How an education trust freed up 8 hours every month and tripled new-donor sign-ups

Vinayaka Educational Trust runs a primary school and a scholarship programme for 220 first-generation learners in Coimbatore. Funding comes from local SME owners, alumni in Chennai and Bengaluru, and a small Malayali diaspora circle in the Middle East.

The trust secretary spent every Saturday morning printing donation receipts on a label printer, signing each one, stuffing envelopes, and posting them. The backlog often ran to 3–4 weeks, and donors regularly emailed asking for their 80G receipt before the financial year closed.

New-donor sign-ups were rare because the trust had no online presence beyond a Facebook page. When the IT department mandated Form 10BD filing, the trust's CA had to spend nearly a week sorting through paper records.

The trust set up its public profile on Donateazy with photos, 12A / 80G certificates, and three active campaigns (uniform drive, library books, scholarship corpus). The online donation page accepts UPI, cards, and net banking with auto-generated 80G receipts.

Existing donors were imported from the trust's spreadsheet and tagged by giving frequency. The communications module sends a quarterly impact update by email and WhatsApp with photos from the school.

The trust secretary recovered 8 hours per month previously spent on manual receipts. The public profile drew 34 new donors in the first 3 months, mostly from out-of-town alumni who could now contribute online. Form 10BD filing took 20 minutes instead of a week.