so you want to be like charity:water? 10 brand challenges between you and cool

If you’re in non-profit marketing (as I am) you know about charity:water and there’s a good chance you’re obsessed with charity:water. (If you’re in non-profit marketing and you don’t know about charity:water than, frankly, shame on you. You’re not doing your job properly. Before reading the rest of this post go to their site and study what they do.)

A lot of non-profits want to be like charity:water — they want to figure out how to make lots of money online, appeal to GenX donors who are just starting to develop their giving habits and crack the code of social media giving. Never mind that for a lot of non-profits trying to be like charity:water is like asking the Boston Pops to be like Cee Lo Green, they see something that works and they want to emulate it.

My personal feeling is that charity:water has captured lightening in a bottle through a combination of forces, most of which they created themselves, that will be very hard for other non-profits to replicate. However, there’s still a lot we can learn from the group’s success. Below is an analysis of ten things charity:water is doing right along with some hints on how other non-profits can replicate the strategy.

QUICK NOTE: Scott Harrison responds on my staffing assumptions, which were based on the staff list on his website: We actually don’t have (nor have we ever had) a marketing department, but have three total people in Design / Content that produce all the printed work, plus all the work on charity: water + mycharitywater.org.. Even leaner than you thought!

1. Have a brand evangelist who is an amazing story teller.
   If you haven’t heard Scott Harrison speak, do it today. He’s a great and charismatic speaker who understands how to tell a story. In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Harrison noted that he uses over 200 pictures and videos in his standard speech, turning a talk into a multimedia experience. He is the top evangelist for his brand because he knows the story (it’s his story after all) and because he has the talent for telling it. Finding these ingredients in your CEO might be tough — he or she might not be the founder, or they might not be an inspiring speaker — but every non-profit must have a chief evangelist who can go out and tell their story on the biggest stages.
2. Develop a focused mission that can be stated in 140 characters.
   Just like their for-profit brethren, many non-profits want to grow and expand. After all, the bigger they get, the more people they help, the more habitat they preserve, or the more they
   can influence lawmakers, etc. Growth is good.One of the challenges with growth, however, is it can often bring about an expanded mission.Take The Nature Conservancy (where I work) as an example. A non-profit that used to be about simply preserving and protecting land in the United States is now working in 33 countries around the world on issues like climate change, freshwater supplies and marine health. Certainly we still buy and protect our fair share of land, but our mission has expanded dramatically. That’s a great thing for the environment, but its a marketing challenge. Charity:water doesn’t have that problem. Their message is simple: Provide clean drinking water to the most underprivileged people in the world. They aren’t about protecting rivers, or forests, or microfinance. All areas they could conceivably “grow into.”If you’re a non-profit you should be able to convey your core mission with some specificity — and it doesn’t have to be all that you do — in 140 characters or less. If you can’t do it, keep refining until you’ve discovered your essence. (Full disclosure, I don’t think the Conservancy can do this yet.)
3. Have an emphasis on, and passion for design and marketing.
   Charity:water doesn’t think like a non-profit, they think like a consumer-focused tech start-up. They want to make their product (yes, all non-profits are selling a product) a must-have among the coolest, trendiest people in their target demographic. They then let these cool, trendy people tell their friends who are also cool and trendy (but perhaps less so) about the product and it takes off from there through an ever-widening pyramid of influence. Companies like Twitter and Instagram don’t advertise in magazines, they don’t do TV commercials pleading with us to save puppies. They make something cool and irresistible that a lot of people want to get in on.The backbone of this type of marketing is design that makes the product irresistible. Charity:water has that, almost all other no-profits don’t. Non-profits traditionally market an organization, not a product. and it shows in the design decisions they make. Harrison is passionate about design. He noted in a recent TechCrunch interview that the second person he hired was a designer. His wife is Charity:water’s creative director and 40 percent of his staff is dedicated to marketing functions. (See note above) He has gone all-in on marketing his product in a smart way and he has success to show for it.
