YouthKiAwaaz launches mobile platform to take action on social causes

YouthKiAwaaz (YKA) is positioned as a mouthpiece for the youth across India to make their opinions heard and count. Started in 2008 by Anshul Tewari, YKA has managed to sustain and keep the momentum going with contributions from volunteers, mainly college students.Completely an ad based model, YKA broke even after four years of operations and then decided to go ad free. They now focus on leveraging the reach of their platform for social organizations.

In a new development, YKA has launched their mobile platform to turn opinions into actions. It is a ‘youth line’ where anyone can call in and make their voice heard. Once a user calls up, they would get an option to record their message in Hindi or English in 60 seconds. Once a user records their message, it is immediately received in the YKA backend as an mp3 file, and then uploaded on the website as a podcast.

Explaining with an instance, Anshul says, “While earlier a college student facing lack of administrative action on a ragging incident could only write about it on Youth Ki Awaaz, she/he can now use our platform to turn it into an action, such as getting the readers to dial the dean's number and asking them to act on it, and get hundreds and thousands of responses on it.” For one such incident, the dean got 100+ calls in a space of 3 days and the problem was looked into.

The telephony support is provided by kookoo.in and the number to call is 09310952952. The number is charged as per normal rates and YKA doesn’t make money from this as of now. Their revenue model focuses on working with social organizations (both for profit and non-profits) and helping them reach out to the youth through different ways by using our platform.

Currently a 7 member team based out of Delhi and Jharkhand, this move from YKA will allow it to reach a much wider audience. They have a strong offline play as well in terms of promotion via posters and setting up pop up kiosks to educate the users. It’ll be interesting to see the penetration they achieve and kind of changes they can make in the system.

Website: YouthKiAwaaz