Author: gkjohn

With the introduction of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, it may be useful to revisit how we think about data collection and impact measurement.

The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act of 2023 marks a significant shift in India’s legislative landscape. By establishing a comprehensive national framework for processing personal data, it replaces the previously limited data protection regime under the Information Technology Act, 2000.

The DPDP Act applies to the processing of digital personal data within India, and to data collected outside India if one is offering goods or services to Indian residents. The act encapsulates various principles of data protection, such as purpose limitation, data minimisation, storage limitation, and accountability. It also provides multiple data subject rights (rights of individuals whose data is being collected), including access, data correction, deletion, and grievance redressal.

Beyond its legal ramifications, however, the passage of the DPDP Act calls for a moment of introspection for the philanthropic community. The act’s emphasis on data protection and privacy rights is a timely reminder of the evolving responsibilities and challenges faced by philanthropic organisations and their grantees.

While the DPDP Act covers a broad spectrum of data concerns, this article focuses on exploring its implications on impact measurement within the philanthropic realm. As we delve into this facet, it’s worth noting that the act, like any evolving legislation, will invite further interpretations.

CSR’s focus on data-driven impact measurement

India’s CSR regulations have historically pushed companies towards a data-driven approach to demonstrate their social and environmental impact, insisting on detailed tracking of both user data and impact measurement. This is regardless of the model adopted by CSRs, that is, whether they run their own social and environmental projects or allocate grants to nonprofits to execute initiatives on their behalf.

For instance, if a company undertakes an education initiative directly, it might require detailed student profiles to demonstrate the tangible outcomes of its interventions. In a similar vein, nonprofits being funded by companies are often asked to furnish comprehensive reports showcasing impact—this necessitates the collection of data such as medical histories, personal narratives, or academic progress, depending on the project.

The rigorous demand for data and impact evidence is now at odds with the stringent provisions of the DPDP Act.

This rigorous demand for data and impact evidence (in both approaches) is now at odds with the stringent provisions of the DPDP Act, especially those pertaining to user data collection, storage, and reporting. Such a clash has significant implications for funders and civil society organisations that engage in impact measurement and evaluation, and raises important questions about user data collection and reporting and compliance.

What will change?

Collecting personal details without informed consent was an ethical conundrum even before the introduction of the DPDP Act. The act merely crystallises these ethical concerns into tangible legal mandates. For example, under Sections 3 and 4 of the new legislation, gathering intimate personal information such as health records or financial data without explicit consent could pose legal risks.

Moreover, the act’s emphasis on data security, minimisation, and explicit consent complicates the previously straightforward reporting processes integral to CSR. Complying with data security and minimisation requirements in Sections 8 and 11 may add substantial administrative burdens for resource-strapped organisations.

In addition, if nonprofits are to comply, they will be confronted with increased legal liabilities and administrative overheads. This cost is more than just financial; it takes away from resources that could be channelled into doing transformative work.

Going beyond numbers

Given the stringent requirements of the DPDP Act, there’s a pressing need for revisiting and potentially revising the CSR guidelines. Striking a balance between accountability and privacy becomes crucial in ensuring compliance with both CSR and data protection mandates.

While accountability remains paramount, it’s time to transition from rigid metrics to narratives of change. By fostering relationships built on mutual respect and shared learning, practices followed by donor organisations can resonate with the ethos of the DPDP Act and nurture a more collaborative philanthropic ecosystem.

This necessitates a fundamental rethinking of how social impact can be measured, and shifting the focus from data collection to storytelling and community empowerment. By upholding privacy and agency, as per Sections 6 and 12, the law provides an opening to develop more participatory and human-centred evaluation frameworks. Funders are pivotal in enabling this evolution by modifying expectations, building capacity, and championing new trust-based and collaborative models of assessing progress.

While the philanthropic sector, especially CSR, has traditionally leaned heavily on quantitative metrics to measure impact, it’s becoming increasingly evident that numbers alone don’t capture the full spectrum of change. Trust-based philanthropy does not seek to abandon these metrics but to complement them. It suggests that, alongside traditional measurements, there’s room for more qualitative, human-centric indicators.

Drawing from the experiences of pioneering funders and nonprofits, here are our learnings on implementing trust-based philanthropy in the context of the DPDP Act.

1. Have conversations with your grantees

Funders have an obligation to understand impact, but the understanding becomes more profound when it’s rooted in both data as well as human experiences. Strict numerical metrics sometimes miss the nuanced changes and adaptations taking place in communities.

