- Type
- Full-time
- Source
- RecruiterFlow
Description
Program Head – Individual Giving
Sama Digital Foundation | Full-time | Location: Flexible (with travel to campaign states)
About Sama
Sama Digital Foundation is a Section 8 nonprofit working to close India's digital divide. We collect decommissioned laptops from corporates and individuals, refurbish them, and deploy them through NGO and institutional partners to students and communities who need them most.
Every laptop we place is a door to education, skills, and livelihood. Our goal: 100,000 recurring laptop deployments annually by FY30. Until now, our device pipeline has been powered largely by corporate partnerships. This role builds our second engine: the people's pipeline individual donors, individual devices, and a citizen movement for digital inclusion.
The Role
As Program Head – Individual Giving, you will own and scale Sama's individual giving vertical, with device mobilisation as the primary mission and crowdfunding as its supporting engine:
- Individual Device Mobilisation: building a statewide, volunteer-led campaign that surfaces unused laptops from households, institutions, and organisations and channels them to students who need them
- Crowdfunding: mobilising monetary contributions from individual donors to power refurbishment, logistics, and deployment of those devices. This is a builder's role. You will design the playbook, recruit and energise the first volunteer network, run the first statewide campaign end-to-end, prove the model, and then systematise it for replication state by state.
What You Will Do
- Build and run the Digital Ambassador network
- Design and launch a statewide digital inclusion campaign (one state at a time), recruiting local volunteers as Digital Ambassadors
- Create the Ambassador journey end-to-end: recruitment, onboarding, training, toolkits, recognition, and retention
- Enable Ambassadors to work within their communities on both sides of the equation: a. Supply mapping: identifying households, institutions, and organisations with unused laptops b. Demand mapping: identifying schools, colleges, and community organisations where students genuinely need digital access
- Activate Workplace Ambassadors employees who champion Sama inside their own organisations (for instance, an Amazon employee running a laptop collection drive or matched-giving campaign within Amazon), opening doors to corporate device pools through their people rather than through top-down partnerships
- Build simple systems (forms, dashboards, WhatsApp-based workflows) so device pledges, pickups, an deployments are tracked transparently
2. Lead the storytelling and social media campaign
- Launch and run a campaign where students share short stories and videos about how a laptop would change their access to education, skills, or employment
- Curate and amplify these stories to humanise the campaign, drive donations, and connect donors directly to the impact of their contribution
- Close the loop: ensure every device donor sees where their laptop went and whose life it touched
3. Mobilise crowdfunding to power the device pipeline
- Design and execute crowdfunding campaigns (platform-based and direct) tied to campaign moments, student stories, and giving seasons — with funds primarily fuelling device refurbishment, logistics, and deployment
- Build a recurring individual giving base — monthly donors, giving circles, alumni and diaspora networks, payroll giving — framed around a simple ask: sponsor a laptop's journey to a student. Manage donor journeys: acquisition, engagement, receipting (80G), impact reporting, and retention
4. Build the engine, not just the campaign
- Own the vertical's targets, budget, and reporting — devices mobilised, funds raised, Ambassadors active, students reached
- Document the statewide campaign as a repeatable playbook for expansion to the next state
- Collaborate with Sama's operations team on device collection logistics, refurbishment intake, and deployment through partners
- Recruit and manage a small team (and eventually state campaign leads) as the vertical grows
What Success Looks Like (First 12 Months)
- One statewide campaign launched and running, with an active, trained Digital Ambassador network —in communities and inside workplaces
- A strong, growing pipeline of individual laptops mobilised, tracked, and deployed — the vertical's headline metric
- A live storytelling campaign generating consistent student stories and donor engagement
- A crowdfunding engine that reliably funds the refurbishment and deployment of mobilised devices
- A documented playbook ready for the second state (Specific numeric targets will be co-created with you in your first 60 days.)
Who You Are
- Meaningful experience across fundraising, community mobilisation, campaigns, or grassroots program leadership — nonprofit, political campaign, community organising, or movement building backgrounds all welcome
- Proven track record of mobilising people: volunteers, donors, or communities — you know how to make people feel part of something bigger
- Hands-on experience with digital fundraising or crowdfunding platforms, donor CRM basics, and campaign analytics
- Strong storytelling instincts — you understand what makes content travel and what makes a donor feel connected
- Comfortable building from zero: ambiguity energises you, and you can move between strategy and execution in the same day
- Fluent in English and Hindi; fluency in the campaign state's language is a strong plus
- Willing to travel extensively within the campaign state Bonus points
- Experience running volunteer networks at district or state scale
- Familiarity with social media campaign management and creator/UGC-style content
- Prior exposure to education, livelihoods, or digital inclusion work
- You've sat a Vipassana course — we value the equanimity, patience, and inner
- steadiness the practice builds, and it's part of Sama's own DNA
Why This Role
Own a vertical, not a task. You'll build one of Sama's two core growth engines from the ground up.
Own a vertical, not a task. You'll build one of Sama's two core growth engines from the ground up.
- See the impact directly. Every laptop you mobilise reaches a real student with a real story.
- Build a movement. This isn't just fundraising — it's organising citizens around a cause that touches every community in India.
- Grow with us. As the model scales state by state, so does your mandate and your team.
How to Apply
Send the following to [email protected] with the subject line “Program Head – Individual Giving”:
1. Your resume
2. A short note (max 300 words) on: “How would you mobilise the first 100 Digital Ambassadors in a new
state?”
3. Optional: a link to any campaign, community, or fundraising effort you've built or led
Sama Digital Foundation is an equal opportunity employer. Women and candidates from underrepresented communities are strongly encouraged to apply.
Skills
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