Transcript

Using Social Media for Non-Profit Fundraising - charity: water's Success

March 03, 2011

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ANNOUNCER: You are listening to an archived version of the PDF Network call featuring special guest, Paull Young, Charity Water’s Director of Digital, on the subject, Using Social Media for the Non-Profit Fundraising: Charity Water’s Successes.

The call was recorded on March 3, 2011, and is presented here in its entirety. For more information on the PDF Network and upcoming calls, please visit PersonalDemocracy.com.

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MICAH SIFRY: Hi everybody, this is Micah Sifry with Personal Democracy Forum, bringing you another of our regular PDF Network conference calls with movers, shakers, thinkers and innovators in the political and technology space.

As always, we appreciate the support of our sponsor AT&T for making these calls possible.

This week I am really thrilled to be hosting this conversation with Paull Young, who is the Director of Digital for Charity Water, and just to say briefly why I’m so excited about this call, we’re going to focus on how you use social media for that age-old problem of raising money.

But the reason why I’m so excited is Charity Water, as Paull will describe in his opening remarks, is really a standout among a new generation of what we might think of as web-native non-profits. Still doing the important and difficult dirty work in this case of raising money to help people in the poorest countries in the world drill wells to get clean water and absolutely vital, vital work that Charity Water does.

But as an organization that was just started a few years ago with definitely a different style of doing things that I think is very much inspired by the open, accessible interactive networking culture of the web, we really have a lot to learn from the whole digital side of what they do.

So, it’s really a pleasure to introduce Paull. Paull Young, Charity Water, why don’t you start out and give us some of the background of how the organization got going and then maybe a little bit about how you guys think about using the media in your work.

PAULL YOUNG: Really happy to, Micah. And thank you everyone for taking the time to join in and listen to me. Apologies for the thick Australian accent, I’ll do my best to talk slowly and annunciate because I know I can be difficult over the phone.

Yeah, so as Micah said, I’d like to give a bit of more background on Charity Water. If you happen to be in front of your laptop, feel free to point your browser to CharityWater.org as well and start checking out the site to learn a bit more about us.

We’re a New York City based non-profit devoted to bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in need in developing countries. It’s an important issue. There’s 1 billion people on the planet that don’t have access to clean and safe drinking water. And that lack of water and basic sanitation causes 80 percent of all diseases, kills more people every single year than all forms of violence, including war.

In particular, kids are really vulnerable to water-borne diseases, lack of sanitation; 450,000 kids who die every day because of this issue, so a very important issue.

There’s a few critically important things about our brand that are really important to understand, to really understand Charity Water and who we are and how we operate. The first is our 100 percent model. Every single cent of public donations that we receive, we push to water projects. We take no administration fees out of it. We’re even so crazy about it that for online donations we pay back credit card fees from our operating budget.

So, we have two separate budgets operating in water. Our operations cover from a range of large donors, but it means that on the public side if you were to donate $20 on our website today, we pay back that 5 percent credit card fee so that every cent from your money went to water projects.

The other thing that we’ve done since our inception five years ago was proving every project we build by marking it on Googlemaps. So, every single water project we’ve built in our history, we’ve marked on Googlemaps so that you can see precisely where the dollars are making an impact.

So, quick background on kind of our story because we’re not like a traditional non-profit. I think we’re actually a lot more like a digital startup and that that fits my professional experience. My background -- I’ve only been with Charity Water since May of last year and prior to that I was working with a social media agency in New York, Conversian.

(Inaudible) started with a birthday party five years ago. I found Scott Harrison had formerly been a night club promoter here in New York City throwing what I’ve heard were amazing parties. He had a change of heart and a change of life, spent two years working on Mercy ships in Liberia, taking photos of surgeons donating their time for facial surgeries and whatnot in countries like Liberia.

When he came back to New York City, he knew that he wanted to start a non-profit with a different focus with a 100 percent model so that every cent went to water projects, and he knew that water was the issue that he wanted to focus on because of some of those items I talked about earlier.

So, five years ago we started with a birthday party. We quickly built a website, the second hire in our history was a designer and developer and web designer after Scott. And then we tried many different things to fundraise and raise awareness of the cause. Content’s always been really critical to who we are. Certainly events have always been a big part of it in traditional development but more and more online’s been the big focus.

So, when we look at our online presence, first of all there’s a (inaudible) slight really the face of Charity Water online, CharityWater.org. If you’ve been to the site, you’ll notice that it doesn’t really look like a traditional non-profit site. Design’s really important to us. The look and feel of our charity whether it’s online, offline, at events, anywhere else, is really important.

So, if you look at CharityWater.org, you’ll notice it’s more like an Apple website or something like that than a traditional non-profit. Here we tell a lot of stories. We frequently use video content. You can see Scott talking about -- a 45-minute talk about our history if you click through.

