Lessons From Charity : Water

Last week was Blog Action Day, a day where 4,319 Blogs and 33.2 million readers from 131 different countries came together virtually to highlight and read about clean water.

In all honesty, most of us probably don’t care very much about the water crisis in Africa. It’s not something that affects us on a daily basis. Like the Millennium Development Goals, world peace and climate change, the scale and enormity of water issues is larger than what any one person can change.

On this blog, I explore ways that people successfully communicate and personalize complex issues. I’d like to highlight charity : water, a nonprofit organization that helps to bring clean water to people in developing nations. Charity : water does an amazing job of leveraging social media and visualization to personalize the complexities of the water crisis. Their site provides easy, actionable tools to engage the public.

Whether you care about water or not, any individual, organization or company could benefit from learning about charity : water’s branding and marketing strategies.

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What I like about their approach:

• Website is incredibly visually appealing
• Make it easy to share information and get involved
• Break up text with visuals
• Share stories:

We’ll continue to show you what the global need for clean water really looks like. Not through statistics or numbers, but through individual lives. Armed with cameras and GPS devices, we send photographers into the field to document the projects you help fund.

• Use infographics and visuals to communicate impact of projects
• Use social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, to connect with people who are similarly concerned with water
• Show donors the specific impact of their donations through sharing photographs and GPS coordinates that enable donors to search for their wells on Google Earth
• Create viral video campaigns

Some information about from Charity : Water about the link between food and water:

food supply.

Feeding our world takes up to 90% of our freshwater withdrawals but many people in developing nations still don’t have access to enough water for irrigation. When a water project is built in a community, members can often use the new water source to grow small gardens near their homes and secure their own food supply. Self-sufficient households are less affected by external conflict, famine or inadequate government services.

Right now, almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s one in eight of us.

charity: water is a non-profit organization bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations. We use 100% of public donations to directly fund sustainable water solutions in areas of greatest need. Just $20 can give one person clean water for 20 years.