A week into philanthropy

Edhi Sb was a great philanthropist and a true believer in humanity who started with nothing and built an international foundation. His foundation supports the poor, needy and aged people who have nowhere to go. Sadly, Edhi Sb is no more with us but his work should go on. In this project, led by Amal Academy, we worked for supporting the Edhi Foundation in fund collection. We believe even the smallest of efforts count and we can proudly say that we made it possible on our behalf. Let’s see how we did it and what was our experience doing this project.

1. Planning

The first step of our project was to devise a strategy on how we are going to approach people and convince them into making a donation to Edhi Foundation.

#ASmartDistraction — Before we started devising our strategy, our circle members came up with a smart plan of collaborating with another Amal Circle in completing this project. Circles are basically groups comprising of team members completing the Amal Mega Project. Therefore, we collaborated with Group 7, hosted a two circle collaboration discussion and devised the following strategy:

• To approach people, we decided to get in touch using simple image posters supplemented by a simple text message personalized according to our target audience that is, our friends, family and acquaintances. The images should explain our initiative and donation information. There were 3 great posters designed and 1 video by group members Nadeem, Aliza, Aamir, Maryam and Yasir.
• All asset files can be found at this link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1vb3Vu9K1a6x-BhiuYj_UZx7e4TtFbXV2?usp=sharing
• After getting content ready, we decided to leverage the power of social media and post the content on our stories. To make it more effective, we also reached out personally to our friends, family and groups. We set a target of getting 30 donations per circle member.

2. Execution

After planning, we moved on to executing our plan as soon as possible by posting the content to our stories and texting our friends and family in person. Here’s how our experience has been while executing our plan, the challenges that arose and the way we overcame them:

• Posting on the status and story updates did not really help us a lot. Contacting people personally and telling them about the initiative of Amal Academy’s fundraising for the Edhi Foundation has proved helpful.
• Many people were reluctant at first to doubt the initiative as a fake or scamming activity but after explaining and providing proper document proof issues by Amal, most of the people were convinced into making the donations.
• Lack of interest was also a major factor since many people do not want to put any effort into going through all the steps of the donation process. So, most of our close friends and family members were more likely to make that effort for us rather than the strangers.
• Engaging with people in the group was not helpful at all since people put no notice or miss your message in a group chat.
• Some people had trouble making donations and need guidance so we provided a complete walkthrough on how to donate.
• Few people told us that they could not make donations at the moment due to their busy schedule and shall get them done in their spare time, so we also had to remind them a few times.

3. Statistics

Let’s see some statistics of our fundraising activity:

Rubbia

• Total people reached: 22
• Total businesses/community centres reached: 1
• Total people/entities that provided funds: 16
• The total amount of funds collected: 4,500 PKR

*Rubbia took part in a school session and collected most of the amount by hand and donated that right on the spot in front of all the people.

Aamir

• Total people reached: 20–25
• Total people/entities that provided funds:
• The total amount of funds collected: 1,518 PKR

Bassma

• Total people reached: 15–16
• Total people/entities that provided funds: 1
• The total amount of funds collected: 10,000 PKR

Sarmad

• Total people reached: 15
• Total people/entities that provided funds: 6 (updated)
• The total amount of funds collected: 2,820 PKR

*Some people shall be donating money on the weekend. We shall be updating this article as more donations are done.

Link to screenshots: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19i62LSIK--A7OihcGe9Nc8OE1QuR4FSn?usp=sharing

Contribution by remaining members

Although some of our members Nadeem, Adrash and Maryam were not successful in getting donations from people, they made a significant amount of contribution in other work. Nadeem and Maryam helped make graphics for the activity and Adrash has helped in writing content for effectively approaching people.

4. Conclusion

The lesson that we learned from this activity was that no matter how much rejection or failure you face in life, you have to persist. Persistence is the key to more opportunities. At first, most people were reluctant but our resilient efforts in terms of explaining the initiative, guiding them on the payment process and appreciating them for their donations proved to bring the best outcome for this initiative. It also instilled in us a strong motivation to participate in such activities onwards.

If you’re reading this article and want to contribute to Edhi Foundation, you can share/follow the given link to further support this noble cause: https://edhi.org/habib-bank-ltd/