We also frequently do a number of campaign-focused sites. Every September we do a specific campaign focused on a specific issue. We celebrate our birthday by drilling a well in the field on September 7th.

If you point your browser to CharityWater.org/September, you’ll see last year’s campaign that was a successful campaign to raise $1.7 million to provide clean and safe drinking water to all the (inaudible) people in the Central Africa Republic.

And you’ll also notice on that page a kind of video content. Not only was there video content in the lead up and also some background video content explaining things like sustainability, explaining what it’s like to work in the Central African Republic, a country with very few paved roads and no amenities. There’s also live videos from the field. September 7th we filmed a video in the morning of a well, which we then published via Facebook and online that afternoon.

Another key aspect of our web presence is mycharitywater.org. Mycharitywater.org is our fundraising platform. Basically it’s 15 months old and in that 15 month time period has raised over $7 million from 7,000 individual campaigners.

MICAH SIFRY: (Overlapping comments) mybarackobama.com right, as a similar approach would you say?

PAULL YOUNG: Yeah, correct, correct. It’s similar to a few of them out there. You can set up your own fundraising campaign, 100 percent of the donations will go to water projects in line with their model. And the other thing we do is match every donation there with a specific water project. So, it takes about 18 months to build one, we’re about to start reporting to the first people there.

But you run a campaign on mycharitywater, if you raise $5,000, which is the average cost of a water project, there will be a plaque on it with your name on it and every who donates to the campaign will see where that money went.

This is really the fundraising arm and also the interesting thing about Mycharitywater is that it’s not just fundraising, it’s also a word of mouth movement. So, everyone of those 7,000 campaigners who have run campaigns there they’ve also told all their newest and dearest friends about the cause, they’ve educated themselves, they’ve become passionate about the water issue by virtue of fundraising.

So, the dollars have certainly been extremely successful from that front, but we also like to think about how everyone’s birthday that was given up, whoever’s donated a birthday or another effort to fundraise for us has really become an active supporter in their own community both online and offline.

The other thing too, I’ve got to mention for us and then I’d love to talk more, especially through questions about how we use these tools, but in order to (inaudible) the (inaudible) out for starters. Twitter is a huge area of our presence. We were one of the first charities on Twitter and we were the first non-profit to have over 1 million Twitter followers. We’re connected there from --

MICAH SIFRY: (Overlapping remarks) I wanted to ask, did they put you on the Suggested User’s List or is that all organically earned?

PAULL YOUNG: You know, we were on the Suggested User’s List for a while but it was actually really the Twitter community that got us up to that point. About three years back we were the focus of the first Twestival, which was a global event of Twitter users throwing parties in their neighborhood for one cause and that cause was to support Charity Water --

MICAH SIFRY: Which we actually did a call with Amanda Rose who started Twestival, one of the people who started it. It’s back in our archives actually and it’s really well worth going back to listen to how she did the sort of viral organizing part of it, but it was great that you guys were able to partner. Sorry to interrupt, just --

PAULL YOUNG: No worries, that’s a great addition. I was just about to sing Amanda’s praises. She’s (inaudible) to run Twitter, incredibly smart woman. And certainly worth the (inaudible), she knows her stuff really well, so that was the impetus to Charity Water joining Twitter and then being adopted by the Twitter community and then because of all that noise and all that support from the Twitter community, Twitter also had us on the Suggested User’s List for a while early on.

Also a lot of influential users have supported us as well. People like Jack Dorsey, the found of Twitter is a key supporter of ours both financially and through our work. And even interestingly this week, Justin Bieber joined the 7,000 campaigners on mycharitywater and gave up his 17th birthday. And I just had some stats before I came in to this call that in the last week we’ve had over 10,000 new Twitter followers, the Bieber effect. He’s got 7.5 million followers so that’s not too surprising. Also had our biggest traffic day in history thanks to a few Tweets and a couple of Facebook updates from Mr. Bieber, great support.

The thing that’s interesting here is the support of celebrities is always really powerful and we have had -- a lot of people associate some of the celebrity supporters who charitywater with us. You know, Justin Beiber obviously just did a birthday and was talking a lot about it; Will and Jada Smith are running a campaign right now for a year where they’re asking their fans to fundraise. They want thousands of their fans to give up their birthdays in the next year for clean water, and the three fundraisers who raise the most money they’re going to take with them on a trip to Ethiopia.

So, it’s great to have the support of these big celebs. I mean even Seth Goden from the marketing realm did a birthday last year and raised about $50,000 for his 50th.

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, just say a little bit more about how the give up your birthday thing actually works so people understand.

