CREATE A TANGIBLE IMPACT BY CHANGING PERSPECTIVE

Can you briefly tell us what charity: water is and does, and what makes it different?

The easy version is that charity: water is a non-profit organization working to bring clean water to every person on the planet. How we do that is maybe what makes us unique. We work with local partner organizations around the world who are experts at delivering solutions in their own region or country. They have relationships with the government, years of proven experience, and we're just trying to fund and scale their work.

In order to do that, we have to be able to tell stories that make the water crisis feel real for people who have no idea what it's like to live without access to clean water. And then find ways to build trust and connection with our donor audiences. Two really important promises that we made from the beginning: one is that 100% of the money we raise will always go directly to helping fund water projects around the world. We have a group of private donors, families and individuals who support our operating costs, so they pay for everything else so that we can maintain this 100% promise.

The second piece is the idea of proof. We prove every single project that we fund with photos and GPS coordinates. So after 18 years, you can go on our website and look at a map and see all 175,000 projects that we've funded in our time at work so far.

Was this idea of having transparency and giving proof there from the beginning, or did it come after?

That was the idea from the beginning. Our founder created the organization really in response to the world that he was seeing around him. People didn't trust charity, people didn't know where their money was going or that their money mattered. He threw a birthday party and raised $20,000. He took it to Northern Uganda, built a couple of water projects, and then came back with the photos and the GPS coordinates and showed people what they had done or made possible. People didn't even remember being at this birthday party, let alone think that it could be that significant. I think that was a little bit of an unlock, like,

"Oh wow, there's value here if we can continue to do this for every donation."

This becomes really special, really powerful.

And may I ask you about the data you collect? I saw on your website there have been evolutions in the technology you use. Is this something that you study with some partners? Is it part of your expertise? How does this happen on the side of how you implement projects?

We have a team of programmatic experts who have studied public health, who have incredible experience in thinking about how to solve this problem. They are not experts in the solutions themselves. All over the world, the problem and the solution can be very different. You might live in a desert region where water is completely inaccessible and the only option is to drill deep into the Earth and bring clean water to the surface. You might live in a place like Cambodia where water is everywhere, but all of that water is dirty and you just need a simple way to filter it.

So these partners are coming up with ideas for solutions, but our team is there to help them think about how they can grow, how they can perform better, how they measure the progress or can start to see some of the transformation that's happening in data. We have a monitoring and evaluation team that's thinking about these baseline and inline units and what we can measure to know that we're creating real change for people who get access to clean water.

So basically, you have a huge extended team, a huge network. How many people are actually involved?

Our staff at our headquarters is just over 100. If you include local partners, that's 22 countries, maybe 40-something local partners around the world. It takes our staff well over a thousand.

Wow, that's impressive. And coming back to your personal experience, how did you get involved with charity: water? Did you always think of non-profit as a career path?

It wasn't the first thing I thought of. I studied journalism and advertising and then worked in the for-profit world in agencies for almost 10 years. I made a really silly video with a friend of mine that got noticed by the creative director at the time at charity: water. She sent me an email that said,

"You don't know who I am, but I was wondering if you want to move to New York and work at charity: water."

I was in a place where I was a little bit tired of the way that we tracked our time in the agency world, where every 15-minute increment had to be billable to a client. It was starting to infect the way I thought about my time outside of work. So the timing was great, and I flew out and met the charity: water team. 

I love the idea of bringing clean water to every person on the planet, but the thing I truly fell in love with was the vision of the organization, which is to reinvent charity and try to inspire a younger generation to believe in generosity. To demand it or expect it from the brands that they support and the world around us. Just like, how do we be better for some of the people who just lack access to life's most basic need? This is one of the simplest problems. We know how to solve this problem. We have plenty of money and resources to solve this problem. It is just a matter of time and investment. The idea of trying to get people to think differently about charity felt really inspiring to me, so I packed a suitcase and I moved to New York.

How has your work and team evolved since then? What does the creative team of charity: water look like now?