Instead of solely focusing on end results, trust-based philanthropy encourages funders to appreciate the journey—the collaborative learning processes, the stories of resilience, and the community-led innovations that are responsible for those results. This doesn’t mean throwing away the numbers, but instead adding layers of narratives and community feedback to them.

Rooted in values such as equity, community, and opportunity, trust-based philanthropy aims to build stronger relationships with grantees, cultivate mutual learning, centre trust with nonprofits, and redistribute power in the philanthropic sector.

Funders can start by initiating conversations with grantees about their experiences and stories on the ground. Impact assessment can become a richer, more holistic process by incorporating tools such as participatory storytelling and feedback loops. The idea is to strive for a balance between quantitative outcomes and qualitative process learnings.

Trust-based philanthropy envisions a future where impact measurement is not only about hitting targets but also about understanding the depth and breadth of change—change that is driven by people and their stories, and supported by numbers, not dictated by them.

2. Streamline data demands

By streamlining data demands, trust-based philanthropy liberates grantee partners from the complexities of data management and aligns seamlessly with the DPDP Act. The implications of excessive data collection extend beyond administrative burdens. Constant monitoring can feel invasive to communities and reduce their rich life experiences to mere data points. Such scrutiny can be emotionally taxing and may alienate the very individuals we aim to uplift.

Trust-based philanthropy inherently champions data minimisation and privacy—both of which the DPDP Act emphasises—by valuing qualitative insights over exhaustive quantitative data.

From an economic perspective, trust-based philanthropy offers undeniable benefits. By minimising costs related to data collection and compliance, funds can be redirected to more impactful initiatives, optimising the societal value of every rupee invested.

A compass for CSR and philanthropy

Recent research provides mounting evidence that trust-based practices are taking hold in philanthropy. A 2023 CEP study found that more than half of the nonprofit leaders surveyed reported increased trust from funders compared to the previous year. Many nonprofits also experienced shifts towards alignment with trust-based tenets, including 48 percent seeing reduced grant restrictions, 40 percent receiving more multi-year funding, and more than 50 percent facing streamlined applications and reporting. Nonprofit leaders specifically cited unrestricted and multi-year funding as the most helpful changes. This demonstrates the growing embrace of flexibility, responsiveness, and mutual understanding.

The DPDP Act should serve as a compass for CSRs and the philanthropic community. By moderating our data demands, we uphold the privacy and agency of the people we serve and alleviate the burdens on our grantee partners.

As we stand at this crossroads, we envision a future where Indian philanthropy is celebrated for both its generosity as well as its trustworthiness. This is an opportunity to champion philanthropy that’s not just compliant with the law but also resonates with the communities it serves.

---

Originally published at India Development Review on 13 October 2023.

In the quest for social impact, community building and platform creation are crucial strategies for nonprofits. The power of shared values, the vibrancy of collective action, and the sustainability offered by a community-centric approach can help amplify the reach and resonance of an organisation’s mission.

These strategies are the equivalent of turning a single powerful gorilla into a herd of nimble deer, with the organisation acting as a life-giving oasis. Let’s explore how leadership can guide this transformation using the idea of fractals.

Fractals are shapes in geometry that repeat the same pattern on different scales. Leadership is much like this. It’s not a one-way journey but a process that needs constant refining and adjusting, just like a fractal shape that keeps refining itself. Small changes in the beginning can lead to a significant difference later. Similarly, in a community, small decisions can create large effects.

Consider an instance where a leader’s values differ slightly from the organisation’s. At first, it may not be a reason for concern, causing only small ripples. But as this difference is repeated, it can create larger problems in the organisation, leading to confusion and inefficiencies. Over time, this slight difference can become a big issue, leading to the failure of the organisation.

I’ve learned from my experiences that leadership is like a fractal. It starts with one person making a change, which then affects those around them. Here are six ways in which leaders can help their communities grow and make a bigger impact.

1. Sharing core values

Community building begins with identifying and articulating your organisation’s core values. These values serve as the lifeblood that guides the community’s interactions, behaviours, and goals. It’s essential to understand that these core values aren’t merely imposed from the top but rather emerge naturally as an embodiment of the team’s shared beliefs, experiences, and aspirations.

The values thus formed become the common thread that connects diverse individuals, magnetically attracting those with similar beliefs and instilling a sense of camaraderie and shared identity within the community.

These values also give everyone a common language and frame of reference, guiding their actions towards achieving collective goals. This process is not a one-off event but a continuous exercise requiring constant introspection, mutual conversations, and a deep understanding of the community’s mission and vision.