PAULL YOUNG: Yeah, it’s a good call for background. So, you remember me saying a bit earlier on the call that our founder, Scott Harrison, started us with a birthday party on September 7th, 2006. The next year in September --

MICAH SIFRY: That was his birthday, right?

PAULL YOUNG: His birthday, yes, he threw a birthday party and then said 100 percent of the money that he raised in the field -- he raised about $25,000 on his birthday party -- he’s that kind of guy. I can’t raise that kind of money with my friends. He sent 100 percent to the field, built some wells at refugee camps in Uganda and put GPS coordinates on all of them and then sent people the coordinates of what the (inaudible). I’ve heard the joke that a few people at the party might not have even remembered being there and then a few months later saw the well they built with their contribution during the night.

And then the next year in September, there’s another challenge raising money specifically for Kenya and some hospitals there. And 92 more people actually gave up their birthdays. Scott realized he couldn’t scale his birthday party much bigger, but he could ask other people to give up their birthday as well.

The next year it got bigger again and then that led to the creation of mycharitywater.org where anyone throughout the year can give up a birthday and say, you know, for this year I’m turning 28 years of age and for my 28th birthday I’d like $28. So, Justin Bieber, after he spent his $17 for his 17th, and the last I saw he was about $46,000 raised in 48 hours.

So, it becomes a really powerful concept. But the interesting thing is that its scale. It’s not about the big earners, it’s not about the people like Will and Jada Smith who can raise $100,000. The money really comes from a long tale. When you look at all the $7 million raised on the mycharitywater.org platform and you look at the donation -- under $5,000, the average cost of a project versus over $5,000 -- there’s more money that’s been raised at the smaller levels under $5,000 in total then with the really big campaigns like Adam Lambert from American Idol’s the number 1 campaign of all time and raised $290,000.

So, it’s very interesting how these micro donations and micro actions at scale can make a real impact.

MICAH SIFRY: Is Mycharitywater the platform, did you guys build that yourselves or did you hire some outside firm to actually do it?

PAULL YOUNG: We built that ourselves. We have one developer working on it initially. We also -- one of our great supporters is a guy called Michael Birch who’s the founder of (Bebo) (inaudible) AOL and he supports us financially with our operations, he also is very active in the initial development of Mycharitywater.

Still very much a beta, we’ve got a lot of changes and updates coming to it in the not-too-distant future, but it’s an in-house product. We’ve got a small tech team at the moment, two people. We’re looking to hire software developers. If any of you are really good software developers, I’d love an email from you.

MICAH SIFRY: So, it’s important to talk about these details. So, I’m looking at Charity Waters page, it looks like you have a staff of about a dozen, is that about right?

PAULL YOUNG: Twenty-two at the moment.

MICAH SIFRY: Twenty-two, well all right, not everybody get’s their picture on the About Page then.

PAULL YOUNG: We’re growing pretty quickly.

MICAH SIFRY: And of those 22, it looks like there are three of you who are -- you’ve got an online community manager, you’ve got you, the Director of Digital, you have a designer and you have a software - - you have at least one software developer. I mean, how many people on the staff of Charity Water would you say do the sort of website, IT side, all these pieces that are so integral to how the organization reaches the public?

0:15:17

PAULL YOUNG: Yeah, that’s a really good question and it comes to the point that at heart we are a digital organization. It really starts with our founder, so Scott Harrison, our founder, is very actively involved in all our online efforts and our marketing efforts. Scott is a marketing guy really at heart. He is a story teller, these are some of his greatest strengths. Not necessarily a tech guy, but certainly a marketer and story teller and what not so he’s intrinsically involved in all our communications online and offline. And very active, even to the point where he’s hands-on with our Twitter account a lot of the time. So, you know, when you’ve got the CEO regularly reading and responding on Twitter, you can see how this online stuff is intrinsic to how you operate.

Our digital department is me and one staff person. I’ve got a community manager who works underneath me. Her role is to provide customer support, it’s also to help the fundraiser get the most out of the campaign and proactively support and encourage people to campaign better.

Our customer experience is something we think about a lot here, which I don’t think a lot of non-profits traditionally really focus on all the time. It’s make the donation, here’s the receipt, thank you. We try and think about after that donation how can we delight our user?

Our technology group, we’re looking to hire a couple of roles -- probably at most it’ll probably be three people I think. At the moment, we’ve got our developer working there underneath my direction. I mean our content team is three people, our creative director (inaudible) Harrison, very hands-on online, she’s responsible for the beautiful look and feel of CharityWater.org. She has another designer who focuses more offline on other elements of creative. And then we have a full time content person, Scott (Paley) who writes our blog, CharityWater.org/blog, does video content, does photography. So across the board, that content piece works.

