5on5: Charity: Water Unshaken
“We have built a real strong following online and twitter has been a big opportunity for us” -Rod Arnold
Our 5on5 Expert Blog Series on Nonprofits using Social Media is on it’s last week. Today’s interview is with Rod Arnold COO at Charity Water.
- Rod Arnold, Charity Waters
What is Charity Waters and what is its mission?
Charity: Water is an organization dedicated to bringing clean and safe drinking water to the nearly one billion people in
developing nations that don’t have it. Charity Water started in 2006, based in New York.
How have you been able to use social media successfully to advance your mission?
Several things come to mind. Obviously, we have built a real strong following online, and Twitter has been a big opportunity for us. I think we have the largest Twitter following of any non-profit with 1.3 million followers. And that has been driven by things like Twestival last year. We were really excited to be a part of Twestival and it created an amazing amount of momentum around our organization. There were 200+ cities that did live events in support of charity: water by using Twitter as a connection tool, which was phenomenal. We’ve also been proactive about driving traffic to our own site. We’ve never really done anything with direct mail. We haven’t spent money on marketing. We get some free media and quite a bit of PR. Really everything we’ve done has been online and through events. If you want to find out about charity: water and want to learn what we do, it happens online. We’ve also built a new site, mycharitywater.org, which is really a social media site around giving. All that together has allowed us to continue to advance our mission and keep growing.
How do you integrate your current or traditional communication e.g. events, conferences, etc. into social media?
- Ethiopia Clean Water
A lot of our events are private events. They are not open to the general public because they are in people’s homes or an opening of a store. If we do a private event for Billabong or another company we are partnering with will typically take a lot of photos and video and share those events with people so they have a chance to feel like they were there. I think the bigger opportunity for us is that we created an event around what’s happening over seas and what’s happening with our work in the fields. So for example, when we do our annual September campaign it’s always a big push for us.
It’s interesting last year we did our live drill from the field via satellite in the middle of Africa back to our website using social media to get the word out. In fact we were in the middle of doing that when Hugh Jackman announced that he was going to give away $100,000 based on whatever his twitter followers recommended. So a lot of people got excited about what we were doing from our live drilling a well and got Hugh involved and he ended up giving Charity Water $50,000. So I think there’s a lot of momentum around live events from a project taking place and people can feel like they are a part of it.
How do you use online video or viral campaigns?
- Ethiopia Drill
I think the key is making a great video. We see the greatest results when we tell really good stories, and using video is a great way to do that. And capturing emotion makes people talk about it and spread the word. When we post a video on our Facebook page, people help spread the word and share it with their friends. Once or twice YouTube has even put our videos on their home page, which gets people very excited. And those are the kinds of things that you just can’t pay for. That just comes from slowly building a community of passionate people who care and want share the story with their friends. We try to take a personal approach and talk directly to our community with real stories.
What particular social media tools do you use?
We don’t think of it as marketing as much as we do as communicating. We think of Twitter and Facebook as vehicles to communicate with our community in a personal way. We don’t ever ask for money directly. What we do is try to be generous and talk about what other people are doing. We talk about what our donors and fundraisers are doing and share their stories. We ask for opinions, we try to answer as many direct messages as possible, and we try to be the head cheerleader and surprise people. We don’t want it to feel like marketing and self-promotion. After all, they are the true heroes. Our job is to facilitate the movement and cheer them on.
I want to thank Rod Arnold for sharing more about Charity Water. This completes our 5on5 Expert Blog Series on Nonprofits using social media. Subscribe to our white papers for more on these series. The Nonprofits using social media white paper will be available to download next week.