Each member must live and breathe these values, and not just pay lip service to them. This can only happen when they are shared openly, regularly, and with conviction. Leaders for their part should incorporate these values in all communications and demonstrate them through actions.

Socratus, an organisation that works towards arriving at political solutions by bringing together all key agents who are the proponents of competing schools of thought, undertook an exhaustive process of reformulating and crystallising its core values, involving everyone from the senior management to all levels of the organisation. This process aimed to ingrain these values in the organisation’s collective conscience and is consistently revisited in weekly meetings.

The aim is not to achieve a fixed set of values but to nurture a living ethos that resonates with the community.

Similarly, Agami, a nonprofit that works towards innovation in law and justice, has integrated service leadership into their operations and community interactions, reflecting the organisation’s core values. Arghyam uses its mission of providing ‘safe, sustainable water for all’ as a guiding star, helping them discern whether their actions mitigate or aggravate issues. By conducting regular dialogues with stakeholders and beneficiaries, Arghyam ensures alignment with its mission of water security.

Articulating and sharing core values is an ongoing journey. The aim is not to achieve a fixed set of values but to nurture a living ethos that resonates with the community, evolves with it, and guides it towards a shared vision.

2. Encouraging unexpected connections

Serendipity—the occurrence of beneficial events by chance—can fuel innovation and foster deep connections within the community. It is the impromptu conversation at a networking event, the unexpected collaboration from a casual chat, or the innovative idea sparked by a chance meeting. Serendipity brings novelty and spontaneity, allowing diverse ideas and perspectives to mingle and generate unique solutions.

As leaders, the task is to architect an environment that nurtures these moments and promotes open dialogue and cooperation.

Creating ‘collision spaces’ where members can cross paths, interact, and collaborate is essential in fostering this culture of serendipity. These are not necessarily physical spaces but occasions, platforms, or environments that encourage and facilitate unexpected interactions and exchanges among community members. This could take shape in various forms—community meetups, workshops, online discussion forums, virtual coffee breaks, or social gatherings.

As leaders, the task is to architect an environment that nurtures these moments and promotes open dialogue and cooperation. This involves striking a delicate balance between structure and freedom—enough structure to provide a sense of order and coherence, and enough freedom for members to explore, express, and experiment. It also includes crafting an atmosphere of psychological safety where members feel seen, heard, and valued—spaces where they find it safe to voice their ideas and concerns, take risks, and make mistakes.

3. Building trust in the community

Building culture transcends merely assembling individuals around common interests or goals. Instead, it is rooted in creating an environment where care and trust are the foundations of every interaction, relationship, and initiative.

Leaders play a crucial role in this process. Their task extends beyond simply setting rules or defining boundaries; they must embody and model the behaviours they wish to see reflected within the community. This means constantly demonstrating empathy, practising active listening, offering support, and extending kindness and respect to all members. Furthermore, leaders must reinforce these behaviours through effective policies, constructive practices, and responsive feedback mechanisms.

Investing in trust is equally essential. Building trust is not an overnight process; it requires persistent and earnest efforts, transparent and open communication, and a willingness to face conflicts respectfully and constructively. Trust is built and sustained through consistent actions that validate the words spoken. And as trust grows, members become more willing to contribute, collaborate, and take risks, knowing they are in a safe and supportive environment.

At Agami, camaraderie and trust between colleagues and external partners is built through activities such as retreats, offsites, and informal meetups. Responsiveness to user needs and addressing issues respectfully, even when they can’t be resolved, are part of the leadership’s approach at Pratham Books to cultivate user loyalty.

4. Developing a platform for engagement

Platforms serve as a communal space or ‘watering hole’ for your community, where members gather, interact, learn, and collaborate.

These platforms often emerge organically from the needs and aspirations of the community rather than being predetermined structures. Therefore, they must not merely be technical solutions, but instead offer a space that nurtures a sense of belonging and encourages co-creation.

Community members should feel empowered to contribute to, innovate within, and take responsibility of the platform’s development and governance. This active participation deepens engagement and creates a stronger sense of ownership and accountability. It results in a platform that evolves with its users, ensuring its relevance, utility, and longevity.

Pratham Books developed StoryWeaver by observing how translators work offline and replicating this process online, making the platform intuitive and responsive to the needs of marginalised users. Arghyam amplified community capabilities by creating digital spaces to make skills training data visible and reusable at scale. This approach also fostered collaboration between government departments previously operating in silos.