But I mean even Scott -- Scott’s in Ethiopia right now with a bunch of donors and he’ll be creating some video content and taking photos from the field that we’ll use that content when we get back there because content’s just a cool part of how we operate -- to succeed in the social way especially if you’re a cause, you’ve got to be content focused. You’ve got to be able to show people the difference they’re making in the lives around the world to really differentiate.

MICAH SIFRY: Right. And then the actual provision of the support that goes out to all these projects in all these countries, is that done directly by you or you’re giving the money to other contractors who actually do that work?

PAULL YOUNG: Yeah, we work on a partnership basis, so we hand 100 percent of the funds onto partners that are (inaudible) and monitored by us. And then we work with them on monitoring and evaluations, so it’s interesting, the two together -- the fact that we’re online focused in our fundraising and then partnership modeled in our granting -- enables us to be able to scale with the 100 percent model with a very low administrative overhead. So, 20 staff, last year we raised $11 million for Water. This year we’ll probably do -- it’s hard to tell, I think this quarter maybe we’re looking at maybe $3 million we’ll raise, and we tend to do more at the end of the year.

So, we’ve got about four or five in-house that work with our partner organizations. At the moment, we work with 22 partners in 17 different countries. And they range from Water for People that’s one of the world’s biggest water non-profits after us in Rwanda and Malawi and a few other countries, to large non-profits like Concern Worldwide who we work with in Haiti and elsewhere. Right through to the smaller non-profits like for example in Central African Republic we work with the only guy there who’s drilling wells, Jim Hawking in ICDI, you know, we’re really supporting his operation in a country where a lot of non-profits just can’t operate.

One of the interesting things about that is with the partnership model it means that we can try to support the whole water sector, and particularly the best partners. So, the partners that work with us the best that are the most effective, that offer the best reporting, they’re the partners that we’ll support more long-term. It also means that we can take a great idea from one partners and help everyone use it.

So, for example this is a really cool digitally focused element, at Partner Water for People who I mentioned earlier have just launched and Android app called Flow. It’s open source and essentially what it does is it makes it much easier to report on the effectiveness of water projects, so it’s very difficult to monitor thousands of water projects over time, especially in rural areas in a developing nation. This mobile tool is trying to make it easy to get that reporting to enable us to give much better reporting to our donors.

So, instead of saying, we can show you where your well is, we can also show you the water’s still pumping there and if it’s making a difference in that community. Now if that happens to be a really amazing tool, it does happen to work extremely well and it’s still very much a prototype right now. We can help roll it out across 17 different countries.

So, it becomes interesting in that partnership model really enables a lot of growth that otherwise we probably wouldn’t be able to do within our operating budget.

MICAH SIFRY: And just -- I guess this is a question: could the same model also work with a different sector? I don’t know, take vaccines, right? I mean there’s something about the grammar or how Charity Waters’ name works, right? Charity:Water that makes me think is there a five or a 10 year vision here to expand beyond water to say health or some other vital service that you could apply the same kind of model to where you’re basically -- the network messaging and fundraising arm of a larger sector that includes lots of organizations that focus on actual service delivery.

PAULL YOUNG: Yeah, you started something there well on the brand name there, Micah, five points for that one. I think as Scott tells the story, when he initially came back and founded CharityWater, I think he did think that a new model of charity, the 100 percent model, the depth of reporting, that really showing people the impact was something that he wanted to pursue. And water was the most important first element to that.

But perhaps initially he did think that it could expand to other areas, Charity Health, Charity Education. I think we found that the water issue is such a large fundamental issue that it’s going to take a lot of our time to get there. We look at - our 10 year goal, if we can raise $2 billion in 10 years, that will be enough to get 10 percent of the world’s water crisis. You know, to a lot of people that’s a crazy number, however the average birthday fundraising campaign was $1,000. So, $2 billion becomes 2 million birthdays in 10 years. And (overlapping remarks) --

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, well Americans spend what, $250 billion on buying each other tchotkes for their birthdays, so something in that range. Is your base primarily in the US or how would you describe your -- and by the way, are they members? What are the people who work with you? How do you think of them? I use the word “member” very loosely because people aren’t paying dues to you, but they’re obviously working with you.

So, who are they, what do you call them, where are they from?

PAULL YOUNG: Yeah, that’s a good call. So, the first part of the question, certainly a heavy US focused audience now, but being a digital charity, we’ve got global supporters. The donations coming into Justin Bieber’s campaign from all over the place. Finally enough with our search advertising, our PPC, just an interesting aside, search terms for India have been converting really well for us. We have Google grant that we used to buy some pay per click ads and performance over time it’s (inaudible) India that triggered our (inaudible) I think a lot are coming from India, they’re very aware of the water and sanitation issue.

The other part of the question, regarding I guess the fundraiser on Mycharitywater, it’s interesting, we use a few different terms internally. We sometimes do call them members, we sometimes do call them supporters. Fundraisers is a good word to describe what they’re doing because when you’re running a fundraising campaign that has a finite period, we like to tell people we want you to give up one birthday, we just want you to stick with the message.

