@[100001861602434:2048:Ravishankar Arunachalam], @[564198067:2048:Balaji Sampath], I have been cooking a hare-brained scheme for some time now. Since email is passé, I thought I'll post it here :-)
There is a lot of gift-giving that goes on in my life these days. My (popular!) kids are invited to 20-odd birthdays every year. Gifts worth between ₹500 and ₹1,000 are purchased and gifted each time. Then there are marriages, anniversaries, and some of my own friends who still celebrate birthdays. Many of these gifts are unwanted/useless for the recipient, so they are regifted or discarded.
NGOs like GiveIndia have nice schemes for gifting donations. They generate an online gift certificate with the names of the donor, the gift recipient, and the donation recipient. The donor can print this certificate and present it at the event they are attending. They also send follow-up emails to the donor and the gift receiver, sharing with them the impact of the donation. The donor also receives their 80G online at the time of the transaction itself.
http://eureka.aidindia.in/ doesn't have this fancy stuff. We just have graphs. Make a bunch of nerds run an NGO and that is what you get.
So, if I co-opted a village for ₹25,000, would you send me the pics of 50 beneficiary children? I could then use their pics and names, and make the certificates myself. If you regularly send me the progress of this particular lot of children, I could circulate that too among the gift recipients. Maybe the kids could even be penpals at some point.
Your thoughts...
PS: I do not have the ₹25,000 readily available. But there is an 80G involved, this is tax season, and I am a baniya. I will figure something out ;-)
PS2: Kavin has reviewed this post and approves of this scheme. He also says that if he threw a birthday party, and instead of gifts and toys, all he received were a bunch of donation certificates, he would be okay with that.
There is a lot of gift-giving that goes on in my life these days. My (popular!) kids are invited to 20-odd birthdays every year. Gifts worth between ₹500 and ₹1,000 are purchased and gifted each time. Then there are marriages, anniversaries, and some of my own friends who still celebrate birthdays. Many of these gifts are unwanted/useless for the recipient, so they are regifted or discarded.
NGOs like GiveIndia have nice schemes for gifting donations. They generate an online gift certificate with the names of the donor, the gift recipient, and the donation recipient. The donor can print this certificate and present it at the event they are attending. They also send follow-up emails to the donor and the gift receiver, sharing with them the impact of the donation. The donor also receives their 80G online at the time of the transaction itself.
http://eureka.aidindia.in/ doesn't have this fancy stuff. We just have graphs. Make a bunch of nerds run an NGO and that is what you get.
So, if I co-opted a village for ₹25,000, would you send me the pics of 50 beneficiary children? I could then use their pics and names, and make the certificates myself. If you regularly send me the progress of this particular lot of children, I could circulate that too among the gift recipients. Maybe the kids could even be penpals at some point.
Your thoughts...
PS: I do not have the ₹25,000 readily available. But there is an 80G involved, this is tax season, and I am a baniya. I will figure something out ;-)
PS2: Kavin has reviewed this post and approves of this scheme. He also says that if he threw a birthday party, and instead of gifts and toys, all he received were a bunch of donation certificates, he would be okay with that.