How Milaap tweaked crowdfunding model to raise money for medical care

Everyone who works on campaigns at the crowdfunding platform Milaap remembers their first loss. That was when, despite raising funds for a critical medical procedure, the patient did not survive.

For Vrushali Sheth, head of campaigns at the company, it was the one-and-a-half year-old son of a taxi driver in Delhi. The boy needed Rs 2 lakh for a surgery to fix a hole in his tiny heart.

“I was the only Hindi speaker in the team, so I helped write the story of the family, and was in touch with them regularly,” recalls the 29-year-old in a coffee shop in Bengaluru.

Sheth remembers how she called up the father to give him the good news that they had managed to raise Rs 2.6 lakh. “That was when he told me they would not need the money anymore because his son had passed away.” That first loss hit her hard.

Still, she reasons that every profession has a trade-off. “What really cheers me on is beneficiaries recommending Milaap because of their trust in the platform.” Balancing these perspectives and learning to power through are probably essential for Milaap staffers, considering that nearly 85% of campaigns running on India’s largest crowdfunding platform are today for medical procedures.

These are usually for tertiary care and are urgent, with donations literally making the difference between life and death for many. So far, more than Rs 770 crore has been raised on Milaap while the figure stands at Rs 500 crore for Ketto, the other popular crowd-funding platform. Milaap’s experience shows how India has tweaked the crowdfunding model.

Globally, such platforms are mostly used by entrepreneurs and designers to raise money for a tech product or a passion project. On US based Kickstarter, for instance, over $4 billion has been pledged for projects in design, tech, film and publishing, among others. The data on healthcare expenditure in India partly explains why critical medical procedures make for a compelling use-case for crowdfunding, say Milaap founders.



Anoj Viswanathan and Mayukh Choudhury. In a country where medical insurance penetration is low, patients and their families end up bearing nearly 70% of health expenses, according to a 2018 paper by PRS Legislative Research.

Another 2018 study, by the Public Health Foundation of India, estimates that 55 million Indians were pushed into poverty in a single year (2011-12) because of their having to fund healthcare costs.

Greater internet penetration and rise of mobile payments in the last three years have also increased the accessibility of these platforms. Over 45% of campaigns on Milaap come from outside the seven biggest cities and a similar proportion of payments are made through mobile phones.

Some donations are as small as Rs 5 or Rs 10. Though healthcare is now their focus, helping people raise money for medical procedures was far from what the two co-founders had in mind when they started Milaap 10 years ago. Viswanathan, who studied engineering at National University of Singapore, and Choudhury, a BTech from IIT-Madras, met while working at a social enterprise selling solar lanterns in villages.

Sitting in a conference room in Milaap’s open plan office in Bengaluru’s JP Nagar, Viswanathan, 32, says their goal was to initially make giving an everyday behaviour and the process seamless using technology. As he recently said at an event by Shibulal Family Philanthropic Initiatives in the city, Milaap started out at a time when the internet was beginning to change the way Indians shopped and travelled.

The cofounders wanted to see how that could be extended to giving. “So we showcased rural projects online, to connect them to individuals across the world who could give micro loans,” he had told the audience.

Requests to expand the scope of Milaap beyond micro loans first came during the Uttarakhand floods of 2013, when regular donors asked if the platform could be used for flood relief. What nudged the founders to pivot and focus on crowdfunding medical care was “Abhishek’s case”, as they have come to call it. In 2016, a group of friends wanted to quickly raise money for their friend’s heart transplant.

“Here was a situation where the family was not poor and the friends were tech-savvy. Within a week, they raised Rs 30 lakh via Milaap. It made us re-examine fundraising,” says Choudhury, 37. They wondered if the platform could be useful for similar cases. The data they dug up on healthcare financing strengthened their resolve to double down on emergency medical care.

The mobile internet and payments revolution has sped up growth, with the number of Milaap users doubling year-on-year in the last three years. It has also led to success stories that combine the power of online with offline.

One of them involves Mohammad Vasees, who used to run a digital printing shop in Vellore. He had put up posters in the shop about his infant daughter’s liver ailment and a payment gateway for donations that Milaap had set up. “I put up the posters so that more people, who needed help, would get to know about Milaap,” says Vasees, who adds that without the platform, he would not have been able to raise the Rs 25 lakh they needed for the liver transplant.

Vasees says he got to know about Milaap through the hospital treating his daughter. It was one of the over 2,000 hospitals the company has tied up with. Most of the time, donations go directly to hospitals, increasing the credibility of medical campaigns.

This credibility is one reason Mayank Jain, a 40-year-old businessman from Gurgaon, returns to Milaap every few days to make a donation on behalf of his mother, Usha Jain. "I could see that the causes were verified. Medical reports of the patient were also available.

At times, I have also spoken to the doctors involved¨ says Jain, who donates between Rs 2,000 and Rs 7,000, depending on the urgency of the cause. The company charges as fees 5% of the amount raised in each campaign. The founders say they would like Milaap, which is operationally profitable, to become synonymous with raising funds for critical healthcare."

Meanwhile, the company has recognised that employees who are constantly dealing with such emotionally charged cases run the risk of a burnout. For the last one-and-a half years, they have a counsellor for their 110 employees. “In fact, the doctors we work with helped us recognise the importance of going slow,” says Choudhury.