We know they can’t fundraise all around the year, annoy all their friends and family, but we would love for them to give up one of their birthdays. Hopefully they’re going to have about 85 to 110 of them, we’d like one of them.

But one of the things we look at is how do we build a long-term relationship with these people and this is a big focus of our digital efforts at the moment. So, again I think a lot of non-profits tend to be transactional over relationship focused and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Every non-profit is doing great work and they’re very mission focused and they’re trying to change the world. But it’s important that your customers, your donors, your supporters, your fundraisers have an amazing experience while they help you.

Because it’s an amazing thing when someone gives up -- when someone gives up a birthday and use up their time and their energy and their money to support you, you need to make that a really rewarding initiative on their part.

So, one of the terms that we throw around internally is CharityWater citizen and we’re working at the moment in a big way trying to focus the digital efforts on what does that citizenship process look like? If you are one of our biggest supporter and for now it might only be a few hundred people for starters, how can you really connect with the brand on a deep level, and how can we show the impact you’re making.

You know, if you become a really big supporter, fundraise, donate regularly, buy your Mom a ecard for Mother’s Day and then maybe inspire 10 of your friends to give up a birthday, cumulatively you might have made $20,000 worth of impact. And one person could be changing the lives of -- $20,000 is 1,000 lives changed, $20 gives a person clean water. It becomes quite remarkable if you can get that long term connection from people.

MICAH SIFRY: So, we’re getting close to the halfway mark so I want to just give folks who are listening a head’s up that if you have a question and want to get yourself into the Q&A queue. You just hit *6 on your phone and I’ll see those start to line up on my dashboard here.

But Paull, let me ask you, to what degree are you trying to introduce your -- I love that term, “citizens,” -- but to what degree are you trying to introduce your supporters to each other? I mean I see -- you have a very big Twitter presence but Twitter is I mean it’s a wonderful lattice kind of network, but it’s still one to many for the most part, whereas your Facebook page in theory could be the place where you know, your kind of core activists connect up with each other. To what degree are you -- is it a good thing in your mind to enable that to happen? Is it a distraction? Would it make your work harder?

I mean I love your description that you wanted to make participation a delightful experience. We all know that’s hard to do and people are busy, people can be cranky, you know there are all sorts of squeaky wheel problems that can come up.

So, I’m just wondering, talk a little bit about your philosophy and approach to connecting your supporters to each other, if that’s valuable, if that’s time consuming, what the benefits might be or the thoughts might be?

PAULL YOUNG: Yeah, it’s an interesting question and it’s certainly something we thought about a lot and something that we’re starting to try a little bit, but nothing -- we haven’t done anything too formal at the moment about connecting them with each other online.

Fundamentally, there’s a couple of things I think about first. A couple kind of golden rules for digital that I kind of funnel every decision we make through. First is something that I feel pretty core is that, two golden rules, one is that people are good and they’ll do good if you make it easy for them. People want to do good, they are good, make it easy for them to do good and they’ll get there.

The second is that people are kind of lazy. You know, nothing against them but we’re very busy in this society, so it needs to be a minimal -- the more you can remove hurdles and remove time and effort while allowing them to do good, they’ll get there.

The interesting thing about communities as well where we want to connect with people and have value for them is what’s in it for them? We really need to make sure that is a valuable experience. When we’re creating content they can share and pass things off, everyone of our videos you know, we focus, we work so hard on making sure they’re amazing. We’re working on a video right now that we’re going to roll into an Earth Day that we’re putting months against. It’s going to be the story of the water crisis.

So, when we have those content places that is us talking to people, we always want to make sure that the content that we put out there is amazing because people’s attention is so valuable. So, with that it’s not as simple as you know, just kind of building a community and hoping they come. We could set up a (inaudible) community of our big supporters and get them in there really quickly, but what’s the strategy? What are we trying to do with them? And how is their experience going to be amazing?

We’ve also toyed with looking at for example, Facebook has a new groups aspect and that might be an interesting way for people to connect with each other. But we’ve still got to answer that question of why and what’s the value for them? If people are giving us time, we really want it to be valuable for them so that they’ll keep coming back and they’ll stay with us for years and years.

So, something we’re very interested in.

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, so that’s a little bit different say than (Kiva’s) model, which also allows people to create their own fundraising campaigns around specific projects. But (Kiva) also has specifically in their web presence has a very big forum for (Kiva) members to just interact with each other and generate their own ideas, their own projects and it would be a good idea for us to drill down a bit further with the folks at Kiva about why they think that’s valuable.

