Leaders

Entrepreneurship is an extraordinary skill that requires out-of-the-box thinking, strategizing, and executing with perfection to achieve certain goals. It is not a quality often seen in everyone while found in one in a billion. More importantly, social entrepreneurship is the rarest to be seen in our society today. Being efficient in this space, Divya Singhal, the Co-Founder of ShareALittle, stands as an example for many budding women entrepreneurs today. She spent her formative years at Welham Girls’ School, a boarding school in Dehradun, where Divya developed a deep sense ofempathy byvisiting an old-age home, learned to think independently, and gained invaluable lessons in leadership as she was appointed as the editor of the school’s Hindi quarterly magazine. Her father has been the biggest influence on her andtaught her how to achieve her goals with dedication and determination. After completing the Bachelors in Commerce (honors) from the University of Delhi, she completed the Chartered Accountancy course and found her way to start her venture.

Here's her exclusive interview with Women Entrepreneur Magazine.

Give us a brief overview of ShareALittle. What motivated you to work as a social entrepreneur in the company?

ShareALittle is a non-profit B2C crowdfunding platform connecting potential patrons to mid-sized NGOs to narrow the funding gap for the latter’simpactful projects. At ShareALittle, we have streamlined the donation process by making it quick, hassle-free, and transparent, with an intent to makedonatinga recurring event. We add value for our partner NGOs by offering them end-to-end fundraising support by way of fundraising content curation (story, videos, and creatives) for the website, social media platforms, and marketing support through promotions and advertising. We also organize fundraising events such as art festivals, baking masterclasses, and game nights to maximize funds raised. In the 16 months of our existence, we have partnered with 5 credible and strictly vetted NGOs to increase their access to aid. Our vetting framework involves researching the cause, carrying out thorough due diligence on the background of the trustees, and verifying the authenticity and feasibility of the project. Thus, we take the complete onus of a fundraising campaign and offer a personalized fundraising experience to NGOs.

Growing up, I watched my father working extremely hard to provide us with what we needed, yet he never hesitated to help others in need. Guided by his principle of giving back to society, I developed a passion for community service at an early age which eventually led to the germination of my crowdfunding start-up, ShareALittle. Jolted by the pandemic, I switched to social entrepreneurship to help students from underserved families in 2020. As a Chartered Accountant, foraying into social entrepreneurship by launching ShareALittle, a crowdfunding platform, during the pandemic was risky, but it has been a profound learning experience. Within 16 months, I have designed a website, managed countless relationships, and built a trusted brand.On a personal front, I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to add value to someone’s life — and that’s what truly keeps me going!

What sort of an impact does the organization intend to create in the market through its services?

It is a well-known fact that the struggles of those born in richer households are drastically different from the struggles of those born in lesser privileged ones. Thus, I wanted to bridge this gap and empower people from low-income communities by enabling them to overcome their economic hardships. To achieve that, I researched and introspected extensively and discovered that the answer lies in improving access to good education. Without good education, children from these families could not increase their bargaining power. However, an added challenge was the badly disrupted education sector due to the pandemic. This had given a massive boost to Ed-Tech companies, but the masses did not have access to technology. So, I wanted toequip students with digital devices to minimize their learning loss and enable their learning.

With this in mind, after a lot of brainstorming, my childhood friend Trishla Pareek and I decided to start acrowd funding platform called ShareALittle which would connect patrons and NGOs. With a simple business model, we partner with authentic NGOs that genuinely needed funding for specific projects, market those causes to donors, and raise funds for them. Our primary focus includes transparency - building a real-time and seamless donation platform to receive funds; integrity - carrying out due diligence of the NGOs that we work with, reliability -forging long-term relations with donors who trust us, and altruism - providing direct feedback from beneficiaries about the impact.

Tell us what makes ShareALittle unique and different as a non-profit organization?

Unlike other crowd funding platforms where the onus of raising funds lies on the campaign owner, ShareALittle is much more involved with each of its fundraisers. As co-founder, I market the cause to new donors (in my personal network) as if it is my very own and deeply immerse myself in the fundraising process. Our first initiative was called “DigiKit” aimed at providing digital devices to students studying from home. We created an animated movie (with the help of a film-maker, Navjot Kaur) to showcase the mammoth gap in educational opportunities between the privileged and lesser-privileged students, curated fundraiser-specific content and videos to tell a compelling story about the difference that our partner NGOs were making, designed creatives to market the cause and also organized a live bake-along class to raise funds.

Since its inception, ShareALittlehas partnered with 5 NGOs to raise more than INR720K in charity funding through 90+ unique patrons, directly serving more than 2,800 lives. The fundraisers have improved access to education from home, sponsored vocational training courses, and helped with COVID-relief efforts. Besides receiving recognition for our work by leading Indian publications such as India today, Indian express, and Your Story, we have also been bestowed with the ‘Promising start-up 2021’ award in August’21 by the Indian Achievers’ Forum (an initiative to recognize Indian entrepreneurs) for an outstanding contribution to the social sector.

“After a lot of brainstorming, my childhood friend and i decided to start our crowdfunding platform called share a little which would connect patrons and NGOS”

Recently, we expanded from just empowerment-centric causes to causes such as animal welfare and community development. And in the future, we want to diversify to fundraising causes that support livelihood for women, overcome malnutrition and provide last-mile healthcare support to people in rural areas. This way, we will be able to help many more NGOs and in turn, create a bigger impact in the lives of many more people.

As a successful businesswoman, what would your advice be to young women and girls aspiring to become business leaders and entrepreneurs in the future?

I would tell them to ‘just start’. Stop waiting for the ‘right time’. The best time to start is NOW. Once you launch, you can improvise. You should trust your instincts and abilities and know that you can figure a way out if needed.

Divya Singhal, Co-Founder, Share A Little

Divya Singhal is a Chartered Accountant by profession who worked with multiple teams at EY and independently handled audits of MNCs. She joined a broking house in Mumbai and worked as an Equity Research associate from 2018 to 2020. She managed the research coverage of 17 companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange in the Oil and Gas and Chemicals sectors. Authoring over 100 research reports, and analyzing hundreds of companies, she developed her critical thinking and communication skills and was voted one of the best equity analysts in Asia in the 2019 Asiamoney poll.Jolted by the pandemic, she decided to start a transparent crowd funding platform to help empower people at a time that they needed it the most and there has been no looking back for Divya ever since!

Website: https://sharealittle.org/

Location: Delhi

Description: 'A non-profit B2C crowdfunding platform connecting potential patrons to midsized NGOs