shift. Because I always joke and could have solved this, it would have been solved. It’s hard.

And that’s why, you know, there’s a courage in picking up sort of and saying, I will work to try and solve it. I don’t know if it will happen in my lifetime, but I’m going to put in my best to do it. So let’s can we celebrate civil society organizations more and, you know, put them on the right kind of platform, I think, for me, is really important.

But yeah, Adil, over back to you.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Anu. Thank you, Gautam. Gautam, I was going to take a minute and just answer some of the questions that I saw.

Ashok, scaling can be both deep and wide. I think in particular, if the goal is deep scaling, the question is how are you transferring the knowledge to other allies that can then scale the work. Priyal, on salaries, it’s a known challenge.

It’s why a bunch of philanthropists and organizations came together to support something that CSIP and Ashoka did, which was the first ever sectoral benchmarking of civil society salaries. To reach out to a potential, don’t reach out to the CEO, because they’ll almost never have the time. Find the program officer associate who leads this work.

How does your organization evaluate successful relationship management? I’m not sure if you mean between the donor and the grantee or partner or between the partner and the community, either which way, you know, evaluating a relationship is not our goal. That’s not something that we do.

Mangal, share some examples of what good storytelling looks like. ILSS will have a great bank of them, but for example, stories for me that are diverse and come from different levels of the organizations are the ones that I really, really enjoy the most. What is the typical quantum of funding?

We don’t have a typical quantum. We are highly responsive. There isn’t really a typical, but I suppose the median number would be about a crore rupees.

How do we manage, how do we measure our success? Great question. We measure our success not in terms of impact, but in terms of the number of, you know, we actually have a really good framework and there’s an article on SSI that my colleague Natasha wrote on how we look at impact for ourselves.

It essentially has four quadrants to recognize that impact is not a single number taken at a single point in time. It’s a range of things taken over a range of time. The article in SSI is great.

I’m running out of time. That’s fine. We have a minute.

Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Gautam. We would like to express immense gratitude to you for taking the time out and patiently answering all the questions. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1: As always, we never have enough time to do this. Maybe someday we’ll be able to do this in person. But also just to recognize that, you know, the task of getting the foot in the door is only the first thing.

There’s a fair amount of rigor and process that you can apply once you have the foot in the door. And while we didn’t discuss any of it this time, I’m sure the ILSS team has lots of resources and advice and inputs to provide on how to manage your relationship with donors, how not to overwhelm them. But I’ll leave it up to you.

So thank you, Anu. Thank you, Adil.

Speaker 2: We need a version two of this conversation. I mean, just because there’s so much left to still answer and unpack.

Speaker 1: And thank you to all of you who showed up.

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Originally published by India Leaders for Social Sector on 22 August 2023. View on YouTube →