Donor Connect: Our fortnightly updates to donors
Dear Donors - In case you have missed any of our mailers, you could check this page and catch up. And if you are someone who has stumbled upon this page for the first time, we invite you to join us in our journey. Give us a donation to sustain our work. Contribute your time/ expertise. Connect us with people who matter - in the National Medical Commission / ICMR or any of the Councils. Help us reach medical / nursing / dental / pharmacy and other colleges. In short - Become a part of the history we are creating! We welcome you!
February 2, 2024:Why does the stick work better than the carrot?
On 23rd January Vasumathi Sriganesh delivered a lecture on literature searching at the Ayurved Mahavidyalaya in Mumbai for their Post graduate students. An enthusiastic lot, they scored very well in the small post test that we normally give at the end of such events.
But here is something very thought provoking.
In the Feedback Section of the form, we asked a question – “Do you think Literature Searching should be taught in the curriculum”? All of them answered – “Yes”
But – for the question – “Will you register for our courses and complete them” – Only one student said Yes. Most said that they would like to but time is a problem!
(It was mentioned earlier, that they need to spend just about 8-10 hours and they have a whole year to complete them!)
When verbally asked – “You were offered a great carrot, but it looks like you need a stick to do the courses”. Why??
All of them smiled and said “Compulsion definitely helps”!
Interestingly after the lecture, Vasumathi Sriganesh was invited to meet the Principal. And to her pleasant surprise a couple of faculty members and the Principal expressed interest in subscribing to our Elearning courses. They also assured her that they would ensure that all students completed them. We are now eagerly waiting for them to complete the formalities. Once they complete the formalities, they would be the first Ayurved College to sign up!
December 21, 2023: Will You Be a Catalyst for India’s Medical Research Revolution?
Raising funds consistently posed challenges for us. Our donor pool was limited, primarily relying on reaching out to the same individuals whenever funding was required.
Danamojo is a platform through which we collect our donations within India. They recently organized a program to help several NGOs to raise funds. This four-month initiative focused on institutionalizing retail fundraising. We submitted an application for the program and were fortunate to be selected.
During that month, donations we raise wre being “matched” by Danamojo (our fundraising platform). Our target was Rs 15 lakhs! We had a campaign called – Will You Be a Catalyst for India’s Medical Research Revolution?. During the challenge, (Oct 19 – Nov 17) we raised about Rs 4.6 lakhs. And we got matching donations of approximately Rs 70,000/-.
We had planned to utilize the amount as below:
- Rs 7 Lakhs for MBBS students who will be going for the ICMR STS program, providing them with access to QMedCourses.
- Support 12 small institutions with our courses and mentoring.
- Support 15 non-funded Systematic Review authors
Having raised about Rs 5 lakhs we started with the ICMR STS project. We have embarked on this and several students have registered with us to do the ELearning courses. We look forward to seeing more registrations.
We have extended the campaign page – till 31st March, 2023 to raise the full 15 Lakhs that we wished to raise. We hope to show you good results with all that we want to achieve!
August 21, 2023: THIRST For AIIMS – Major progress
In our July 9 communication of Donor Connect, mentioned about the THIRST For AIIMS project being on the “take off mode”. July turned out to be great for us as we did sessions in AIIMS Raipur (July 14), AIIMS Guwahati (July 20) and AIIMS Kalyani (July 22).
We had varied experiences with each institution as we planned the events. AIIMS Raipur gave us only 1.5 hours of time. AIIMS Guwahati gave three hours and Kalyani gave two three hour slots. We had offered a full day session to all.
But over years I have figured out how to handle sessions of varying length, how much to teach and more. Importantly I convey one message to all. That there is a very structured method of literature searching and referencing and that if people invest time in learning these skills they gain a large time saving in their professional life. Most often at the end of the session, people themselves express their feelings – that they need longer sessions!
In every institution I had discussions with people about how we can make sure that majority in their institution finish all of our courses.
