How a rural eye care NGO tracked 12,000 surgeries and satisfied 3 CSR partners with one system

Drishti Netra Seva runs free cataract surgery camps across 6 districts in western Maharashtra. The organisation receives funding from three corporate CSR partners, individual donors, and a small government grant. Each CSR partner requires quarterly utilisation reports showing exactly how their funds were used, down to per-surgery cost breakdowns.

The NGO was managing donor data in one Excel file, beneficiary (patient) records in another, surgery logs in a third, and expenses in a fourth. Preparing a single quarterly report for one CSR partner took the programme coordinator 4-5 days of manual data reconciliation. When two partners requested mid-year impact audits simultaneously, the coordinator worked weekends for three weeks straight to compile the data.

The disconnect between systems also meant that 80G receipts were generated from a separate template and often had small discrepancies with the donation records, causing confusion during the annual audit.

Drishti adopted Donateazy to unify their operations. Donor records, donation tracking, and 80G receipts were migrated first. Then they set up the beneficiary management module to record patient details, surgery dates, and outcomes linked to specific programmes and funding sources.

The fund allocation feature allowed them to tag each donation to a specific CSR partner or fund, and the expense tracking module recorded costs against the same funds. Quarterly utilisation reports could now be generated directly from the system, showing each CSR partner exactly how their contribution was deployed: number of surgeries funded, per-surgery cost, and patient outcomes.

Quarterly report preparation time dropped from 4-5 days to half a day. All three CSR partners renewed their grants for the next financial year, with one increasing their commitment by 40% after seeing the improved reporting. The NGO also identified that their per-surgery cost varied significantly across districts, allowing them to optimise camp logistics and reduce costs by 12%. Audit observations related to receipt discrepancies dropped to zero.