Picture of Mark Pinoli and friend trekking in Nepal, Used with permission. Photo by: Jason Dickie
The Logged On Foundation was established in 2011, and its main aim was to raise money to help children in Nepal receive a quality education.
In my first podcast I talk to Mark Pinoli, the founder and former CEO of the Logged On Foundation about how this was achieved.
The major earthquake in Nepal in 2015 escalated the need for Logged On to increase their fundraising efforts.
It also prompted Mark to create a documentary called Earth-Q.
Logged On closed in July 2020 and Mark continues fundraising via Rotary Melbourne.
Photo on podcast by Frank Septillion on Unsplash
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Ari: Hi Mark How are you?
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Mark: Hi I’m very well thanks sorry and thanks for having me on your, your first channel first podcast…
Ari: I know
Mark: …of all time, I’m sure its the first of many to come
Ari: Thank you its very exciting. So, Mark do you want to tell us a little bit about logged on?
Mark: I was working in Canberra in Social science research policy and spent many years going to the Himalayas and trekking and had a wonderful experience and I thought well look I’d love to take a few years off and volunteer for an organisation working in either Northern India or Nepal.
Ari: I know that you had quite a presence on social media and I know the pages are still up there. So, tell me how did you start it of and how did it all gather momentum?
Mark: You gotta give people a sense of confidence and who you are and what you’re doing and that they can trust you with their money, and the social media and all the photos of the projects, the kids, the videos they seeing this and they think wow Logged On is doing great work we mightn’t t give him money, but we actually think these guys are doing a great job and um, you build your reputation.
Ari: The earthquake, you know evidence of the earthquake the pictures, the news stories everything you used all that on your social media to get the momentum going as well…
Mark: So look, yeah after the, the after the, Nepal earthquake I mean first of all there was my emotional response having seen the images there was and my connection with my friends in Nepal, I mean I just snapped and I said right we got to do something, I don’t know what quite we are going to do, we responded quickly and people because you know within a week you’ll have all big charities and everybody will get on board.
Ari: Yes
Mark: It’s like the bushfires, and you know at the start if you’re in there at the start they see the images they see the suffering and they’re ready to go they’re ready to do something. Ah, it was certainly important for us and we had it just a cache of images about the areas we were working. We also connected with people in Nepal that was sending out you know mobile phone images of what, what it was like on the ground, so we were able to sort of connect with you know our supporters. We were also, be able people that we would never you now wouldn’t even bothered having connected with us. It was massively important for us.
A few years ago, there was one charity for every 444 people, and you know the competition’s fierce, it’s, it’s tough , it’s really tough. So, to see people who saw your message and were prepared to donate to you, when, trust you it was one of the greatest honours in my life. I wanted to come back with a report that would really make them feel good about how they’ve helped us to do these projects and also to sort of build-up you know as you go doing this work you kind of want to retain your supporters, and every once in a while ask them for help so I wanted to produce of documentary about the journey taken through these 7 schools and their suffering how their, how the impact on their children’s education what the damage to that was, and how just a small charity from Australia with you know very generous supporters can help make a difference in peoples lives. So, yeah it ended up being a kind of feature documentary being shown in film festivals.
Ari: When you do get to watch Earth Q and I recommend it to everybody; you walk away different.
Mark: mm
Ari: You understand, you understand what happened a lot better, you connect (outro music starts)to these people on the screen on a human level which is so important. You know one photo, and you know a post with a million keywords is not going to replace what you see when you watch a film like that, with the actual people talking.
Credit for music on Podcast: Timpani Beat by Artist: Nana Kwabena
Ari Talantis 