Founders Note: VIVA @10

by Vinitha Venkatraman, Varadarajan Rajagopalan

Communications Strategists, Social Impact, Entrepreneurs

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*This picture was taken during a field visit to Koppal, Karnataka with KHPT

We started our careers in the private sector – specifically the media and entertainment industry. It was a fast paced, high-energy sector – full of life, entertainment, targets and achievements, an amazing work culture, a great social life and more.

As part of our profiles, we would work with clients from the corporate sector – developing marketing solutions and campaigns to promote their products and services to potential customers.

Working here definitely had its perks – rubbing shoulders with the marketing heads of some of the largest corporations the country had seen, meeting celebrities, regular promotions and fat pay packages, and the potential of a corner cabin with a sea view in Mumbai’s corporate metropolitan.

It was all great, but something did not sit right. We couldn’t probably articulate it back then, but now, we can say that ‘our potentially flourishing careers lacked meaning’. The universe found its way of pointing us in the right direction to find the ‘missing meaning’ in our careers.

Phase 2 of our careers involved working for and with social impact organizations (both the govt and international non-profits), and creating communication strategies and campaigns for some of the biggest causes in the country – water, sanitation, agriculture, livelihood, health and more.

“I remember the day I stood in the Mumbai office of the National AIDS Control Organisation (a unit of the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare) – it was called MDACS or the Mumbai AIDS Control Society; it was definitely not half as fancy as the Times of India office I worked in, but something about it tickled my curiosity.

We had gone to MDACS to pitch a World AIDS Day campaign on behalf of the Times Group. When I heard more about the people they work with – sex workers, transgenders and people living with HIV, I was keen to understand more about them, so we could design a campaign that could create real impact. (a glimmer of meaning).

A few months later, there was a tingle in my stomach when I received a call from Johns Hopkins University (they were partners with NACO) to ask if I would be keen on the role of Joint Director – Communications at their Mumbai office.

Anxiety knew no bounds when I spoke to my supervisor at the Times Group, and said I want to join NACO. They all said, ‘you are a bright young girl, don’t throw away a career to join an NGO, people do this when they are 50’. While it was the hardest decision I have taken so far, it was probably the best and the most fulfilling one.”

-Vinitha Venkatraman, Founder, VIVA Social Communications

A seed was sown!

We felt there was potential. Potential for us to contribute our skills and expertise to this sector. We came with a different perspective, a lens that the sector did not have. And we felt it could add value.

VIVA Development Strategies was born in 2014.

We picked up assignments across what we call a ‘project’s life cycle’. We assisted non-profits, corporate CSR, philanthropies, international foundations and global donors in research, strategy, partnerships, communication, resource mobilization, impact assessment and more.

We enjoyed consulting with clients in their board rooms and loved going to the field and seeing it for ourselves. We delved into problems deeply and used a natural strategic lens that we had, to arrive at solutions. We were hungry to learn and experience the sector fully. We wanted to do it all. We worked with more than 10 causes, 25 organizations and 50 projects in a span of 6 years!

“When I co-founded VIVA, I was turning down a national profile at the celebrated GroupM. One would have thought it was a difficult decision, but it actually wasn’t.

I always had the start-up bug and wanted to establish something independently, and now after having worked on social impact campaigns I knew that ‘this something’ could also hold a deep sense of meaning, an impact that I can create.

When VIVA was 3 years old and we presented our credentials to a client, I remember this gentleman sounding surprised. ‘How is it possible that such a young organization has worked on so many projects’, he asked. We smiled, I am not sure we answered adequately. But if i were to think of it now, i think it was the sheer power of transition from the private to the social impact sector. We were used to the rigour and that we could use that in a sector to make a difference contributed to the surge of projects we worked on within just 3 years of existence."

-Varadarajan Rajagopalan, Founder, VIVA Social Communications

After 7 years of existence, we began to explore how we could scale our work and accelerate our impact in the sector.

One of the deepest exercises in strategy in the social impact sector is understanding your community. Who are we really working for? What is it that they really need? What is the biggest barrier to their progress?

After a lot of reflection, a course in organization strategy, disagreements and confusion, came clarity.

We asked ourselves questions after questions and patiently waited for the answers to form within us, through the insights we had gathered from social impact organizations and communities over the years.

Here is a sector that wants to create impact, create a lasting change in the lives of people and the planet. And ‘communication’ as a technical skill can enable the sector to build a deeper relationship with donors, the government and communities they serve. Communication can help achieve the outcomes the sector seeks to achieve with each of these stakeholders.

If there was one thing that we were ‘passionate about’ and ‘supremely skilled at’ – it was ‘strategic communication’. It was a part of our DNA. We knew it like the back of our hand. We lived and breathed communication!

In marketing parlance, there can be no better demand and supply match.

Our love for marketing and communication enables us to understand audiences who are always at the center of all communication. For close to 20 years in Marketing and communication and 15 years in the development sector, we have used our deep technical understanding of strategic communication to drive our message home to audiences so that it can make a dent in their attitudes and perceptions.

A decision was made!

And here we are, with VIVA Social Communications!