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Q&A: Scott Harrison, Founder and President of charity: water
Founder and President of charity: water
SCOTT HARRISON
Founder & President, charity: water
Twitter: http://twitter.com/scottharrison
Scott Harrison is the Founder and President of the non-profit organization charity: water. In less than 2 ½ years , with the help of more than 30,000 donors and 250 media mentions, charity: water has raised not only massive awareness, but more than $8.5 million, and funded more than 1,240 water projects in 14 developing nations. Those projects will provide over 640,000 people with clean, safe drinking water.
TS: How does Charity Water use social media?
Scott Harrison: We use social media in as many platforms as possible to raise awareness about the global water crisis and the billion people who live every day without clean water. And also to get low level donations, to engage donors from around the world and to fund solutions in 14 developing nations.
TS: Has social media changed the way people give money to charities?
SH: It’s interesting being such a young charity. So much of our money comes this way that it’s almost become the norm for us – we were never a charity that was used to raising money by checks or from big donors or large corporations. It’s a little hard to say from our experience because we just went straight to these social media tools, to the web.
TS: Can you talk about projects you’ve done that really used social media?
SH: Recently charity water was turning two years old and I was turning 32 and there was this sentiment that we have so much stuff these days. We’re really blessed here in America and the rest of the developed world – we have enough crap. The idea was for me to give up my birthday and ask for low level donations of $32 from all my friends and family. It worked so well that we opened it up to a wider audience, other people born in September, because we wanted to make it unique. We partnered with a company called Birthday Alarm which is a social media tool for reminding people about birthdays, we used Twitter and Facebook Causes. We had about 900 people from around the world come together, give up their birthdays and actively engage and raise just shy of a million dollars in the space of 10 weeks.
TS: Would that have been possible without social media?
SH: I don’t think so, and we had promised donors that they could see their money at work immediately. We’d already shown them the need by filming 33 communities, taking 33 GPS locators and putting all that information online so they could see why they should donate. So we thought on the back end we’d show them the communities actually getting clean water, the first well being drilled via satellite and through these social mediums.
We also used Twitter and the viral nature of Twitter to do something called Twestival. We wanted people in 50 cities around the world to come together offline and raise money and awareness for us. We ended up with people in almost 200 cities, so four times as big as we’d intended at events around the world. Some of them were small with $5 fees to come in, others were bigger with $20 or $40 or $60 tickets. There were auctions and musical downloads and clouds where people could donate and see their names, T-shirt campaigns. All of these interesting efforts quickly grew and added up to over $250,000.
TS: Does social media help overcome donor fatigue?
SH: I really believe that showing people what is happening is important. We can show the faces of the people who have gotten the money and drilling wells is a proof of concept for people who might have been wary donors. And that’s much easier through social media. We let these people speak for themselves by creating a platform of people who are paying attention, through these media.
TS: So it’s an improvement on TV…
SH: I think so. I think the way we can present the need and the issues is much different to the telethons and the late-night 3am television commercials with kids with flies in their faces. Because of our age and where we’re coming from the world is filled with possibility. We’re been able to get 1300 villages clean water in two-and-a-half years and we believe we can get 13,000 and 130,000 until the problem is solved. So just by approaching the problem that way – by going to people directly – there’s a difference in the way people react to the organization.
TS: What’s the future?
SH: Our vision is to solve one per cent of the global problem in the next three to five years and that looks like about $200m and 10 million people with clean drinking water. That’s a lot of money to raise – it normally takes an organisation about 10-12 years to get to about $10m and we’re hoping to do that in our third. The only thing that is scalable about our business is the web and social media. We’re currently rebuilding our site to allow anyone born in any month to contribute. And even to allow people to give up bar-mitzvahs and weddings.
Posted in: Uncategorized | Tagged: donors, gps, organization, platforms, scalable, television, twestival, twitter, water
