YourStory.in has recently posted an interview of Shubham Srivastava, co-founder of ‘Godparents.in‘, an online platform that provides a way to connect millions of underprivileged children in need of money for various basic necessities such as education, nutrition to willing donors.

Godparents.in partners with NGOs that have a proven record of dedication and commitment to the cause of creating opportunities for underprivileged children. In establishing partnership with NGOs across India, our aim is to reach children from as far and remote locations as possible. Through Godparents.in, our partner NGOs can create profiles of children which one can browse and help the respective NGO to support them.

Godparents.in maintains a profile page for each child that has a financial requirement and provides comprehensive information about the child’s age, requirements, updates that help a donor (called Godparent) track the progress and the NGO that is related to this child.

Our relationship with our donors is not limited to a 1-time financial transaction but to a continued correspondence of how their support has impacted the life of their godchildren. This adds a human element to fund-raising

However the donation doesn’t entirely go to the children.

Godparents.in passes on 94% of the amount one donates to the care taking NGO to provide services to the child chosen by the donor.. Depending upon the Card/mode of payment used by the donor, the payment gateway charges range from 3.31% to 5.52%. The balance…is used to cover the operational costs incurred by Godparents.in, like charges of web hosting services, web development, reaching out to potential NGO partners as well as potential donors, etc.

Godparents.in faces familiar challenged faced by any other web-based platform working with NGOs.

1. The first challenge lies in convincing and enabling the grass-root organizations to use simplified technology in order to expand the scope of their operations. A lot of Indian NGOs are new to using web-based technologies on their own and often require assistance at several steps of the required operational work….
2. However, the biggest challenge in our work lies in convincing the potential donors about the credibility of the recipient organizations. In order to do so we have set very strict and clear criteria for grass-root organizations to partner with. We only partner with organizations that have proven their commitment to the cause and satisfy the stringent “Credibility Norms” as set by reputed organizations like “Credibility Alliance” and “Give India“.

Godparents.in, in short, has an operating model that closely resembles RangDe, a successful online micro-finance organization for small businesses. As per the after just 2 months of its launch in August 2009, it had 80 children registered, 7000 visitors, 175 transaction, 2 lakh rupees donated. So, there is little doubt that this social business has all the ingredients for success. So what are its future plans?

We plan to open up fund-raising chapters of Godparents Foundation worldwide to spread awareness about the good work being done by the grass-root organizations in the country and to raise funding

In the near future, we shall also start partnering with corporates under their CSR programs to further expand the scope of our operations, and to generate more support for our partner NGOs.