How to run a successful fundraising campaign | Ep. 3

In this episode, Aliefya Vahanvaty shares the 'Journalists for Afghanistan' campaign, empowering women journalists with $100,000 in support.

Simit Bhagat, founder of Simit Bhagat Studios, and Aliefya Vahanvaty, a Mumbai-based senior media consultant, discuss her fundraising campaign for women journalists in Afghanistan. By the end of the month-long campaign ‘Journalists for Afghanistan’, they managed to raise $100,000 through a photo print sale.

All proceeds from the sale of these unsigned prints went towards helping women journalists in Afghanistan, whether it was towards finding safe houses, evacuations, rebuilding small media start-ups, settling in new countries, or finding ways to continue telling their stories in their own voices. Know more about the campaign: https://journalistsforafgh.wixsite.co…
 
Aliefya is a former journalist and has donned various hats, including reporter, copy editor, and assistant editor for photos. She has also curated photo exhibitions, most notably one on the Mumbai 26/11 terror attack. She has also made a documentary film on Kashmir and has most recently worked with a social enterprise.

Transcript of the Episode:

Simit: Fundraising today is an extremely crucial part of any social development organisation, but it is also one of the most ignored aspects of the day-to-day work of organisations, except for a few large ones. Most organisations working at the grassroots level do not have a fundraising strategy in place or do a lot of fundraising. That happens. It happens on an ad hoc basis, or the responsibility of fundraising always falls on the shoulders of the founder or the co-founder.

“It’s very important for nonprofits to have a fundraising strategy.”

But today, I think it is very important for organisations to have a fundraising strategy in place and, at the same time,  look at what are the other innovative ways that other organisations have explored and what are the ways in which an organisation can best leverage their strength when it comes to fundraising. There are many organisations today that have successfully run innovative fundraising campaigns in India and outside. Today, we’ll be looking at one such case study where a bunch of journalists put together a fundraiser campaign to support women journalists from Afghanistan who left the country after the Taliban took over last year. There are a lot of things that we can draw from this case study, and I hope you’ll find this useful.
 
So today, we’re speaking to Aliefya about one of the fundraisers that she ran for journalists, for women journalists from Afghanistan. So thank you, Aliefya, for being on this broadcast. It’s really a pleasure to have you here. We have known each other for the last 15 years, and you have been a journalist for over, I think, 18–20 years now, right from your journey, which started with, I think, business India, then with the times of India and Forbes, Open magazine, and a bunch of other sorts of publications.
 
You’ve won various hats, whether it is a reporter, copy editor, or assistant editor for photos. You’ve also curated photo exhibitions, the most notable one on the Mumbai 26/11 terror attack. You’ve also made a documentary film and, most recently, worked with social enterprises. So today, I want to talk to you about one of the projects that you did, basically a fundraiser that you did for a budget for women journalists in Afghanistan, and when Kabul fell very recently to the Taliban. That was a time when you did a fundraiser to get journalists, especially women journalists, out of Afghanistan and get them to a safer place. So could you talk about the campaign? What was that campaign about? How did it go, and how did that idea sort of come about?
 
Aliefya: Thanks, Simit, for having me here today. Just to give you a brief background on the whole thing, Afghanistan has always had a very special connection with me and my husband. So my husband is a photojournalist with the AP, the Associated Press, which is a wire service, a U.S. wire service. So, Rafiq has been going off to Afghanistan over the last decade—more than a decade. He’s been there every year—every two years. So I have been watching the country and its geopolitics. learning about its culture, its history, all of it through his eyes, and, of course, also learning a lot about his friends and colleagues there that he’s gotten really close to over the last few years.
 
Recently, in July 2021, when the Taliban was slowly making its way into the country and capturing one region after the other, one of Reuter’s photographers from India, Danish Siddique, had gone there to Kabul to cover what was going on. And unfortunately, he lost his life there in a Taliban attack. And that was a huge, huge loss. I don’t think Rafiq’s ever going to, or, for that matter, even when I think about it, it’s just shocking how this could have happened.
 