An interesting addition was that many participants asked me about how I could speak and present very well. The second question that was interesting was – how I had the energy to speak the whole day without losing energy and keep an audience engaged. These questions made me feel good.
I had to first acknowledge the “genetic element” – that my father and grandfather were great teachers and orators and that their skills had crept into my genes. Regarding the energy element, I told them it was a mix of passion, love of teaching, and most recently having gone through NLP processes that added extra energy into me!
In addition to the above workshops, July offered the opportunity for a lecture at NIPER – National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research, Guwahati.
August 2023
Things peaked and through the Thirst for AIIMS grant, we did one workshop in AIIMS Rae Bareli (August 8), two in AIIMS Bhopal (11th and 12th) and one in AIIMS Jodhpur. All of them were full day workshops too. One of the workshops in Bhopal had two MBBS students, one who was in his first year! And he answered the toughest quiz question correctly. These are “Aha” moments for us – as we are able to convince the concerned people that these skills need to be introduced in the UG curriculum and students are capable of learning them
With this we have done events in six AIIMS institutions and need to do four more. We are sure of completing these pretty soon.
Check out our past “Donor Connects” – https://www.qmed.ngo/donor-connect/
Wish to give us a review? You could do that here ! Help us reach out to lots more people.
We seek your wishes
Our commitment to reach out to all institutions stays strong. We are working hard at this and need your best wishes to take our mission ahead!
We invite you to join us in our journey. When you give monetarily or with your time/expertise, you are part of a history which we are creating. You could connect us to people who matter – in the National Medical Commission / ICMR and similar bodies. You could help us reach medical colleges and similar institutions. And of course – monetary donations are vital, till we reach all institutions and they help us sustain this work.
July 12, 2023: THIRST For AIIMS – Getting Started
In our June 9 communication of Donor Connect, we had shared the wonderful news about getting an Educational Grant from Pfizer. With two months of planning, we are all set to conduct workshops and offer our ELearning courses to AIIMS Raipur, AIIMS Guwahati and AIIMS Kalyani. These workshops are happening in July. AIIMS Bhopal, Jodhpur, Rae Bareli and Nagpur have also given their nod, the dates being formalized are in process. We are all excited to move ahead.
This project got its name from the name I had planned for my freelancing entity that I first started with – before I started QMed. THIRST stood for “Training in Health Information Retrieval and Search Techniques” and THIRST for AIIMS sounded very catchy! Pfizer loved this name – when I mentioned it in passing and felt that we should use the same. Once again we seek your best wishes for our implementing these sessions.
QMed’s Donor Conect Page:
For long, we wanted to have the contents of our Donor Connect emails, available on our website. We accomplished that too. Do visit our page https://www.qmed.ngo/donor-connect/ – where you can see our current and old “Connects”.
QMed’s Google Reviews
We recently asked people to leave reviews about QMed on our Google Maps and quite a few have added them. Would you like to give us a review? You could do that here
Reaching out to Dental Colleges
In our June 23 communication of Donor Connect, we had mentioned about how we sent mailers to 650 medical colleges. Later we repeated the process for about 330 Dental colleges. It was much quicker this time, as we had all processes in place.
A thank you to Danamojo!
We would like to thank Danamojo for making the process for the 10BD and 10BE formalities really easy for us. Last year, soon after this became mandatory, they made it easy for us to upload the necessary files in the Income tax portal. This year, they made the mailing of the 10BE a breeze!
An image for Social media by our youngest colleague
Our new colleague Priyanka designed a lovely Social media message to promote our courses. It was a great way of telling people that they needed to join our courses to unlearn, in addition to getting new learning! (Image on the left)
We seek your wishes
Our commitment to reach out to all institutions stays strong. We are working hard at this and need your best wishes to take our mission ahead!
We invite you to join us in our journey. When you give monetarily or with your time/expertise, you are part of a history which we are creating. You could connect us to people who matter – in the National Medical Commission / ICMR and similar bodies. You could help us reach medical colleges and similar institutions. And of course – monetary donations are vital, till we reach all institutions and they help us sustain this work.