An initiative of the KC Mahindra Education Trust, NGO Nanhi Kali sponsors education of the under privileged girl child in India by providing not only year long academic support through special study classes but also material support. In partnership with many individual and corporate donors, it has brought education to the lives of more than 70,000 less privileged girls in nine states across the country.

In India, though corporates have a strong will to dedicate their resources for a social cause, they find it difficult to reach the right people considering the demography and diverse social problems of the country, the trust has achieved this by partnering with 21 Grassroot NGOs to walk the last mile.

The Nanhi Kali website (nanhikali.org) allows donors to register and sponsor the education of Nanhi Kalis (girl child) under different schemes, for as many Nanhi Kali for a minimum period of one year. Donations are received in various currencies, converted to either INR or USD equivalent amounts and subsequently a Nanhi Kali is allotted to the donors. Donors can also choose to gift a Nanhi Kali to individuals or corporates.

In view of the above mentioned multiple permutations and combinations, the growth and expansion of Nanhi Kali made it increasingly challenging to track the vast data pertaining to the donors, their Nanhi Kalis and the NGO implementing partners carrying out the intervention on the field. Further, if particular donor(s) decided to discontinue their sponsorship, then it was equally challenging to change the current Nanhi Kali – donor mapping to the new one. Again, this could be done only if a new donor was readily available, otherwise the Nanhi Kali would get attached to the common pool.

The requirement of the NGO was to systemize the entire process, maintain complete transparency of data, sharing Nanhi Kali profiles and reports with the donors and enable regular updates and reminders as planned. Again here, this was to be done without changing anything related to their existing portal to which all the donors had become accustomed.

The IT team at Mahindra & Mahindra decided to leverage the existing Harmony platform based on SAP. The idea was to ride on the Harmony infrastructure to provide a highly sustainable and scalable solution to the NGO at the least possible cost. The solution thus designed was an integrated system with SAP as its Core ERP and a donor facing e-portal.

This enabled an end-to-end integration across their entire value chain right from donations, adoptions, assigning of Nanhi Kali’s, progress reports, funding of NGO's to finally integration to the SAP accounting system.

Further using the BI architecture deployed as a part of Harmony, the team was also able to provide analytics dashboards to the NGO to help them track their KPIs and monitor its progress. Today, the Nanhi Kali portal operations are seamlessly integrated with various complex donation scenarios as per business requirements. In addition, every donation is linked to a Nanhi Kali. The donor can now view their donation status in real time. All correspondence (Donation receipts, welcome letter, allotment details, renewal reminders) are now sent through the system itself.

Note: K C Mahindra Education Trust for Nanhi Kali initiative is an EDGE winner. The complete list of EDGE winners is published in the October 2011 Print issue of InformationWeek India