Oxfam India

Oxfam India, the Indian affiliate of global non-profit Oxfam International, is a rights-based organisation that fights poverty and injustice by linking grassroots programming (through partner NGOs) to local, national and global advocacy and policy-making. It is striving to become a “Digital First” organisation. Apart from digitising all its operations and introducing an enterprise-wide digital platform customised to meet its needs, it launched in 2012 the Trailwalker programme to create an enabling environment for engaging the community. Today, the organisation has two websites: www.oxfamindia.org and trailwalker.oxfamindia.org.

The Trailwalker programme involves organising walks along designated trails by teams of four. Teams are required to walk 100 kilometres in 48 hours. The teams are required to raise a target level of funds to become eligible for participation.

The Oxfam India Trailwalker website is a unique and an ever-evolving platform, which is used to engage with the community and raise funds to support Oxfam India’s work. The user experience of the platform has been designed to ensure long-term user engagement. Oxfam India converted the Trailwalker website to a gaming platform. This has increased engagement by 50%, increased site visits – 94000 visits in 6 months, reduced complaints by 95% and fundraising in every trail is minimum Rs. 2 crore. The organisation has also introduced the Trailwalker app to enhance engagement with the community, while adding new members to it.

The Trailwalker website and mobile app enables participants to engage the community through social media such as Twitter, Facebook etc to involve people into making donations and raising funds for Oxfam’s work. As a result, the organisation’s social media presence has been growing tremendously. On Twitter the organisation gets approximately 1000 followers every week and on Facebook it gets 800-900 likes a month. And these numbers are only increasing.