Supporting an unreasonable entreprenuer

It's reasonable to expect people to donate to charity or to invest for a profit. A combination of both i.e donating to a for-profit venture makes an unreasonable expectation.

 During the last couple of weeks, I had the pleasure of supporting one such unreasonable cause: raising $ 8,000 for Arohana Dairy Pvt Ltd, headed by my cousin, Devi Prasad Rao.

 With no prior experience and no precedents to learn from, we were very much on our own. A combination of the “Social network” and low tech was what followed:
 Facebook, Twitter, Emails, SMSes, LinkedIn, Digg and videos being posted on youtube. 

Knocking on your neighbor's door, calling the uncle you’ve not called in the last 2 years, going through your phone-book and spending the better part of 20 minutes talking about their life, then yours and finally about Arohana. I’ve spent every night sitting up late to speak to friends overseas on Skype, spending hours chatting to raise the cash. Old favors were called in and new ones done, finding hotel rooms in Paris, arranging conference calls with Devi so that potential donors can clarify their doubts directly, proof reading a friend's script for a movie! Unreasonable indeed.

While the social networks created the hype and awareness, the personal interactions were more successful. Family and close friends pitched in, big time. We'd end the day by sharing success stories, inspiring feedbacks received and frustrations. Every week we'd have new recruits in our ever growing circle of campaigners and we kept learning. Our pitches got refined, objections anticipated and handled better, FAQs created, a chic, new video launched and confidence that we'd make it. We also realized early on that the race was essentially against ourselves, to be better every day and remain motivated and focused without being over-confident. As the word got out, the money poured in.

From our key supporters, a few rich obnoxious, relatives and a generous grant from HP, we built a backup of guaranteed donations of over $ 3,000 that we could rely on, if required. In the end, we raised $ 8,000 in 31 days without accessing any of these funds. Through it all, we got sore voices, aching heads, puffy eyes, lots of pending work but had truckloads of fun, raising money for a cause we believed would make the world a better place.

The Marketplace for this years unreasonable institute is now open at https://marketplace.unreasonableinstitute.org , check it out