I think we built a better rhythm and structure to support the organization. My team almost operates like an internal agency that is serving these other departments - a marketing department, a fundraising department, a brand partnerships department. So it's not only giving them the tools that they need to raise money, connect with donors, continue to retain donors, make people feel connected to their impact, but also trying to innovate and create things that are going to help increase brand awareness.

The team that I oversee today is 12 people. We build our weeks around working sprints and everybody gets story points, and then we're allocating points to certain "clients" internally. So very much like an agency, just trying to set everybody up to raise as much money as possible.

You mentioned earlier that the first goal of your communication at the beginning was to make people believe that charity can be trustworthy. Do you think this message is related to the fact that charity: water provides clean water, or would this approach work for any charity?

I think there's a shift coming. Even like, we talk about user experience in terms of how people navigate to and purchase your product. User experience should be what people do with your product after they get it, right?

Absolutely, it's about what happens two months, three months, six months after that.

Yeah, exactly. There's an urgency or a "why now" that comes from knowing. We run fundraising campaigns around a specific type of solution or a certain project partner's work, and that becomes really compelling because you know,

"I'm helping to solve this social equity problem in India. The water that I'm funding is eliminating a caste system that has held some people prisoner and is creating equity in these rural communities."

It's bigger than water.

And you get to associate a specific price with it and just feel incredibly powerful, I think. If you think about it like there's a fire in your neighborhood and somebody starts a GoFundMe, it becomes urgent and important because it's real to you. I think that's maybe part of the opportunity for us - if we can make something very far away, a partner, a local partner organization that you've never heard of, six people working out of an office in Rajasthan in India, if we can make that feel important to you for a minute, gosh, that's the best.

You're not giving clean water because it's familiar to you how hard it is to live with dirty water. You're giving clean water because you want to empower women, you want to give women opportunity to live differently, to take leadership roles in a community, to become respected earners and in driving change for rural parts of the world. I think that's where the stories get really good.

Do you foresee the impact ahead of a project, or is it something that you observe over time?

It's a little bit of both. I mean, I think we have 18 years of experience, and you can say with confidence that certain things will change. Women and girls are bearing the brunt of this burden, so they're going to get time back. Families are going to become healthier, that creates extra opportunity. So there are some basics, but when my team has the privilege of getting to travel and visit our local partners and visit these communities and ask questions and learn more, we are constantly inspired by the way people talk about the impact.

We had a woman in Uganda who had been walking a really long distance. She was an older woman, she could only collect two jerry cans, these big jugs of water, each day for her family. So every day she was choosing: how do we use this water? Is it going to be for bathing or cooking or drinking or washing dishes? Are we doing some laundry? Every day she put herself last. She took care of her family. She was the last one to get water, and she told us after her community got access to clean water for the first time, "Now I feel beautiful." She finally had an opportunity to take care of herself, to wash her own clothes, or to bathe regularly, and water made her feel beautiful. 

It's very difficult for us who are used to having clean water to imagine the impact of not having it, apart from the obvious ones.

You know what's interesting? We're just starting to get into a new form of data collection that's built around more emotional responses. So instead of "How far is your water source? How much time are you spending?", the questions are around "How much time do you spend worrying? How often do you feel in danger at home?" It's getting more into a category of mental health, I guess, and getting to capture actual data to prove water, dirty water, causes worry or causes not just health issues, but concerns about the future, economic concerns.

Absolutely. How are you building this framework?

It's one of our partner organizations, an organization called Helvetas, that is leading it, and we're just coming in in partnership with them and the UN to try to think about that framework. What do we build that can be used by other organizations and try to hold a higher standard? I think this is a really important part of reinventing charity.

It's not just the proof piece and getting comfortable, like, we know how to do this, we'll just show you where your money went and we'll just continue to grow as an organization. I think we have a bigger responsibility than that. For me, part of it is creating a sense of integrity or accountability within the water sector. It's really easy to come in for a local group, a church, somebody with really good intentions, to fund a water project with a poor solution, just like not the right materials. It's going to rust, it's going to break, no plan for what goes wrong or how to take care of what goes wrong. So you're not training the community, they have nobody to get in touch with if something changes.