So, at this point you’re taking an approach that’s very much people’s time and attention is scarce so let’s be very, very judicious with what we do to tap into that time and attention and simply enabling lateral connections because you can without a clear strategy for why you’re doing it you’re saying is a bad approach.

PAULL YOUNG: Correct, yeah, we’re trying to be judicious but also we are trying things at the same time. A mentor of mine and one I look up to in the digital space, a guy called Mike Moran who’s a former colleague at (inaudible) and did 30 years at IBM.com and he read a great book about digital marketing called Do It Wrong Quickly. And that’s become a bit of a motto I use as well. If I do it wrong quickly, what it boils down to is, is it’s very cheap and easy to launch and trial a lot of things online, and it’s easy to measure. So, you can try things, measure them, see they’re successful and then scale them.

And that’s really the approach that we’ll take with the community. I think we’ll start small by connecting a few of our real core supporters together and having them support some fundraisers and as we start to get some learnings and some results that we can point to and we start seeing that it is a valuable experience, we’ll scale (inaudible). We’re not going to kind of buy the farm and build the community first and then work out what we’ll do with it.

MICAH SIFRY: Got it. Great, so we’re at the halfway point and I can see we’ve got some calls starting to trickle in. And so first person, I’ve just un-muted your phone from Michigan, if you would just introduce yourself and ask your question.

PARTICIPANT 1: My name’s Erin Mazer, I’m actually living in Los Angeles but Paull, you mentioned that a big part of the model is the 100 percent donations that go directly to the program. How does CharityWater cover all of its overhead costs? You mentioned Michael Birch helped fund the program, but where’s all the additional money coming to cover the credit card fees and the other costs?

PAULL YOUNG: Yeah, that’s a great question. The primary means of revenue as a group of high-end donors that we call The Well, and these are high-end owners that make a three year commitment at a minimum of $12,000 per year up to $100,000; a couple more that are higher than that. That includes people like Sean Parker, one of the Facebook co-founders, Jack Dorsey, and some other significant individuals who can give at that level.

So, we really try to help them understand how supporting operations gives great leverage, so at the moment and we’re expecting the leverage to only increase because our costs don’t plan to rise anywhere near our fundraising efforts because we’re doing it all online.

But at the moment $1.00 given for operation equates to about $4.00 for water, that’s a major revenue stream. I do have one angel investor that makes a significant yearly commitment and hopefully a couple more. Also there’s some operations partnerships with corporations, we partner with them, they direct the funding to ops so that public donations will go to water and they’ll support operations. Also some foundations, so a few different revenue streams.

I’m interested in finding more digital revenue streams for operations as well, but the 100 percent model is just so important to us that we never, ever want anyone to accidentally give to ops if they’re trying to give to water or thinks that their money is going to water and we don’t send 100 percent of it to water.

So, so far digitally, ever cent we (inaudible) digitally has been water money. And last year that was 70 percent of our organizational revenue was over $7 million.

MICAH SIFRY: If anyone else has a question, go ahead and *6 your phone. I’m going to ask another question, Paull.

You said you know, your motto was to do things wrong quickly. What would you say was like one or two of the harder mistakes? You know, you guys have tried various things, maybe share one or two lessons learned from a failure if you would.

PAULL YOUNG: Yeah, that’s a good question. One really standout for us last year was so as I was saying earlier, every year in the September campaign we live drill a well from the field so every year on our birthday, September 7th, somewhere around the world we’re doing a specific fundraising campaign for a specific reason and we’ll live drill a well to show our supporters how the money they’ve already raised is already making a difference. So you know, that means in the past we’ve built wells in Haiti on the day, in Ethiopia. This year it was in the Central African Republic.

It can be a risky strategy. It essentially requires our founder and two other creative team members you know being up before dawn somewhere in Africa to date, hooking together a video and then uploading it via satellite late in the day Eastern time back in America because most of our supporters are on that time zone. So, it can be a risky strategy.

This past year it was even more risky because we were in a site where we didn’t know if we were going to hit water. There’s a village called Malalay, which was a couple hours outside the capital of Central African Republic. And it’s a village that our partner, NCAR, ICDI had tried to get water to three times previously and had never been able to hit water. They tried to hand dig a well and got so deep that people were using oxygen, didn’t hit water, they took in a drill and ran out of drill bits before they hit water.

This year we thought we would hit water. We had a new drill that could go deeper, we’d done some work with geologists and what not. And then I remember waking up the morning of it, I was in New York City and I got an email from our founder, just started, things don’t look good here. And then we had this day where it was kind of anything with Africa throughout the day in real time, we could see our audience on Twitter and online getting excited about the live drill to come, we were broadcasting live on YouStream and Facebook and then putting it on the website.

We could feel this excitement building but at this point I started to realize that we weren’t going to have a happy story. Normally it’s a very happy story, water spurting, people singing and dancing, water changes lives so when they get water, it’s amazing. You can see the videos on our site.

