Education India Project #14455

Helping medical students become better doctors

by QMed Knowledge Foundation

Project Report | Apr 25, 2022
Learnings about fundraising and leadership from a workshop and a webinar

By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Founder

This month – April 2022, I attended a workshop on Fundraising and a webinar on Leadership. I would love to share some learning from these.

In the workshop on Fundraising, the speaker – Morry - asked NGO leaders two questions:

“How many people fundraise in your organization?”
“How many employees do you have?”

The answers were very varied, of course. But in all cases the answer was less for the first question and more for the second

And the speaker, after hearing the second response, said:

"That is the real number of fundraisers in your organization”

In the webinar on leadership, the speaker - Rajeev said that when people talk about leadership they usually highlight points like

How efficient a leader should be
How much the leader should achieve

And more.

But, he stressed, that while all that is important, the crux is that

A leader is one who is sure of his or her values, and stands by them in any situation.
The leader may or may not have a team to lead or have “followers” – it is all about the leader’s “being”

I pondered about these two aspects over the next few days and I realized:

In QMed’s team of five, everyone is a fundraiser and has strong leadership traits

Dipti maintains our donor database and over all assists me with campaigns
Fatima handles all aspects of technology, and so when we need to tweak our donor database for different types of reports and more – it is “Ask Fatima” and we know it will be done
Jayanthi handles all our administration and accounts, and ensures that several minor details are taken care of
Rajendra does various miscellaneous jobs for QMed and importantly has a great memory – reminding us of anything in case we forget!
Vasumathi – (yours truly) – does the asking

More importantly, everyone in QMed is taking a very modest salary and not what one actually deserves. Why? Most NGOs raise funds either by asking for donations in several ways, or by getting an income with their products or services. For QMed,

Raising funds for our cause is a challenge as we work for a making a big change in the higher education space. An area that many do not understand. There are no words like underprivileged, environment etc – the most common words associated with NGOs
In the context of getting inflows with our activities – that is – our courses, the health sciences community we work for have not yet fully grasped the need to make this change and prioritize it. If they did and paid the small fee that we charge, we could be self-sustaining at a quick pace!

Everyone at QMed understands that the change we are trying to make in India is a long term process and have chosen to be patient and stick to the cause.

I realized that everyone in QMed has these leadership traits:

Going beyond the “call of duty”. Doing a few jobs even when on leave, or beyond working hours or in the weekend. Each of us does not have a team to delegate things to
Taking on each other’s tasks in case of need
Thinking of each other’s area of work and contributing ideas
Ensuring that expenditure is only for the most important requirements
Constantly learning – to improve outcomes in one’s area of work

For long, I knew my team was great, but these two events made me see them all as super-special – as fundraisers and leaders of QMed! I think it is important for our donors to know this too.

I wonder if this will inspire you – our precious donor to keep giving and giving more?

Links:

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Apr 11, 2022
Useful interactions with our enrolled participants

By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Founder

Mar 23, 2022
The blended learning approach to reach out to a large number of institutions

By Vasumathi Sriganesh | Founder

Our work so far – in a nutshell

Over the last 14 years, we conducted more than 240 workshops on literature searching and referencing, and also delivered nearly 500 short lectures on these topics.

From 2020 we have had our courses online - with a "learn at your pace" offering. In addition, participants could have sessions with us for clearing doubts or for personalized support

While a total of around 5000 have enrolled, majority of them are from institutions. The number of active participants in an institution has not been as good as we would like it to be.

Of course the last two years have had other challenges that contributed to this. We could not communicate easily with members of an institution because so many were stuck with Covid related issues.

We have charged institutions a reasonable fee for both learning modes.

The next step – incorporating more in the blended learning approach

Now that things are opening up, we have hit upon another idea to reach out our offerings. We are telling institutions that:

If they wish to have a workshop for a select audience, then we will also offer our online courses to the whole institution
If they first subscribe to our courses, this will include the offer of a one day workshop at any time in the year
Additional workshops may be done at a nominal fee

In addition we have also been doing sessions for individuals or small groups over Zoom meetings, and this too will continue. This way - the people in the institution could have a blended learning opportunity and we can explore how to create a Training of Trainers program too!

We are just beginning to tell institutions about this approach and initial discussions have been well received. We hope we can tell you about many institutions engaging with us in this coming year.

The support needed for QMed to take this ahead

I am also happy to share that QMed has got its "FCRA certificate" renewed for five more years. This certificate is something that every not for profit in India needs to have, in order to receive funds from foreign sources.

We also have got registered for "CSR grants" - CSR standing for Corporate Social Responsibility. This means that we are registered with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs - in order to ask companies to give donations to us.

Funding has been a long time challenge and we hope that with a “blending” of all the above we can continuously raise the standards and offerings of our courses.

Please continue to heap us with good wishes!

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