4. Never put out crap — ever.
   I don’t get a lot of email from Charity:water, but when I do I always open it and I always read it because it’s always something of a very high-quality that’s going to hold my interest. Because they have a focused mission, a small staff and a high concentration of marketing staff, the organization seems to be able to spend a lot of time on, and put a lot of care into, the pieces they produce. Everything is of the absolute highest quality and standards.Excellence in creation is sorely missing in the non-profit world. In fact, some of us seem to take pride in creating crap. It’s as if having a crappy website, or an amateurish, poorly produced video is a point of pride — because our marketing is crap we’re clearly spending our money on doing the work on the ground. “Just look at our four star Charity Navigator rating as proof!”Sorry, but that’s BS. Your marketing is crap, because it’s crap. By the way, try finding charity:water’s Charity Navigator ranking on their site — you can’t. They don’t wear it like a badge of honor because they know that marketing their product is far more important than some third-party verifier about their organization that their target audience doesn’t know about or understand. Again, they are marketing their product, not their organization. Which brings me to…
5. Market your product, not your organization
   I sometimes think there’s a notion among some in the non-profit world that people are coming to their sites on a daily basis — or at least several times a week — to see what the organization is up to. They believe, wrongly, that supporters are using their site like The New York Times, coming to browse the weekly “News of the Non-Profit.” This leads them to believe that if they don’t post something new several times a week support will evaporate. This turns these non-profits into quasi-news agencies, creating feature stories, interviews and long written content that does a great job of selling the organizational process, but not such a good job of selling the organization’s product — their particular solution to the World’s troubles.This would be like going to the Nike homepage and instead of being served a big splash of the latest Nike shoe or campaign and prominent links into its product lines, you were served a stream of feature stories highlighting how great Nike’s manufacturing process is, who its great partners are, what wonderful shoe designers it has, and the latest musings from the CEO. All fascinating stuff for sure, but nothing really about the shoes you want to buy.Charity:water doesn’t market the organization, it markets the product — clean drinking water for the world’s poor by drilling wells — and how visitors can buy (aka. donate to) that product.
6. Understand that the web is a visual medium.
   There is a place for the written word on the web: It’s below a stunning picture, a well-executed video, or an informative graphic. Over the last five years, the web has moved from being a medium for the written word to one that is highly visual. Increased access to broadband and the proliferation of sites like YouTube and Flickr have given everyone, from the small-time blogger to the largest corporation, the ability to host and serve high-quality visual media and — even more importantly — given users the ability to consume and share this content. In mobile, some of the most successful startups — ie. Instagram — have been in the photo sharing space.Users don’t read on the web. They look at pictures, they skim, read highlighted text and flit around like hummingbirds looking for a big bright flower. Charity:water understands this principle and fills their site with big bright flowers — photos, videos and graphics that tell the story visually and don’t require the user to read a stitch of text.Their current “Why Water” campaign is a perfect example of this principle. Certainly there is text to read if you want more details, but it’s not necessary to read a thing in order to understand the story.If you’re a non-profit struggling to adapt to the visual web, here are some things you can do right now to start to adjust:

• Stop referring to your site visitors as “readers” and start referring to them as “users.” (Note: Interesting comment on this below.)
• Make text subservient to images. Every page should have an image at the top.
• Don’t diss your video content by making it a tiny thumbnail that people have to click on to activate a pop-up box in order to read. (See how painful that sounds?) You’ve spent a lot of time and potentially money making that video, post it loud and proud at the top of the page.
• Don’t write anything over 500 words again, ever. (Yes, I understand the irony of this statement in an essay that’s now cranking past 1500 words.)

