Sustainable Impact & the Art of the Ask with Vandana

So you're also an entrepreneur.

Yes.

And you have developed a framework around closing the gap between intention and impact-

Yes

... within the nonprofit world.

So what is this? Tell me more.

We established Commsat at the beginning of COVID, when I realized a lot of fundraisers, or rather large impact individuals, wanted to donate to people across the globe.

COVID took down the barriers for financial entry into nonprofits across the world.

It changed the way CSR worked.

It changed the way philanthropy worked.

And from there, we realized that one of the things that donors did not have was verified impact.

We would see these reactionary stories that would come up, which were filled with horror stories or poverty porn, and it would identify a certain class which did not have the authority to authorize their story to be told, or to be told with a certain amount of dignity.

They were just images of a child sitting in settings that were not theirs to, theirs in the making.

But the organizations were raising a lot of money, and the money that was raised was not socially verifiable.

They were not impact verifiable, and we did not know whether the money was actually going towards the impact that was being created or not.

So there were all these barriers that we would had to work around, and one of the things that came up to the forefront was donors wanted to give.

It was just that they didn't have the mechanism to give, and they were looking for the wrong things.

Because remember, half of them are coming from a financial background.

They're coming from a VC setting where they're used to seeing things in a different framework, and you're going towards social good, where the framework is a little different.

Here they're looking at the output of profit, and the output of profit in social good is either impact or communities changing.

And there was no way to create this in a measurable, verifiable way for translating it to both sides of the spectrum.

Got it.

So what does this organization do?

So we work with philanthropists to identify organizations across the world that are verifiable, social impact creatable.

We manage their fundraising portfolios, but off late this year, in the last eight month, in the first eight months of our organization, we raised about 72 million, going towards women's education, going towards reproductive health and sexual reproductive rights, going towards climate change, going towards women's entrepreneurship across the world.