5. Getting ready for decentralisation

The journey towards a community-centric model is a significant transformational process that involves rethinking and reorienting traditional organisational structures. It necessitates the shift from a hierarchical, control-based approach to a more collaborative, decentralised model, embracing shared ownership and governance.

This shift is not just operational but also cultural. It requires a change in mindset among the leadership and individual team members. It’s about redefining power structures and creating an environment that allows community members to shape the organisation.

A shift towards real decentralisation makes the organisation more resilient and adaptable in the face of change.

Indus Action, for instance, is working towards a future where regional teams operate autonomously and are independently funded, while the central team focuses on specialised functions such as technology. Pratham Books has adopted a light-touch governance approach for their StoryWeaver platform, employing mechanisms such as red flagging to maintain quality while encouraging open contribution. The organisation believes in collective stewardship, allowing the community to control the platform with minimal gatekeeping.

Such a shift towards real decentralisation—handing over ownership and agency to the community members—makes the organisation more resilient and adaptable in the face of change. By embracing decentralisation, the organisation truly becomes a platform that is of the community, by the community, and for the community.

6. Becoming a gardener

In a community-focused model, leaders transition from being the central authority to adopting the role of a ‘gardener’, often both within the host organisation and in the larger community.

Much like a gardener who cultivates a thriving ecosystem, leaders provide the necessary resources, conditions, and support for growth but also step back to allow the community to take the lead and evolve organically. This means creating opportunities for members to spearhead initiatives, mentor others, and even make mistakes from which to learn and grow.

But it’s more than just stepping back. It’s also about being attuned to the changing needs and dynamics of the community. It involves listening, observing, and offering targeted interventions when necessary, not unlike a gardener who prunes a tree or enriches the soil. Leaders need to maintain a hands-off, eyes-on approach, nurturing the environment while respecting the autonomy and individuality of its members.

Ashoka recognises individuals in the ecosystem who spotlight others’ needs without pushing their own agendas. Ashoka believes it serves as magnets, bringing together different stakeholders. At CIVIS, the leadership encourages organisations to cultivate volunteers’ passions, encouraging them to take ownership of the work rather than focusing on internal scaling.

Building communities is a journey of learning, adapting, and growing. The most successful organisations are those that enrich and are enriched by their communities. By embracing this fractal approach, leaders can help their communities become more resilient, creative, and impactful.

So, what patterns will you adopt to grow a thriving community? What new possibilities could your leadership unlock?

Disclaimer: IDR is funded by Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies.

---

Originally published at India Development Review on 1 September 2023.

How does one create infinite good with finite time and resources? This is the challenge that many nonprofits face. The traditional approach to this question of scale has been to build a larger organisation. However, there is an alternative—one that enables the organisation to scale through external resources by building communities, engaging networks, and creating platforms.

To help illustrate this point, I often use the metaphor of a 300-pound gorilla versus a herd of 300 deer. The gorilla represents a central entity that is slow to move and expensive to feed, whereas the deer are agile, responsive, and independent, both as individuals and as a group. While it may be easier to manage the gorilla, there are ways to manage the herd of deer–by creating a watering hole where they can gather. This watering hole represents a safe place of trust and resources where the community can share knowledge, ideas, and solutions. By building such a watering hole (a platform), nonprofits can create value throughout the ecosystem.

Platforms are the best way to engage what Seth Godin calls ‘tribes’—a group of people or a community that has a shared interest. The platform then becomes a way for people to communicate and organise.

However, when platforms focus only on their scale, or the number of users they have, they can inadvertently fracture communities. This is because the sheer size can make it difficult for users to connect in meaningful ways, leading to a fragmentation of the community. It is, therefore, crucial for platforms to prioritise building depth and trust within communities.

Building deeper connections can help a platform create value for their users, and foster loyalty and retention.

Depth refers to the quality of connections and interactions among community members, while trust is the sense of safety and reliability people feel within the community. Fostering deeper connections and trust could mean offering features, services, or content that cater to the specific needs and interests of the community members. Doing this can help a platform create value for their users, and foster loyalty and retention—both of which are key to long-term success.

To achieve any of this, however, it is important to first nurture a community around shared values—essentially beliefs, goals, and principles that unite a group of people and guide their interactions. This is the foundation on which platforms can then build a thriving community that can grow and evolve over time.

Communities provide us with a sense of identity and belonging and can offer support during difficult times.