And so, yeah, we were then chatting about the aftermath of all of that. We were chatting with one of EP’s photo editors who had called Rafiq about something, and we were just on the phone chatting and obviously talking about what was going on in Afghanistan. And she mentioned how she was a very active member of NWMi, which is the network of women and media in India. And she was telling us about how they were racking their brains on what they could do to help. And somehow the idea of a photo online print sale came about, and she mentioned that she was waiting for a green signal from AP. But most likely, yes, they would be very happy to have some of their friends and some of their photos from their archives over the last 20 years.

“We decided to do an online print sale to raise funds.”

Basically, for us to use that as a fundraiser for this cause, this campaign was possible because of two key collaborations. One was AP coming forward generously and agreeing to open its archive to us, selecting prints and putting them up, saying that was a key collaboration.
 
The other one was a collaboration with NWMi, the Network of Women and Media India, and they wanted to help women journalists in Afghanistan. So this is how the whole idea of the fundraiser came about, and we decided to go ahead with it. So, NWMi also had a collaboration with an organisation in Australia called Media Entertainment, Arts Alliance, and Media Entertainment. MEAA helped us with the backend logistics of letting us use their payment gateway to help us disburse funds and route the funds to women who needed help.
 
And that’s how this whole thing has worked out, because a lot of people selflessly gave off their resources, their time, their expertise, and whatever else they could manage with the Taliban coming back into power. In Afghanistan, it was obvious that the first casualties would be women, and actually women in the media, because overnight they became voiceless, faceless, and lost everything that they had worked so hard to get over the last two decades.

“It was obvious that women in the media would be the first casualties of Taliban rule.”

So, yeah, we started this fundraiser in early September. By the time we finished the fundraiser, we had managed to raise over 100,000. We never, ever thought it would happen so quickly, so organically, and so easily out of literally nothing.
 
There was a case of this 125-year-old reporter, who was a reporter and presenter with an Afghan radio station, and when Kabul fell, she left with three members of her family, and I think she went to Turkey. And they were still there, although her parents were left behind and other close family members were left behind. But we just realised that, and this was the same thing that we saw over and over again. We realised that while we could help just that one individual, it didn’t seem right to us—that individual who most probably was a mother or a sister—to leave her kids, her parents, or her siblings behind and just make our own way to safety and not take you, how it’s put, to put yourself in their shoes.
 
So while we thought that the money would go a long way towards helping a lot more women, we realised that we have to account for one last, maybe two or three. It wasn’t possible for us to just take that one person. I think this is the least you can do to make sure that the dreams, hopes, and hard work of women over there continue to be respected, to be heard, to be given all kinds of assistance, and to just make sure that they’re not wiped out. And so, yes, we’ve managed to help a little over thirty women get a fresh start in life. And we hope they, in turn, will find another voice and will help all the others who are still in Kabul, in Afghanistan, see better days.

“We have managed to help over 30 women get a fresh start in life.”

Simit: Some of these photographs that we put out for sale were really impactful, and these are some of the best pictures in what would have been 20 years of various journalists and photographers. Could you talk a bit about what these photographs would be, what they actually mean, and why they got such a good response from across the world?

Aliefya: So these photographs have all been taken by AP’s team of photojournalists, who have been in Afghanistan over the last two decades or more. And we were very clear that we wanted to showcase just the daily lives of people in a country that once was. So whether it’s roadside vendors or whether it is a U.N. refugee camp or whether it is helicopters flying overhead with children playing down in the fields or so, these pictures just depict life in Kabul, which went on as normal as possible.

