Charity Water

Charity Water has experienced a surmounting amount of success when it comes to utilizing social media to generate donations and spreading awareness of their mission. Although this organization is only 7 years old, their success cannot be overlooked as one of the leading non-profit organizations to produce significant results through digital media. What is even more amazing is according to an article on Duitee.com, Charity Water claims to spend “zero” dollars on marketing and branding their charity. So how does one become so successful with such a little monetary investment in promoting?
This organization has gathered the smarts and strategies to make the most of the free promotion tools we all have access to every single day: social media. The one thing that I believe that makes Charity Water stand out, as stated in the Google Hangout, is that they seek to inspire people into believing in their mission, and “activate individuals to do something”. Compared to other organizations who may promote only in hopes of receiving money for their cause, Charity Water looks to offer their audience something in return for their participation. They look to build unique relationships with their audience and keep them inspired.
As early adopters of the social media, Charity Water has grown significantly in their innovations and their secrets lie in turning with the tide. When they see a new outlet or strategy within social media to engage their audience they take advantage of it.. Of Social Media’s latest strategy’s, we are introduced to the idea of “Visual Story-telling”. For their India Campaign last year, Charity Water employed a team of 8 people to stay over a period of ten days collecting stories of people and gathering information. They then spent a month editing the content and the final results were amazing. Instead of merely posting an image of someone whose life they affected, they take a compelling quote from a piece of that person’s story and add it as the caption to their picture. This strategy gives us a better insight to exactly who these people are and what they are going through. To me it evoked the same response as if you were to be watching a video of these people saying the quote themselves. Whereas on another organization might post a picture with a caption such as “Today we helped 3 kids in Mali access clean water”, Charity Water takes humanistic pieces of the people’s lives and narrate a brief biography in a way to show us who the people are as humans.
I believe this is the strongest aspect of Charity Water’s social media usage. They have focused content that is appealing and their stories are character driven. According to MajorMultiMedia.com, approximately 70% of the organizations donations are digital and come from offline. They have also raised over $140 million dollars in donations total, a huge portion of that stemming from social media.

www.dutiee.com/charitywater-explains-how-they-use-social-media-to-raise-millions-online

www.bethkanter.org/charitywater-digital/