This year was a sad story. I was able to see the video just before we launched it and you know that poor (inaudible) very upset on his birthday and certainly a sadder story and our commitment to open (inaudible) transparency and stuff that of course we’re going to air it and push it out there.

Really didn’t know how people would react, so we launched it live and the outpouring of support we had from people was amazing. We had Nick Christoff from The New York Times Tweeting about the openness and transparency. We had non-profit partners talking about how great it was to see a failure being broadcast in a sector that we’re always a big nervous in the non-profit sector to say that we’re not perfect. No one is, but you know, you don’t want to say that because there’s a lot of pressure to be really effective when you’re a non-profit.

And it turned out to be one of the biggest positives because we stuck to our brand and that’s transparency, that’s a commitment to engaging openly with our supporters no matter what the story might be.

We had another one this week that we posted a blog post just yesterday about our $20. So $20 gives one person clean water. We used to say $20 gives one person clean water for 20 years. Now we’re at a point where we’re granted $30 million to the field in 17 different countries and our water budget in Haiti might be $30,000 and somewhere else might be $3,000. And sustainability is also something that’s very different in different countries.

So, we’ve removed the 20 years element but instead of just removing it and never mentioning it again, we’re proactively telling people why we removed it and what that means. And that lesson has been informed by in part by the response from last year’s live drill failure.

MICAH SIFRY: Right. Thank you. We’ve got another question. Looks like a call from New York. Go ahead, introduce yourself and ask your question.

PARTICIPANT 2: Hi, my name’s Lyndsey and I actually used to work with Paull and (inaudible) full disclosure.

I wanted to check in with you on what you guys do as far as that community moderation and keeping people inspired throughout the fundraising process from a more tactical level can definitely be a challenge.

PAULL YOUNG: Yeah, absolutely. We do a lot of things. I think it comes back to content being the most of it. I think there’s a few things, first off is the brand can be inspiring so every communication is out of interest. Key messaging is really important, so I think people understanding that they know they’re making a difference. Just $20 gives one person clean water so it’s very easy to make a difference for a large number of people in a short amount of time. Justin Bieber gave 700, 800 people clean water for his 17th birthday in 48 hours. So, that becomes really core.

Also, we’re very valid about how we communicate with people. So, one of our big tasks for the start of the year is revamping all our email to our fundraisers from MyCharityWater. You know, we don’t want them to have an automated feel. We want them to be personalized based on that person and their activity.

We’re even trying to proactively at the moment think more about how can our staff and volunteers and other supporters, we have more -- you know, help out campaigners have an even better experience. There’s one point last year, a great book on this type of stuff is Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, the Zappos CEO. And he came and visited our office last year during the September campaign as part of his book tour, he put the proceeds to CharityWater and one of the things we did in line with everything he preaches in Delivering Happiness was we called three people who were in the September campaign and had birthdays that day and our whole office and Tony Hsieh’s crew sang them Happy Birthday. And one of the guys we spoke to like his response was just, wow, you could see he was just blown away by that level of content and that personal attention.

And I know that guy’s going to be a lifelong fan of CharityWater and that’s great because he took the plunge of giving up a birthday and fundraising for us. It doesn’t matter if he raised $50,000 or $50, he took that plunge and told that to his friends.

So, it’s a lot of that real personal connection and the focus on how can we delight people? How can we make them say, wow?

MICAH SIFRY: We have a question from Ohio.

PARTICIPANT 3: Actually I live in San Francisco, now. My name’s Matt Monday.

MICAH SIFRY: Everybody’s got these funny (overlapping remarks) their cell phones, yeah. Okay, go ahead.

PARTICIPANT 3: So, first off I really appreciate the digital approach that you’re taking and seeing now that our digital world is moving away from the desktop and into our hands in the form of mobile smart phones, I’m wondering what your mobile strategy is going to be into the future?

MICAH SIFRY: Great question.

PAULL YOUNG: Yeah, good question. It’s a difficult one. I’ve got to admit, and not that I or we have cracked yet.

It’s certainly interesting. One of the things that we’d love to do given that fundraisers are our big focus, so text to donate to date has not been something that really excited me we tend to worry less about the Donate button. For example, the Donate button’s much less important to us on our site than people campaigning and supporting us because you get the additional benefit of the word of mouth and you get a chance to inform them and build a relationship.

A lot of the text to donate stuff right now is very clunky, especially because there’s a couple of core things for us. One is the 100 percent model, so we’d have back fees and the fees can be a little hefty on some of the donate programs; and two, that commitment to time, donations to specific impact and you don’t get great information back about who it is that’s donating to you with a text message.

