Where they started
The coalition had been running annual flood-relief campaigns for six years on a well-known donation platform. Each monsoon, they raised a few crore. Each monsoon, the platform took 3–4% in fees, plus a UPI markup, plus a 7–14 day settlement lag. In flood-response terms, a week's lag is people not eating.
They also had no way to show donors where the money went. The platform's transparency page was a PDF at the end of the campaign, six weeks after the water receded.
What we built
- A dedicated donation platform on the coalition's own domain. HTML-first, ~120 KB, ready to load on 2G. Handled 8× normal traffic during peak news cycles without a slowdown.
- Direct UPI + international cards. Payments through Razorpay's non-profit rate (0.4% on UPI, 1.6% on international). No intermediate wallet. Money hit the coalition's account in T+1, not T+14.
- A real-time transparency dashboard. Every allocation — kits distributed, meals served, boats sent — updated within 12 hours and visible to any donor who had given. Not a PDF. A live page they could bookmark.
- Fair-share allocation logic. Six orgs, one pot. We built the coalition's agreed split (40/20/15/15/5/5) into the settlement flow so no monthly reconciliation meeting was needed.
- An off-season mode. The site quietly hibernated between monsoons, showing an evergreen page with the previous year's transparency report and a "we'll be back at the next flood" note.
What it moved
"We saved almost 3% of every rupee — which on ₹4.7 crore is more than 12 lakh that went to the actual relief work instead of fees. That's a lot of tarpaulins."
What we'd do differently
We built the dashboard for donors but the coalition teams also needed one — a lightweight ops view of which org had what pending. We added it in month two after three feedback rounds. Should have shipped it at launch and saved everyone a week of Excel.