Concern India Foundation (www.concernindiafoundation.org) was established in 1991. Registered as a non-profit public charitable trust, their motto is “Helping people help themselves” by making the disadvantaged self-reliant and enabling them to lead a life of dignity. Concern India Foundation extends financial and non-financial support to grass-root NGOs working in the areas of education, health and community development.
Over the past 30 years, they have strengthened and supported over 1,000 NGO partners across the country. Through various initiatives in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Delhi, West Bengal, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, they have helped bring about a direct positive change in the lives of children, youth, women, differently-abled, and the aged.
Over the past 30 years, Concern India Foundation has:
- Strengthened and supported over 4000 NGO partners across the country.
- Impacted over 4 lakh children and youth by supporting educational initiatives
- Improved the lives of about 7 lakh people by supporting programmes of health and hygiene
- Benefited around 10 lakh individuals directly by supporting community development like natural resource management, livelihoods, women empowerment and community at large
- Served over 300 CSR partners through end to end to project management.
Automating end to end project management to increase the efficiency of the team
Concern India Foundation works with nearly 100 projects annually, implemented by NGO partners or directly by the Concern India team. They have rigorous processes for identifying, monitoring and evaluating the projects they support so as to judiciously disburse funds and track the activities and impact of each project.
Manual systems were used to track the fund disbursement and activities across projects. This made it challenging for the project team to stick to the timelines and budget and also often led to delays in donor reporting. There was a need to support the project team at each branch and the national team to automate the processes and enhance the overall efficiency.
Key Business Problem
Concern India has a two-tier monitoring and evaluation system - the first level is conducted by the project personnel at the respective branches and then by the all India project team. The data across 100 projects were captured via excel by multiple people making it difficult to consolidate and analyze the data. A lot of time was wasted in collating and rectifying the data, making MIS reporting cumbersome.
Tracking the project deliverables (activities and budget vs. expenses) for each project and meeting the needs of donors required significant effort and was difficult to maintain without a system. This in turn has an impact on the performance of the project management team and their ability to monitor programs effectively.
Our Solution - Synergy Project Management System
Koita Foundation worked with Concern India Foundation to digitally transform their project management and streamline processes. Synergy Project Management Platform is a desktop application for project managers to integrate processes & data for seamless project delivery and help them to manage multiple projects and coordinate better within & across projects.
Fund management is a key operation for project managers, the software enables capturing all details on project fund disbursement and project fund utilization. The software allows project managers to capture end to end details of all stakeholders, save all documents related to the project, and manage different tasks - scheduling, approvals, reminders, deadlines, alerts and tracking project - planning, setting targets, and measuring indicators.
Koita Foundation worked closely with the Concern India Foundation team to develop dashboards and reports, which unified all data across the country in real-time, making it easier for the team to track various activities and budget spent information across organizational levels, programs, sectors and geographies. This led to efficient and timely monitoring of programs, providing clear tracking of funds and activities.
On an annual basis, Concern India works on the CSR of close to 60 programmes across the country. With stringent rules of the CSR bill and the ever-increasing demands from corporates, we were facing an uphill task in project management. External stakeholders, such as Corporates and donors, demand accountability for funding in the form of quantitative and qualitative outcomes. This requires the presence of a holistic management information system or a central repository of data that can address a variety of needs of an organisation.
The lacunae of a technological solution led us to approach Koita Foundation to identify a technological solution to automate the project management processes and track the complete lifecycle of the Project.
The Team at Koita Foundation worked with us closely on shortlisting various platforms and zeroed onto the software product being offered by Synergy Connect, a software company, exclusively working in the social sector as an Information Technology Partner with various NGOs and corporates.
The solution offered by the Koita foundation will enhance our operations by defining processes, improving productivity, facilitating adherence to timelines and budgets and removing duplicity of work and oversights. It. has been great working with Rekha, Rizwan and Drishti. The inputs received from them have really helped us to understand how we as an organisation can adopt technology to streamline processes. A big thank you to each one of them!!
Ms. Kavita Shah
CEO of Concern India Foundation