1. Have friends in high places.
   Before starting charity:water, Scott Harrison was a nightclub promoter in New York City. From what I can tell, he was the dude who organized big celeb parties, got the bottles of Crystal on the table and charged ludicrous prices (possibly to Ludacris) for hard alcohol. After several trips to Africa photographing cleft palette surgeries, he decided to change his life and start charity:water. He also found God, but he doesn’t preach his conversion.Harrison’s unique history is an asset on its own, but the connections he’s been able to make and the constituencies he can cultivate as a result of this history are unparalleled. Harrison can presumably move from celebrities, to relief organizations, to evangelicals without missing a beat. More recently, because of charity:water’s success and their ability to embrace the tech start-up aesthetic, he’s been cultivating entrepreneurs and VCs in Silicon Valley. The TechCrunch interview, for example, was filmed after a presentation to a room full of Silicon Valley elite.A guy who could potentially set up lunch with Will Smith, Ev Williams and Rick Warren is a powerful asset indeed.
2. Keep it lean.
   From my very outside view, it seems like the biggest challenge facing charity:water right now is managing growth. While they’ve had a ton of early success, they are still small, even in the non-profit world. But they have massive ambitions and they need to be able to fulfill those ambitions while staying lean. As I stated earlier, close to 40 percent of their current staff is dedicated to marketing — but that’s only eight people. According to Harrison, Charity: water has three total staff dedicated to content and design.
   An eight person marketing staff, A three-person content and design staff, with their roles very clearly defined, means no bureaucracy, no review committees and no turf battles. It means eight three people get together in a room, make a decision and drive the product forward. Big non-profits are going to be hard-pressed to replicate this type of thinking, but what they can do is empower their marketing staff to make more independent decisions, turn ideas into products and be OK with failure.This can’t just be something people say, either. It has to be translated into the structure and operations of the organization.You can’t have a sprawling org chart with three review committees and tell staff, “Go make things happen, be creative, you have permission to fail!” Because what they’re really hearing and seeing is, “Go, make things happen, be creative, you have permission to fail, as long as you complete this three-page strategic brief; consult strategic communications, digital marketing, the leadership team and field operations; present to the web network; put your brief through the website review committee, and — of course — consult Legal.”
3. Don’t do the work yourself.
   So, the real secret to charity:water’s success is that they don’t actually drill any wells. They’re not a relief organization, they’re a fundraising operation that gives money to trusted partners on the ground who then use the money to drill and maintain the wells. This allows them to focus on their marketing message rather than dealing with the messy work that actually happens on the ground. They have great on-the-ground partners to do all of that for them.When it comes down to it, charity:water is a marketing and fundraising firm for clean water and 25 organizations that provide it.
4. Let your supporters do the work for you.
   A lot of non-profits pay lip-service to this idea. They talk about finding their champions and advocates and having them carry the torch for the cause. Unfortunately, what this often means is putting up another user-generated content ask that creates more assets for the charity, but little long-term good will from the supporters.Charity:water turns this thinking on its head and actually provides its supporters with beautifully produced assets they can use on blogs and social networking sites. They’ve even created twitter backgrounds to help spread the word.And then there’s charity:water’s personal fundraising space, mychariy:water, which has raised over $8 million from supporter-run fundraising campaigns. The site is not only beautifully designed and an actual pleasure to sign up for, it includes a host of celebrity fundraisers, from Adam Lambert to Twitter’s Biz Stone, to help keep participants motivated. The combination of design and celebrity are a powerful force in this instance, creating true engagement and a space that users want to participate in.

These are ten of the big things I’ve identified that have put charity:water at the top of the non-profit marketing game. They are by no means the biggest charity in the world, nor are they raising the most money in the non-profit space (they’re not even close, actually). But they are on the cutting edge of what it takes to get GenX and GenY donors engaged and opening their wallets.

Most non-profits will not be able to replicate all of these strategies. Many simply don’t have the leadership and vision in place to think like charity: water, others are beset with red tape and legal impediments and still others may simply be too big and unwieldy to make these kids of changes. But every non-profit should take a hard look at charity:water, figure out what makes them tick and replicate what they can. Otherwise, they’ll be left with a donor base that’s dying instead of growing.