Save the Children is one of India’s leading independent child rights’ NGO and works in 18 Indian states. It has worked to improve the lives of more than 11 million (1.1 crores) children. Being a non-profit organization, they were facing the challenges of youth engagement as volunteers and inadequate reach of their social media presence. We were required to focus not only on increasing their number of volunteers but also on the retention of these volunteers. We identified the following challenges within these deliverables: The first and foremost challenge was the time commitment required for volunteering. Most people believe lack of time to be a major hindrance when it comes to volunteering. The second major challenge identified was the lack of recognition of the work in which Save the Children was engaged. A number of people that we talked to hadn’t heard of Save the Children, despite it having a social media reach comparable to that of other organizations like CRY or Goonj. The visits to their websites and the engagement on social media platforms were falling sharply as well. The website had a high bounce rate which pointed to faults in the interface of the websites. Another challenge to be tackled was the misconception associated with NGOs; people were hesitant to volunteer because they were not confident about the credibility of these organizations, the opportunities they provided and the role that they would take up within them.
To increase website engagement, we recommended Save the Children to adopt a minimalistic homepage for their website and avoid unnecessary pop-ups. To improve the volunteer engagement and donations received, we worked on finding the right target audience, collecting demographic and psychographic data and using the correct keywords for search engine optimization. Having a clear and distinct Call-to-action would help increase the time spent by people on Save the Children’s website and reduce website bounce rate. To improve their social media engagement we also recommended Save the Children to collaborate with influencers and student bodies to sensitize the youth and improve content on their social media handles by identifying those social issues that the youth relates with the most. Instead of posting low quality content with high frequency, we suggested Save the Children to shift to a High Quality – Medium Frequency content posting model and use features like reels and stories to engage the youth. To increase the number of volunteers we also advised Save the Children to reduce the volunteering tenure to 1-2 months and allow volunteers more flexibility by letting them choose their working hours freely.
After our engagement, Save the Children started posting informational content and collaborated with famous personalities such as Soumya Sathyaraj (500k+ followers), Pooja Makhija (365k+ followers) and Ishinna Sadana (700k+ followers). These famous personalities succeeded in adding another layer of credibility to the organization, solidifying its position and removing any doubt that people might have about the organization. These initiatives have led to an annual growth rate of 9.8% for its instagram followers as compared to an average of 6% among its peers. With this boost in creative and interactive content, Save the Children has seen a tremendous rise in their social media engagement and visits to their website. The bounce rate of their website has also fallen down sharply. Average change in bounce rate among peers shows an increase of 9.4% whereas Save the Children has witnessed a decrease of 3% which indicates that the changes made to the website has resulted in better retention of visitors than its peers. This also indicates that many more people are spending time on the website, becoming aware of the social issue present in the world that Save the Children is contributing towards and are taking steps to help solve it by donating or volunteering themselves. The world has started to feel its impact and are actively contributing towards it on a greater scale than before our consulting project with them. These suggestions also led to an improvement in the quality of work done by Save the Children as now there were more hands on board to help make an impact. A drastic rise has been observed in the number of volunteers engaged with Save the Children. This number has been rising every year with no visible intention of slowing down.
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