Giving Compass' Take:

• Here are a few key insights about the CSR portals, launched by a philanthropic foundation to help Rajasthan organize and better leverage CSR funds across India. 

• How can you utilize charitable giving to help innovate resources for communities? 

• Read more about CSR giving in India. 

To better leverage CSR funds, online CSR portals have emerged across India. These portals were originally developed by state governments attempting to supplement their own budget shortfalls and provide additional resources towards state development plans. They hosted government-created social development projects that relied on crowdsourcing from corporate donors to fund and implement.

Over the past three years, in states including Odisha, Gujarat, and Telangana, these CSR portals have further developed into information repositories, resource centres, and more grandiose funding platforms for CSR projects. While they attempt to facilitate investment and reduce barriers to corporate social spending, poor implementation and limited flexibility have affected their potential to bring greater efficiency and alignment to CSR spending.

To address these setbacks, the International Innovation Corps, in partnership with the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, supported Rajasthan’s Department of Education to develop and launch a sector-specific CSR portal, the first in the country. What follows are a few key insights that have helped Rajasthan raise more than INR 130 crores for government education, to date.

Simply creating a CSR portal was not the key to Rajasthan’s success, and the installation of other such portals are not guaranteed to work in raising more funds for social development, as companies are not legally required to use them. However, building systems that cater to their incentives, making these portals easy to use, and creating win-win environments can help encourage companies to successfully use them.

Here are some of our learnings:

  1. Listen to your donors
  2. Focus on ground-level data
  3. Create structures that build capacity
  4. Reassess along the way

Read the full article about CSR portals by Steven Walker at India Development Review.