Fundraising for Edhi Organization
So, we were around the midway of our fellowship at Amal academy when we were assigned a challenging yet satisfying task. The goal was to collect funds for the Edhi Welfare Organization, as much as we could.
Our team
- Muhammad Saim Fiaz
- Muhammad Ali Hassan
- Muhammad Salman Zia
- Muhammad Umer Bukhari
- Maham Rashid
- Siddra Noor
Obstacles and Challenges
Keeping in mind the pandemic situation, it was a tough task to go out and collect funds in person. So our options were limited. Moreover, it was thought that people would not give donations because we were not present to convince them personally.
Solution
The first step to overcome the obstacles was to arrange a group meeting as soon as possible. This was done to gather as many potential ideas as we can. We arranged a meeting right after our weekend session on Monday, 4th 2021. In the meeting, we came to the conclusion that our only option to gather funds was to do it remotely. It was a one and a half-hour-long meeting in which everyone pitched in with their ideas.
After brainstorming ideas, we decided that being one dimensional will limit our potential. So a couple of members volunteered for the collection of clothes on the behalf of the whole team. Then we shared the account details of one person for the collection of funds and all of them were supposed to submit the funds in these accounts.
As Amal academy did not specify any target related to the funding process, so we decided to set our own target. We as a team decided to collect at least 10,000 per person, except for the two who volunteered for the collection of clothes.
Experiences and Executions
At the start, everyone was so enthusiastic about the collection of funds. Some members were able to accumulate up to 20,000 right on the first day. This gave motivation to the other team members and they pitched in with their contributions on a daily basis as well.
Unfortunately, some team members were not able to reach their individual targets because of their jobs and hectic schedules. But to compensate for that the others went beyond their individual targets.
A couple of members reached out to two different companies for this purpose and managed to collect up to 10,000 Rupees from them. One of those companies gave us written proof of donations in terms of a letter.
On Thursday, 14th of January we arranged an in-person circle meeting to collect funds from people who were not able to submit the funds to the bank. This gave us a chance to meet with the team and we got to know each other very well.
At the end of the day, it was, after all, a team effort, and because of our amazing team, we were able to get so close to our estimated target. We managed to collect up to 117,300 Rupees, which was just short of 2,700 to reach our basic target of 120,000 Rupees.
Conclusion
It was something that we had never done before and we did not expect it to be this successful. It was a collective team effort and we all learned a lot from the challenges we faced during this fundraising. We learned how to accept the failures and rejections we faced and still kept our heads high. This was eventually fruitful because we managed to get so close to our target.
