1. List ten non-obvious assumptions about your target customers (or organizations) that you need to validate.
- Non-profits are reliant on business donations to continue their operations
- Corporations are acting out of obligation rather than passion
- Corporations operate with a high level of professionalism and formality
- Corporate hierarchy is extremely important in the dynamics of respect between coworkers
- Non-profits are less formal than corporations
- Corporate employees that are not directly engaged with work the non-profits are completely uninvolved with non-profit work
- Caste is highly influential in institutional relationships
- Citizens look upon corporations more positively as a result of their work with nonprofits
- Political discussion is inappropriate in these professional settings so political affiliations are kept private
- Culture is much more traditional in rural areas than in Mumbai
2. List ten hypotheses about your project that you need to test during fieldwork.
- CSR can be used as a marketing tool by corporations and can be proven to improve sales in the areas that their nonprofit funds are going.
- On average, corporations are not highly involved with the management of the nonprofits they give the portion of their profits too.
- Corporations do not typically share physical resources with non-profits.
- The strongest relationships between corporations and nonprofits are the ones that have been established for a long time.
- Corporations that donate more than 2% of their profits to the NGOs are more invested in the success of the NGO and work more alongside their operations more than corporations who donate exactly 2%.
- Corporations that give profits to a single charity are more easily able to measure the difference their making and so are more motivated to help the organization get results.
- The most successful non-profits are the ones that work with corporations to strengthen their management and operations.
- Non-profits have had to strengthen their marketing to compete with each other over who receives the funding.
- Castes discretely affect which organizations receive funds
- Non-profits have become much more effective since this law was passed in 2013.
3. What do you think you bring to your team? How has your perception of your own strengths and weaknesses changed over the course of the class? Please be specific.
I think what makes me distinct in any group is my ability for critical thinking and quickly coming up with solutions or new perspective to analyze situations with. Lately I have come to identify with the word creative more and more because I feel like I process and connect what I experience in unique ways. I would say that this is my strength, however I think the entire GSIF class is working to strengthen our critical thinking skills, so what I can personally bring with this ability may not be as valuable as the entire group is becoming sharp with their critical thinking. The other trait I bring to the table is intuition and an ability to make people comfortable and bring people together. I tend to think ahead with how people will react to things based on what I understand about their personality, and I think this is a skill that can be useful when navigating and strengthening group dynamics. Understanding my place, not necessarily as a leader, but as a guide in this project will be helpful going forward in assessing how I should react in certain situations and also how I can shed light on my team members when they may have a valuable insight that they have not realized may be relevant or that has been shut out.
I would say in general over the past year I have come to realize that I am much more of an idea person than an action person. Through other projects I have been involved in, I have been thrust into leadership positions because of an initial passion and outburst of ideas in meetings. The trouble that I tend to have is follow through. This is where I rely can become uncomfortable in leadership positions because of the constant need to plan, update, organize, and motivate others. I have learned the importance of open communication and delegation as well as communicating things in groups instead of just individually. Someone else may be better at motivating another person than I am.
I have seen this with our project. Although I am not a group leader, I can assume sort of a leadership position when others do not speak up or when we are brainstorming. I would say that the other team members are much better at planning for presentations and meetings than I am. The topic of our project is incredibly broad, so I have learned that I may think adding an opinion to a discussion seems relevant to we are discussing when really it only distracts from a particular issue. I think that I have had to work to streamline my focus in both research and action throughout this project. Luckily, team members and Professor Deo have helped me to do so.