People send us pictures when they receive the prints. Those prints hang on their living room walls or on their desks. And it is for them; it meant a daily reminder of what had been lost. And so, for example, we had this teacher in a school in the US who ordered a print. I think it was one of Andrea’s pictures, and it was a father with five of his kids on a bike, and he was paying money to enter a park in Kabul. So yeah, and this teacher wrote to us, saying, I’ve ordered this print. I want to thank you for organising this. And she taught at an all-girls school, and she wanted her kids, her students there, to have a visual reminder of how privileged their lives were and how kids in other parts of the world didn’t have the same access to just the basic necessities of life.

Simit: Could you tell us what some of the reasons were for the success of this campaign?

Aliefya: We could have gone the normal route and said, donate, have it on, or something along those lines. But instead, we wanted to ensure that we caught the attention of people across the world. And frankly, what better way to get noticed than through some beautiful pictures? We had access to some of the world’s best images. It made sense to leverage our strength. Hence, a photo print sale was a logical route to take for us.

Another reason was that, somewhere in the back of our minds, we also wanted to ensure that the Afghan story remained visible long after the dust had settled. A photo print sale ticked that box as well. Every time someone looked at one of the images that they purchased through the print sale, Afghanistan and its people would be seen. It’s on your walls. It’s on your desk. And every time you look at it, every time someone else at your house looks at it and it remains alive, the issue remains alive.

“The donors were active participants in the photo sale.”

 
Thirdly, and most importantly for the donors, this fundraising went beyond being just a mere donation. They were active participants in the photo, so they could choose which image they wanted to buy. They could interact with us through email or social media. They could, if they wanted something specifically, ask the photographer something, and we were happy to facilitate that. It was very much a two-way street. Also, I think holding the principle right while Afghanistan was still in the news and also keeping the fundraiser open for a very limited time period meant that the urgency to act was that much stronger.
 
So all these factors, I think, played a part in making this campaign the success that it was. But I think finally, and most importantly, it also took a community of world-renowned journalists, photographers, photo editors, and the media at large to engage, spread the word to a whole lot of other people, and get support for this cause. It was every bit of a team effort from the get-go.
 
Simit: What are the things that organisations,like similar organisations working on the ground, did at the grassroots? What can they learn from this, from your experience, or from this fundraiser?
 
Aliefya: From the little that I have managed to get out of this project, there are a couple of things that stand out really clearly. One, define your cause and your immediate requirements very clearly. So for us, we specifically wanted to help women journalists in Afghanistan, and the access that we had to do that and the means that we had to do that were through this fundraiser. For an NGO in the education space, you could say, June, for example, in Bombay, in Mumbai, schools reopened. So maybe they can do something like a “back to school” fundraiser, so make it a very narrow focus thing and make sure that people know exactly where the funding is going. So it’s going to have to contribute 100 rupees towards a child’s school supplies. Make sure you put that out there in front, that this is what it is going to help with.
 

“Make sure the people know exactly where the funding is going.”

The other thing that we did during the course of this fundraiser was also the social media campaign that we ran through Instagram. We made sure that we constantly updated and kept in touch with our community by letting them know that, yes, the prints would reach you six weeks down the line. We kept putting out pictures of the milestones that we had reached during the campaign, or we kind of kept them interested in little case studies that kept coming up during the fundraiser and way after that as well, because all these women in Afghanistan who needed help or the emails that they sent out were the wise messages that they sent out to us. We made sure that we documented all of that. We kept clear records of what was going on. We made sure that we kept them updated with little nuggets of information all through.
 
Simit: Yeah, I mean, today’s also the time when you have large teams working on fundraisers and you have like these smoky websites that organisations have, but this case has shown that you don’t really need all of that. You can still run a successful campaign with a small team, a basic website, a functioning website, and a strong cause. Could you talk a bit about that?
 
Aliefya: The Journalist for Afghanistan was a very informal NGO. It’s not. We didn’t have any of those. It was basically a fundraiser that happened overnight, just for a limited time. So we already knew that we had no resources. We started with, like, literally zero funding. Um, so we put in the time and the effort ourselves to realise that all we needed was a place where we could display the prints, where people would go online and shop for prints, and then we needed a payment gateway to be attached to it, and then we needed one other end of it, which was where we could communicate with our community.

