I co-founded Badlaav Foundation in Dehradun. Over the past decade it has worked with more than five hundred children living in shelter homes across the city.
I also run a studio that builds websites and campaigns for businesses. People occasionally treat these as two unrelated things I happen to do. They are not. The NGO taught me more about marketing than any campaign has, and it did so by removing every shortcut.
Why does charity work teach you anything about business?
Because it strips out the things that normally do the persuading for you.
When you sell a product, the product helps. People can see it, hold it, compare it. When you ask someone to fund a child’s education in a city they have never visited, for a result they will not witness, none of that is available. There is no demonstration. There is only whether they believe you.
That turns out to be the same problem every service business has, just with the volume turned up. Nobody can inspect a website before it exists either. They are deciding about you, not about a thing.
What is the single biggest lesson?
That specificity persuades and adjectives do not.
Early on we wrote the way charities are expected to write. Empowering futures. Transforming lives. Making a difference. Every word true and none of it doing any work, because nobody can picture a transformed life.
What changed everything was replacing all of it with facts. Not “we support children’s education” but “every child in our board cohort passed, and four of seven cleared the Sainik School entrance.” Same work. Utterly different response.
The reason is simple. A specific claim can be checked and a vague one cannot, so a specific claim is the only kind that carries risk for the person making it. People understand that instinctively, and they trust accordingly.
I have never written “bespoke solutions” on a client website since.
What does that mean for a business website?
Delete anything that would still be true if a competitor said it.
Go and read your own homepage as a stranger. Every sentence that would sit equally comfortably on any competitor’s site is doing nothing. “Quality service” and “customer focused” and “years of experience” are not claims, they are noise that everyone makes.
Replace them with things only you could say. Not “fast turnaround” but “most sites launch in six weeks.” Not “we care about results” but “we set up tracking before spending any of your budget, so you can see which rupee brought which enquiry.”
Specificity feels riskier to write, because you can be held to it. That is precisely why it works.
What did fundraising teach you about asking for the sale?
That the ask should be small, clear, and obviously connected to something real.
“Support our work” raises very little. “Two thousand rupees covers one child’s school supplies for a year” raises considerably more, and it is the same money.
The difference is that the second one lets someone picture what happens next. Vague asks require the other person to do the imagining, and most people will not.
Business sites make the same mistake constantly. “Get in touch” and “contact us for a quote” ask a stranger to invent the next step themselves. “Tell us what you are working on and we will come back with an honest view of what it takes” describes what actually happens. It costs the reader nothing to picture, so more of them do it.
Is there anything you unlearned?
Yes. That persuasion and pressure are the same thing.
Charity fundraising has a bad reputation partly because some of it is manipulative. Urgency that is not real. Photographs that take dignity from the people they show. Guilt used as a lever.
It works, in the short term. It also means the next time you ask, people brace. You have taught them that hearing from you is uncomfortable, and that is extremely difficult to undo.
The version that lasts is slower and duller. Say what is true. Show the work. Make the next step easy. Accept that some people will say no, and let them say it without friction.
That approach makes me worse at extracting a decision today and considerably better at being the person somebody calls in eighteen months. For a business that runs on referrals, that is not a compromise. It is the whole strategy.
Does this actually change how you work with clients?
In one specific way, and it is the thing clients notice most.
I ask what the website is supposed to achieve before I ask what it should look like, and I keep asking until the answer is something measurable. Not “look more professional” but “stop losing enquiries to the competitor who explains pricing clearly.”
That habit came directly from the NGO, where every rupee had to be justified to someone who could have given it elsewhere. You develop an intolerance for spending on things that cannot be connected to an outcome.
It also means I will tell you when you do not need something. A brand refresh you are not ready for. A booking system for four appointments a month. Saying so costs me revenue in the short term and is the reason people come back.
Marketing for a shelter home and marketing for a solar company come down to the same discipline. Understand who is reading. Work out what they need to believe. Say it plainly enough that they can check it.
Everything else is decoration.
If you would rather work with someone who asks what a website is for before asking what it should look like, tell us what you are working on.