So these are things that we're thinking about and trying to set a standard. We're building sensor technology right now, a sensor that lives in the body of a water project and keeps track of the amount of water that's flowing. It eventually learns patterns of the well and can start to predict if something is going to break. So you have a situation where you have a mechanic arriving before the water project breaks to repair something - preventative maintenance - and the community never goes without clean water. That sensor technology could be available for the entire water sector. I think the estimate right now is like 35-40% of water projects in sub-Saharan Africa are broken. So there's work to do.

I’m really interested to know more about how you collect meaningful stories. You've got a lot of storytelling content, you go around the world. So do you actually work on all of this with your creative team, or do you have partners? How does it work? How do you get all of these campaigns and contents live with such a wide area where you collect all this content and data?

It is an increasing challenge. We have probably three different ways that we're collecting content. One is my team, which is writers, designers, filmmakers who get to travel probably three or four times a year. We structure a trip, maybe a two-week trip. They get to visit a local partner, spend a bunch of time with that local partner, and uncover as much story content as they can. Those trips are usually built around a very specific storytelling need or purpose.

In addition to that, the programs team, who's working really closely with our local partners, they travel even more than we do. And we try to set them up to collect smaller story pieces - no expectation about the quality of the content, but more real-time, scrappy, sort of behind-the-scenes stuff that we can share as an organization.

And then the third is we've been building what we've been calling a local storyteller program. So we try to bring in someone from a local level, another creative, a photographer or videographer, journalist, who can join our team on the ground for a week or two, see how we work. We get to make sure that there's a really strong alignment in values and working styles, and then that person is essentially a contractor. We can send them back to revisit communities or go capture additional content for us. So the hope long term is that we would have this local storyteller network across a dozen countries and just constantly be collecting new stories through the eyes of somebody who can represent a local perspective, who can talk about why this matters for their people.

May I ask you about your experience - we talked about transparency and how to empower partners in being part of this. If you had to say what is something that you could take from your work, your role in the non-profit, that you think could be a good example for for-profit companies? Is there something that you feel you learned from this experience that would have helped you in your previous career?

I think this is probably informed by my experience in the for-profit world and now my experience in the non-profit world. But I think brands often think that their product is the story. And for charity: water, if we say our product is clean water, that's never the story. And for a for-profit brand, it would be the same - the way that your product benefits the people who use it is the story. I think for-profit brands lose sight of that and talk about the soap or the toothpaste or the sweatshirt or whatever, not about the way it makes people feel or the way it changes them or what it does to their life or empowers them to do more of. There are some brands that do it really well - Nike does this really well. It's not about clothing or merchandise. It is a statement about what you believe in yourself.

Well, I would say this has been really interesting. I hope it moves a lot of people to get into charity: water. I wanted to ask you one last question. Would you like to share some sources of information - magazines, blogs, authors, some advice for readings, hearings, seeings, whatever that inspire you or you find interesting that you're into currently?

Yes, I'll give you three. One is actually right here - this Archive magazine. This is one of my favorite places to go when I'm looking for creative inspiration because everything in there is brilliant. It's almost uniquely advertising, but it's conceptual and clever and brilliant, and it's just easy to thumb through a catalog and feel ready to sit down and come up with some great ideas.

The second one, these are going to be all over the place - Scott Galloway is a marketing professor who's become maybe better known as a thought leader in the US, and just like a brilliant business, brand, marketing mind. He has a newsletter that he shares called No Mercy No Malice, and I just love the energy and enthusiasm that he brings to sometimes radical or offensive opinions.

And the third one is improv. I don't know if you've ever considered improv, like improv comedy. I think anybody should go take an improv class. It is one of the best things I've ever done. It forces you to learn how to build on ideas instead of rejecting ideas. It teaches you how to be an exceptional listener, creating space and trying to make people around you look better. Everything about it feels like it will benefit you in business, but I think as a creative in particular, it just makes you a better teammate and it makes every brainstorm better. It's also a source of like very weird and wacky ideas, but I think improv is a great recommendation for anybody.


Discover some of charity: water’s campaigns.

NORA

TINY HEROES

THE COLORS OF DIRTY WATER