“We needed to communicate with our community.”

So in terms of where we could display these pictures and have them up there for people to buy them, we realised that, yeah, we could, and we did go around looking for web designers and web developers, and we realised that one, nobody really was available at that short notice, or if they were, they were charging us quite a sum of money, which we definitely didn’t have. And so we realised that there had to be an easier way to get around this.
 
And so I literally sat there doing research overnight on how to build a website. And that’s when I saw “Wix” up there. And there are a couple of other templates that you can use as well. So yeah, it was easy. There were a lot of technical bits that I had to familiarise myself with and lots of YouTube videos that I watched, but it’s doable. So if I had to do it again, yes, there would be things that I might have done differently, or so it’s not very professional looking, but it serves the purpose, right? All the people who were coming on there were to see the pictures displayed and get information about shipping, packaging, and things like that.
 
And at the back end, we needed to keep track of where these people were from, the geographies, and which photographer’s prints sold the most. And, just to keep track of how much money was collected per day, things like that And we served the purpose beautifully. We were surprised the first day that I went there, and I looked at, Oh my God! So I know exactly who’s bought a print and from where. It was like, wow!
 
 I thought I’d have to really touch the depths of the Internet to find out what’s going on. So it was just such a joy to realise that this was something that each of us could just do on our own. They didn’t need any kind of reliance on software or other people, expertise, or years of, like, diploma courses or anything. And so yeah, the Instagram account was, again, very easy to set up. We set up an email address, and it was just the two of us doing this from the ground up, within a span of like 6 to 8 days.
 
Simit: A lot of camping that I see these days that organisations run is purely about supporting a cause. But from a donor’s point of view, from an individual donor’s point of view, there is nothing that they can sort of take home. There is nothing that they, in a way, get in return. You want to kind of talk about this.
 
Aliefya: But I feel that in a lot of cases, just having that little tangible object sitting at your desk or on your walls, or whether it’s a cushion cover or a little handmade doll, or a card or whatever, I feel that every time someone looks at that, they are reminded that they managed to touch another life and that they managed to do some good. And I think that helps you to go out there and say, I can do more of this. I would encourage organisations to find innovative ways to connect their donor communities with their recipients. That human connection is ultimately what will touch lives and determine the outcome of a fundraiser, more than anything else.

“Find innovative ways to connect their donor communities with their recipients.”

Simit: Based on your experience running this campaign for women journalists in Afghanistan, would you say that something like this is replicable and other organisations replicate a similar campaign of this sort?

Aliefya: Simit, I am not sure; replicate is something that would be because this was, again, tailored to a specific cause with a specific set of criteria. But yeah, in terms of, can a similar idea be used to inspire other such fundraising opportunities? Of course. So it was a coming together of three to four various entities who were bound by a very similar course, each in its own way directly or indirectly touched by Afghanistan and what was happening to its people.

And so I feel that for every organisation, a similar kind of ecosystem does exist where their work overlaps with what’s happening in the world outside, what is currently on their plate, and how someone else out there might have the expertise, the desire, the willingness, and the passion to help. So yeah, is it replicable in that sense? Yes, of course, because you might not be able to do a photo print sale but can definitely do another more interesting exercise in, let’s say, a cooking class, or, let’s say, they could do something like an evening of dance or something else, something that showcases possibilities and that plays to each person’s trend and that can get the donor and the receiver together in the same space and shared experiences.

Simit: I think what you’re suggesting is that fundraising can be more personal; it can be customised, and that would sort of give organisations better results because, anyway, a lot of people are bombarded with those fundraising videos that you advertise. So I suppose what you’re saying is that the fundraising space needs to be more customised.

Aliefya: It needs to be more meaningful and social; it needs to have that connection between individuals.

“Fundraising should be meaningful and have a connection.”

Simit: Right, right. Oh, thank you so much, Aliefya, for all your insight. I suppose next time an organisation wants to run a fundraiser, they should definitely get in touch with you. Can they?

