The Social Town

"Before collaborating with 180 Degrees Consulting SSCBS, our team had been facing several hindrances, preventing us from materializing our dream of formalizing the social welfare sector. I couldn’t be happier when I say that after six months of consistent efforts by the team at 180 DC and bi-weekly follow-up meetings, we have been able to tackle most of the issues and are finally ready to launch the platform pan-India! Now that we have completed the project, I have nothing but gratitude for the team, for all the time and effort that they invested. The team displayed sheer dedication and will to help The Social Town by following the project timeline to the T and showcasing utmost excitement during all of our meetings. Moreover, all the recommendations had a strong data backing owing to the extensive primary and secondary research that the students conducted."

The Challenge

TST faced a multitude of challenges that required strategic planning and solutions to achieve its goals. With the primary challenge of onboarding stakeholders, including volunteers, NGOs, and companies, TST needed a user-friendly onboarding process that would efficiently welcome and engage new users to the platform. This required a delicate balance of creating a streamlined process while also providing personalized attention and support. In addition to onboarding, TST required a robust operations strategy to manage volunteers, coordinate with NGOs and companies, and handle logistical challenges. It was essential to ensure that operations ran smoothly to maintain user engagement and satisfaction, as well as to maximize impact. To establish itself as a go-to platform for socially responsible individuals, NGOs, and companies, TST required a comprehensive marketing strategy that would generate interest and build awareness of its platform. A user-friendly feature pool was necessary to provide a seamless and satisfying user experience that distinguished TST from its competitors. A fair pricing strategy was also critical to TST's success, as it needed to generate revenue to sustain operations and invest in growth while also offering affordable services. Additionally, TST needed to identify effective ways to fundraise to support its mission and further its impact. Finally, incentivizing companies to contribute to a Nano CSR pool was necessary to address fundraising challenges and encourage corporate social responsibility. Developing effective strategies required careful consideration of the needs and interests of both companies and the community TST serves.

The Solutions

Our onboarding strategy focused on Partnerships with city, state, national and international level NGOs and schools. This was done through skimming databases of prospective companies, outreaching various heads and managers In charge and using the rich alumni base of IIM Bangalore. An incentivization strategy was curated to attract volunteers. For operations strategy, we addressed the three stakeholders separately- NGO’s, volunteers and the company. A grievance mechanism was developed to solve complaints of the three stakeholders. A comprehensive strategy covered their registration, request for funds and a feedback mechanism. Marketing strategy covered various channels such as social media and SEO. Special emphasis was given to micro influencers under influencer marketing and using techniques such as Search Engine Optimization to focus on improving website’s visibility, when searched for on search engines. To address the issue of prioritizing and filtering opportunities based on convenience, duration, incentives provided etc, the team suggested a multitude of features to be included in the website. These included an opportunity filtering pool (time, location etc.), an interactive dashboard for users and a dashboard for NGO profiling(for NGOs to post opportunities, match volunteers to skills). For the Pricing Strategy, we proposed a sustainable pricing model, a freemium Model after conducting an extensive peer analysis. We suggested the use of Nano CSR funds because of three primary reasons which were tax deduction, improved social image for companies partnering with The Social Town as well as marketing and branding. We proposed other funding options like branded donation page, corporate sponsorship, partnering with coaching institutes and fundraising opportunities.

The Impact

The Social Town (TST) is a collaborative platform that offers a multitude of benefits for both companies and volunteers. The Social Town’s website saw an increase of 297% in the weekly traffic on their website after our proposed solutions. The keyword search rate (the number of keywords required to reach our website) decreased from 9-10 to just 3. Thus, our solutions also improved the accessibility of the website. Our proposed solutions created a significant impact in terms of the website's traction. This includes a CAGR of 108% in the number of volunteers registered,180% in NGOs registered and 74% in companies registered on our website. Thus, our proposed solutions were estimated to lead to a significant rise in CAGR over a period of 5 years for companies, NGOs and volunteers partnering with TST.

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