Adding Value To Community

Impact guru was born with the mission to make healthcare accessible to all and save more lives. The founding team, including Khushboo Jain, Co-founder & COO, Impact Guru Technology Ventures, was keen on a business model that would add value to the community. Patients from below-poverty-line backgrounds suffering from critical conditions or middle-class patients who have drained their finances sustaining long-term treatments such as cancer, dialysis, premature baby care are the two segments of India’s unheard voices.

“These people have nowhere to go except to rely on crowdfunding for survival as it comes with no payback liability,” says Jain. She believes that by finding a solution that fills in this gap, ImpactGuru.com has become among the largest crowdfunding platforms in India for medical expenses. Over 20,000 patients have benefited by 2 lakh donors. Over Rs 150 crore has been mobilised across 15 countries on its online platform and by its partners. The company’s key corporate goals include raising Rs 100 crore for patients in the next 18 months, scale annual revenues to exceed Rs 10 crore and achieve ebitda and cash flow breakeven.

The Road Less Travelled
Crowdfunding is at its nascent stage in India and four years ago it was nearly a foreign concept. Within the healthcare ecosystem, the level of awareness about medical crowdfunding among hospital management and doctors is fairly low. “They are the first people who find out when a patient has a financing issue. The journey from education to persuasion has been a challenging but a fulfilling one,” shares Jain.

Another challenge for the company was that donors harbour lack of trust regarding fund utilisation. “We are working to increase the level of transparency so that donors believe that the funds will be utilised correctly and share success stories, photos and videos,” adds Jain.

ImpactGuru also realised that many looking to raise money are often unable to articulate their own problems on their fundraiser page. “We came up with a tool called ‘the storybuilder’. It allows people to create a well drafted fundraising appeal which is informative and emotional to persuade their potential donors. They have to answer a few questions and their fundraising appeal will be automatically drafted within two minutes,” Jain informs.

The company’s strategy is to scale digital marketing to increase patient awareness. It aims to increase sales team in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities at private hospitals to raise crowdfunding awareness among patients. It also has a partnership with GlobalGiving.org, a non-profit crowdfunding platform based in the US and UK.