Fund Distribution
We have encountered unexpected problems during fund distributions—the main reason being that we didn’t screen the kids before finding a sponsor for them.
Failure Analysis
The (faulty) process before:
- School gave us a list of student
- We reached out to potential donors
- Once we matched a donor with a child, we will reach out to the parent to screen them
We found several issues:
- A few families rejected our help by saying that they don’t need the help right now and that we should help other more needy kids instead.
- One child was adamant that they wanted to drop out of school because they wanted to help their family make money. It took us a couple of weeks to convince the child and their family to accept our help and continue their study.
- A few families are uncontactable. We tried contacting them via phone calls, WhatsApp (the default comms method in Indonesia) and sometimes contacting the kids directly without any success.
New & Improved Process
From now on, we will switch up the steps:
- School gave us a list of student
- We reach out to the families to screen them and make sure that they are receptive and require help
- Only then will we reach out to potential donors to raise funds
Fundraising
We have entirely stopped fundraising while we close the loops on the first wave of 8 students.
Once we identify the next group of student, we will start the fundraising again.
Business Entity Registration
We have registered Borneo Education Foundation with the State of California.
I’m working to figure out the next steps now on the path to 501c3.
Website
The development is coming along. We aren’t in a hurry to get this done. The website’s primary purpose is for high scalability, and we aren’t ready for high volume yet.
I will write a more in-depth blog post about the website architecture later.
For now, I’m enjoying learning NextJs, Typescript, Serverless architecture, integration with Contentful, etc.
Lots of fun!