How We Vet NGOs Before Your Money Is Disbursed

As a consulting firm, we, at Vardaan, enable you to reach your Social Responsibility (SR) objective with a carefully planned strategy tailored to suit your needs and requirements. We engage with the ‘doers’ and the ‘givers’ which includes corporates, non-profit organisations, foundations, and other philanthropic entities.

You are privy to this information already and a rundown of our website will give you all the additional details you’re looking for. But that’s not the purpose of this article.

We understand that you’d want to see your funds utilised in the right way to generate maximum impact in the community. So in this edition, we will outline how your funds are going to be disbursed to partners we have carefully vetted.

We follow a standard protocol to verify our NGO clients in addition to customizing the selection for various Corporates as per your CSR needs. The exhaustive process involves several rounds of meetings, visits, interactions, discussions, verifications to identify the right NGO. We also initiate the monitoring and evaluation process ending with the impact assessment report.

The process involves:

1. NGO Selection

a) To select NGOs aligned to company’s focus areas as CSR policy

As your consultant, we understand by principle that you have a certain vision based on which you’d like to implement your SR strategies. To make sure your money is well spent, we go through a lengthy process wherein we choose only those NGOs which align with the ideals you’re choosing to serve.

b) Connect With Them

Once we find the NGO that caters to the cause you’d like to be associated with, we directly establish contact with them to discuss possible collaboration.

c) Fix Meetings

The meeting round is quite extensive as this is the last stage of the selection and every minute detail is laid out and scrutinised to ensure a good fit.

2. Initial Meetings During the initial meeting, we further touch on topics concerning the implementation of the projects, find out if there is any clash of ideas, and finally reach an agreement. 3. Discussions And Coordination This stage is where the contributions of both the parties are discussed and blueprints are created to figure out how we would coordinate with them in the future. 4. Visiting The NGOs Office a) Interact with the NGO team The next step is to visit the NGO’s administrative office and interact with their team to get a better understanding of the projects they are undertaking and the results they are aiming to achieve. b) Organizational Profile This is where you’ll be officially briefed about the organisational environment which includes the services they offer, the mission they are striving to fulfill, and the workforce leading the processes from behind the scene. c) Needs And Challenges Here you will understand the basic needs of the organisation and the various challenges and hurdles the NGO is facing. 5. An Overview Of The Project Once the NGO visit has been scheduled, the next step would involve us taking a tour of the project they are handling. We get first-hand knowledge of the project and get to interact with the individuals and the community that directly benefits from the project. 6. Checking The Documents The penultimate part of the vetting process would involve checking all the relevant documents such as Trust Deed, 80G, and 12A etc… to ensure that the NGO has the right title and check whether they are engaged in a legal tussle. 7. A Proposal From The NGO The ultimate step in the process is where we draw up an official proposal stating what the NGO can offer our clients. With such a comprehensive process in place, we make sure that every single penny spent by our clients on CSR goes to the right places and truly helps to make the world a better place. 8. Confirmation of the projects The NGO selection process ends with the preparation of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the partner organisation to reaches an intended common line of action.