THE ORGANIZATION  
Vibha is a completely volunteer run, US-based non-profit, non-religious, non- political organization working to ensure health, education and economic opportunities for underprivileged children in India and the US. Vibha is a 501 (c) (3) registered non-profit organization registered as Help Them Grow Inc.  

THE PROBLEM  
As a social venture capital organization, Vibha funds grassroots level projects that are selected based on the focus areas, target beneficiary groups and the demographics serviced by the projects. Vibha projects are monitored at the end of each funding cycles and the cycle time could vary on the basis of the impact, budgets and resource availability of the different projects. Projects are evaluated at the end of the funding cycle not only for further funding but also to see if it can scale to have a greater impact.  

Over the past 20 years the organization has build up considerable expertise in this field and the scope of the project selection and evaluation process has come to include the following:  

  • Impact analysis
  • Beneficiary tracking
  • Onsite monitoring
  • Budgets, annual reports  

The number of projects being supported also increased by 40% (25 in 2004, 35 in 2011). This increase in evaluation scope and the number of organizations being supported coupled with the virtual and volunteer nature of the organization resulted in extended funding cycle times delaying project funding renewals.  

A recent analysis found that over the past 7 years project renewal cycle times have increased by more than 50% resulting in  

  1. Delay in fund allocation and project renewals
  2. Wastage of volunteer time and inability to take up new projects/strategic initiatives
  3. Compels Vibha to provide advance funding, which reduces the organization’s flexibility and impacts the monitoring process (since funds have already been allocated).  

PROJECT GOAL  
The objective of this project was to reduce the project renewal cycle times by 50% resulting in the below benefits while ensuring that the evaluation scope is not negatively impacted.  

  1. On- time project renewals
  2. Better use of volunteer time and increased bandwidth to take up new initiatives.  

TEAM ORGANIZATION

  • Core team of 9 volunteers ( 2 Project Sponsors, 1 Project Manager and 6 team members)
  • Extended team of 30 volunteers (Project Leads for the Vibha funded projects )  

CHALLENGES  
The following factors proved challenging to the project team  

  • Coordinating a volunteer driven matrix organization
  • Coordinating volunteers who were located in different time-zones in different continents
  • Coordinating volunteers who were working professionals, most project activities including all meetings and trainings were done during off-hours
  • Training the team and customers in using freely available technical resources to minimize project cost (like free online meeting software, Google sites etc)  

RESULTS  
The process improvement measures implemented have shown a statistically significant positive impact on the renewal process by  

  1. Bringing down the average renewal lead time from -119. 28 days to + 54.5 days 
  2. Increasing the on-time renewal percentage score from 8% to 100%