Ngopost.org is an online podium for people sharing and discussing various social welfares inventiveness. Launched in 25th August 2007 by a group of Indian students studying in US, NGOpost.org soon became a good source of information and a place for many like minded people who have one noble reason to join NGOpost.org and that is doing social work.

Few days before I tried contacting one of the founder of ngopost Parul Gupta and requested her to give a  small time to answer my few questions, I am very much thankful of Parul for giving me this opportunity and making this interview successful.

How did the idea of a website like ngopost come up? Please share the story behind it.

NGO Post’s origin goes back to days at University of California, San Diego where Nitin (co-founder, ngopost) and I were students. We were a part of a student group called Udai where all of us volunteers worked with NGOs and created awareness about different social issues. During our activities, we felt the need for an open, global platform where anybody interested in social welfare activities could come together to share their knowledge, learn from each other’s experience and also find other motivated people. Both Nitin and I have been deeply involved in the social sector since our early college days – I have been volunteering for many causes and Nitin was a founding member of an NGO called Shiksha Sopan in IIT Kanpur and Udai at UCSD. Nitin is also a web-technology enthusiast and a computer scientist by education. One night, during our chat sessions, he suggested NGO Post as a means of using technology for social good. I got hooked on to the idea and then slowly fellow-believers like Goli, Aneesh, Mayank and many others joined forces! What NGO Post is today is due to the efforts of all these champions.

Parul can you please tell us about yourself, your birthplace, education, profession. In short, your biography.

I was born in a small town called Khetrinagar (near Pilani) in Rajasthan and my childhood was spent in many cities all over India. I have a B. Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay and a M.S. in the same from University of California, San Diego. Currently I am working at IBM India Research Labs and devote my free time to NGO Post.

Being a social worker you provided a platform through NGOpost.org for many other social workers like you. How much successful you feel at this point of time when ngopost completed its 1 year being live on the internet?

NGO Post has had its small successes where people found some stories and discussions very useful or it helped like-minded people connect with each other and pool resources. But I feel that worldwide the community is much larger than is currently involved on NGO Post – means there is a lot more work for us to do J

India, in terms of internet awareness is still on its developing stage, are you taking any productive action to spread word through out India?

Absolutely. We realize that even though internet access in improving in India and worldwide, there is a large segment of population which doesn’t have access to it or is not comfortable using it, so we need alternate methods to reach them. For this, we do talks, presentations for groups and man booths at social events. In addition, a lot of NGO Post members are active volunteers in different areas, so they are the foot soldiers of the knowledge-sharing and collaboration goal J For future, we have some dreams about extending NGO Post’s reach through other channels like print media, mobile devices so that many more people can benefit.

What are the statistics of registered members you have on ngopost and majority comes from which age group?

NGO Post currently has ~1100 users and most of them are young people passionate about social change. In addition, we also have social workers and NGO representatives who are usually more experienced.

What are the developments going on from technical side? Are you going to introduce any new features?

We are continuously introducing new features and programs to improve the usefulness of NGO post. Recently we instituted a “best story award” to highlight the best contributions every month. Then, we added locations to stories and users, which make it easier for people to find articles, NGOs or users in a particular area. We have also made changes to the networking features making it easier for users to find/contact other users, follow their friends’ activity etc. There are many more ideas in the pipeline - please visit the NGO Post blog to read about developments on the website.

What was the most memorable moment since you attached with ngopost?

I would say there hasn’t been a single memorable moment, but it feels good whenever someone tells how they benefited from NGO Post. Redoubles our faith in what we are doing and makes all the hard work worth it J

The team is full of youngsters? Do you guys do get-together sometimes?

We are a very scattered team with NGO Post members spread across various cities like San Diego, San Francisco, Mumbai, Bangalore, Austin etc. We try to meet regularly in our cities for brainstorming and execution of ideas or volunteering as a group. Besides that, the whole meet through web-conference every fortnight and whenever one of us is traveling to another city, we try to meet up people there.

What are your hobbies? If you are not online, where do you hangout?

I like doing so many things that I am always confused which one to do J In general, I love to try out new things, whether it be a new book, new cuisine, new place for travel or any new activity. Listening to music, reading, dancing, outdoor activities and travel are all very high up on my fun list.

Thanks for your time and making it possible for me and hallabolo.com.

It has been a pleasure. Thanks for giving me this opportunity!