Aliefya: Of course, at any time. Please feel free.

Simit: That sounds great. So thank you so much, Aliefya. Thanks for being on this podcast.

Aliefya: Thanks, Simit, for having me. It was lovely talking to you.


Subscribe to our newsletter

Sign up for our newsletter and receive exclusive podcasts, blog updates.

Swanand Deo

Web Development Specialist

Swanand Deo is a WordPress and Web Development Specialist working on various digital projects. With over a decade of experience in the design and development space, he has collaborated with over 50 national and international clients. He specialises in User Experience (UX) design, WordPress development, and creating engaging digital experiences. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Pune.

Mrinali Parmar

Associate (Partnerships)

Mrinali Parmar works on operations and building partnerships with social impact organisations. With five years of work experience, she has focused on education and promoting awareness of climate change and sustainability in her operations role. She holds a Master’s Degree in Commerce from the University of Mumbai and is passionate about linguistics, speaking six languages.

Swarnima Ranade

Voice Actress

Swarnima Ranade is a medical doctor turned voice actress who has done voice-over work for everything from commercials to documentaries to corporate narration to children’s books. She has worked with numerous noteworthy businesses in the past, such as Tata, Uber, Walmart, and YouTube Kids. She graduated from SVU in Gujarat with a degree in dental surgery.

Kumar Shradhesh Nayak

Illustrator

Kumar Shradhesh Nayak is a professional artist, illustrator, and graphic designer who studied at the National Institute of Fashion Technology in Hyderabad. His experience includes stints at EkakiVedam and Design Avenue, both of which are prominent advertising firms. He enjoys trying out new approaches to illustration and creates artwork for a variety of projects.

Divya Shree

Content Producer cum Editor

Divya Shree is a media alumna from Symbiosis Institute in Pune who loves producing and editing non-fiction content. She has directed, shot, and edited videos for various productions. Her strengths are research, audience awareness, and the presentation of intricate topics with clarity and interest.

Manish Mandavkar

Motion Editor

Manish Mandavkar has studied animation at Arena Animation in Mumbai. He has previously worked on animated videos and motion graphics for brands, including Unilever and Zee Movies. An avid gamer, he is also passionate about sketching and photography. He holds a degree in Commerce from the University of Mumbai.

Joel Machado

Film Editor

Mumbai-based creative consultant and film editor Joel Machado has worked on documentaries as well as films in the mainstream Bollywood sector. He was also the Chief Assistant Director on the Jackie Shroff short, “The Playboy, Mr. Sawhney.” In addition to earning a B.Com from Mumbai University, he attended the city’s Digital Academy to hone his script writing skills.

Apoorva Kulkarni

Partnership Manager

Apoorva Kulkarni is the Partnerships Manager, and is responsible for developing strategic alliances and collaborative initiatives with other organisations in the social development ecosystem. For the past five years, she has been employed by major corporations, including Perthera (USA) and Genotypic Technology. She has written and published poetry, and she has been an integral part of The Bidesia Project. At Georgetown University in the United States, she earned a Master of Science in Bioinformatics.

Aliefya Vahanvaty

Sr. Creative Partner

Senior Creative Partner, Aliefya Vahanvaty has worked in a wide range of editorial roles over the course of her career, gaining experience as a correspondent, copy editor, writer, photographer, and assistant editor at publications like the Times of India, Forbes India, Open Magazine, Impact Magazine, and others. In addition to her MA in Sociology from Mumbai University, she also has an MA in Photojournalism from the University of Westminster in the United Kingdom.

Simit Bhagat

Founder

Founder, Simit Bhagat has worked in the fields of filmmaking, project management, and journalism for over 15 years. He has served in a variety of positions for organisations like the Times of India, the Maharashtra Forest Department, the Tata Trusts, and the Thomson Reuters Foundation. From the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, he earned a Master of Arts in Science, Society, and Development.