While most of us use Google's suite of free applications to make our online lives simpler, this enterprising young man from Google's Bangalore office used these applications to help a non-governmental organisation find homes for orphaned children.
Snehalaya, an NGO that works with children, was of course delighted. Srikanth Belwadi believed that prospective foster parents would be easy to find if only organisations could reach out to more people. The first step was to train employees to use simple applications such as Google Docs to create online records of their activities. Srikanth followed this up with a blog to chronicle the organisation's rescue operations, linked it to Google's Picasa web albums and integrated it with a YouTube channel. Now, dealing with multimedia apps, he set up websites that could integrate all these various applications.
Srikanth had to drive traffic to this new site, and a marketing campaign was simply out of the question for an organisation for which even a single dollar could provide a child three meals a day. To tackle this problem, Srikanth set up an Adwords account for just a dollar a day. And he spent time with the Snehalaya administration to teach them how to operate and maintain the operation.
Impact
Within three weeks of setting up the websites, Snehalaya received six adoption requests, and its management reported a ten-fold increase in donations. Snehalaya chief coordinator Sandeep says: “Most organisations in our sector lack the know-how to operate a website with such efficiency. This is a truly unique achievement.”