Building a community

I worked at Pratham Books from 2007 to 2014 when it chose the Creative Commons model and gave up its position as a content gatekeeper in the children’s publishing space—a bold move at that time. They openly licensed their content to spur discussion, and had regular interactions with the community. This enabled entrepreneurs to experiment with creating new formats for content, enabled organisations to make this content accessible for differently abled people, and encouraged everyone to localise the material in ways relevant to their contexts.

This approach allowed Pratham Books to harness the power of this vibrant community and the breadth of these external resources to achieve its larger goal of helping all children discover the joy of reading.

While Pratham Books is one of the first ones I know of that adopted this agile, community-centric platform model, I now see others in the nonprofit ecosystem such as Agami, Civis, Reap Benefit, and EdelGive Foundation’s GROW Fund that have developed innovative models to expand their impact using technology, capacity building, and social engagement.

Creating community-centric platform models

Agami seeks to elevate other innovators in the space to create a network of problem solvers rather than doing it alone. Civis is a platform that works under their umbrella. It creates a participatory structure for citizens to engage with draft policies and laws. Its open-source technology interface makes room for citizens to be active participants through public consultations on urban development, environment, social justice, information technology, and health. Civis then collates this data and shares it with the government to build accountability.

A similar initiative is Reap Benefit, dedicated to collective action around civic and environmental problems at a hyperlocal level in cities. Through a platform called Solve Ninjas, Reap Benefit gives agency to communities to solve the issues and propose solutions at the local level, whether it is designing better dustbins, waterless urinals, or community waste and garbage disposal methods. The information collected on the platform is then shared with stakeholders and governance to push for impact. Reap Benefit’s community-driven approach has allowed it to build a platform that empowers young people to become changemakers within their communities.

Platforms that serve communities can look very different while serving similar purposes.

An important realisation is that platforms that serve communities can look very different while serving similar purposes. EdelGive Foundation’s GROW Fund, which supports 100 nonprofits, is an example of a platform that goes beyond mere collaboration. It has effectively evolved into a transformative platform, fostering knowledge sharing, capacity building, and continuous improvement for its partner organisations. By implementing a platform model based on trust and community engagement, the GROW Fund has demonstrated the potential for such platforms to create sustainable social impact.

The reasons for the importance of these platforms are many:

• They provide a way to scale without scaling the organisation proportionally.
• They provide a way to bind and engage communities even without continuous engagement.
• They help build sustainability and reliability by creating many community audiences and voices.
• They are a force multiplier, offering the possibility of leveraging the power of networks. As the web grows, its value increases exponentially.
• They offer some protection against failure. Once stable, a platform needs far less overhead to function than an organisation.

While existing platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram are good, they cannot be the primary platforms since their agenda is their own. They are beachheads in the digital world, but these companies hold the development, messaging, and purpose and seek to build their own communities on their platforms.

Investing in the community and nurturing it

Communities provide us with a sense of identity and belonging and can offer support during difficult times. However, communities don’t just happen; they need to be built and maintained through the investment of care. This can take many forms, from simply being friendly and welcoming to new members to organising shared events and forums. But whatever form it takes, the care we invest in our community helps to create a stronger, more resilient place for all of us.

J P Rangaswami, in his blog titled ‘The Plural of Personal Is Social,’ writes: “You need to start thinking of the customer as someone to have a relationship with, to get to know, to invest in, to trust, to respect. And you need to get everyone in the company to think that way, to act that way, in everything they do. And you need to do this everywhere, not just with your customers. Not just with your supply web or your trading partners. Not just with your staff and your consultants. Everyone. Everywhere.”

What organisations need then is an internal culture that enables this. They need to learn how to work with crowds and govern through the network rather than controlling the network itself, understanding the community by working with insights from learning and feedback loops. This can only be done if the tone is set at the top of the organisation and demonstrated in practice.

My time at Pratham Books taught me valuable lessons about communities and platforms and their role in creating positive social impact. Witnessing the power of building and nurturing a community to create value throughout an ecosystem has impacted my work—it has instilled in me the desire to cultivate care, trust, and value for users in any community-building endeavour. I have understood that nonprofits can achieve scale and catalyse infinite good with finite time and resources through engaging networks, creating platforms, and fostering communities.

I now approach platform and community building with a focus on deepening connections and building trust, and understanding that scale only happens at the speed of trust. Because only when we view the community as an investment are we more likely to work together towards common goals and create a stronger sense of connection. This is the mindset I now carry with me in all my work.

Disclaimer: IDR is funded by Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies.

---

Originally published at India Development Review on 28 April 2023.