charity:water’s scott harrison knows the value of marketing for non-profits

Scott Harrison of charity:water does what very few non-profit heads do: He elevates marketing within his organization, making it just as important as the work they do on the ground. This is radical thinking for a non-profit and one that might make traditional donors nervous. After all, some might think a crappy website means money is being spent more efficiently in the field. When in reality, having a crappy website usually just means you have a crappy website and likely significant organizational inefficiencies.

Harrison highlights his premium on marketing in the above interview saying, “The first person we hired helped me work on setting up water projects and the second person we hired was a designer.”

How important is marketing and creative to Harrison? Well, his creative director is his wife and nearly 40 percent of his lean 22-person staff is dedicated to marketing.

I give Harrison a lot of credit for not thinking like a non-profit CEO. He isn’t worrying about what donors might (or might not) say about overhead and marketing expenses. Instead, he’s marketing his product in the best way he knows how. If more non-profits would learn to throw these shackles off, stop thinking about what worked in the past and acted like a modern business they’d be a lot better off.

Most non-profit marketing departments are idea rich and resource poor. With charity:water that clearly isn’t the case.

If you’re not familiar with charity:water, they are a small, US charity that collects money to build wells for clean drinking water in Africa, Haiti and other desperately poor areas. They are also the hottest thing going in the non-profit space right now. Everyone is looking at charity:water as the leader in non-profit when it comes to marketing and brand building and no one has been able to replicate they’re secret sauce. There are lots of reasons why replicating charity:water is so difficult, but that’s another post for another day.