One of the things we’re very proactive about is making sure that all our content is deliverable over tablets and smart phones. You know, we know people are going to be using the iPad to the US site so proactively most of the videos on our site will be posted in vimeo, which is compliant with HTML 5 and whatnot and not a flash player that people can’t view.

Also I think there’s more integrating mobile on what we’re already doing. The ideal mobile issue for me and hey, if there’s a vendor on the phone and you’ve got a product that you think works, drop me a line. The ideal solution would be a real seamless way that people could donate to people’s campaigns via a cell phone and receive the same experience as if they were on the web whereby 100 percent of the donations go through and eventually will be able to show them exactly where that donation went. But it’s not quite there.

So, yeah, it’s certainly an issue that we’re looking at. No clear answers and we’ll just take the do it wrong quickly approach and try things (inaudible).

MICAH SIFRY: Great, great. Another question. This caller looks like they’re from New York, could be from anywhere. Go ahead.

PARTICIPANT 4: This is Sarah Stewart and I am in New York and I have a lot of experience with on the ground participatory video work in the field, developing countries. I wonder how you’re generating your media and your video reporting for your project and to what extent there’s a participatory element to it?

PAULL YOUNG: Good question. I don’t know how much detail I can answer it in because I’m not the guy who does it. We use a pretty simple camera, it’s a Sony something or other, I don’t even know the exact name of it, from the field. A lot of it is done by hand. Our content producer we send to the field a fair bit to get stories, Scott’s very capable.

As far as personalized video goes, we tend to only do that for high end donors or specific view cases so every September campaigner. We don’t provide videos for every one of our thousands of donors but we do provide them with specific photos of their water project as well as GPS coordinates and if they raise over $5,000, a plaque with their name on it.

We’re always interested in doing more with video though, especially where we can personalize it. I think what we’d like to do is get to a point where every country we work in, we have great content about our work there. Some of it will be video, some of it will be photos, some of it will be text, but it means that if I know that my donation went to Cambodia, I’m going to be able to learn that oh, it didn’t actually went for a well, it went for a filtration system and a bio (inaudible) serving a family.

So, the more content and the more we can educate our people in an informative way, the better. I think video is going to be a big part of that.

But yeah, not much participatory as yet, could happen.

MICAH SIFRY: The person asking, do you want to add any insight on how you would do that?

PARTICIPANT 4: I just -- I’m working on (inaudible) violence issues with refugee communities and maybe these teams could help collaborate with CharityWater. So, maybe there’s some resources out there that we could help you connect with.

I’m very interested in people telling their own stories and growing as leaders in the process and that’s been the heart of that work.

MICAH SIFRY: Well maybe there’s a role for somebody to play to network the videographers so that --

PAULL YOUNG: There’s an interesting point here as well in that sometimes the supporters themselves can be incredibly inspiring. Like in my role, almost every week there’s a campaigner that inspires me.

My favorite is this little 8-year-old girl called Riley Goodfella, raised enough money for three wells by doing things like she ate rice and beans for a month with some of her friends, and had their parents donate the extra money for dinner.

When her Dad was taking photos of her walking down the street, carrying a (inaudible) can in the morning to see what it would be like to carry water. She even sent us a photo where she spent a night drawing 450,00 lines on a piece of paper to try to conceptualize what 450,000 kids die every day from lack of water and sanitation meant.

So, as a non-profit, if a non-profit’s on the phone, think about how amazing your supporters are in the stories that could be there about what they’re doing to support your cause because it can be really inspiring and it inspires people to see how easy it is to make a difference.

MICAH SIFRY: Is her story on the site somewhere where it’s easy for people to find?

PAULL YOUNG: Probably is. I’ll have a quick Google (inaudible).

MICAH SIFRY: Good. And I’m going to our next caller, looks like Craig Hansen?

PARTICIPANT 5: I’m Carrie, but --

MICAH SIFRY: All I have is caller ID here, so I’m terribly sorry if I’m mangling people’s identities.

PARTICIPANT 5: That’s okay. My name’s Carrie Hansen and I work for Newer International so same industry but I just wanted to thank you for what you’re doing with CharityWater. You guys do amazing work and I’ve been a big fan for a long time.

You guys have done an amazing job with marketing and PR and I was just wondering if you could talk about maybe that there was one certain thing that gave you the big break, that gave you the opportunity to move into the household name category?

PAULL YOUNG: Oh, that’s a good question. Let me think about that one for a second. Well I am -- I just Twittered a link to Riley Goodfellow’s story on our blog and as I did so I kind of thought, well, this is part of why it’s kind of easy to do the social media stuff because I knew that would be a great story on the blog that we put together. So, @PaullYoung, I spell Paull with two “Ls.” The link’s there if you want to check out her story in depth.

The one big break’s a really hard question because it feels like in my time here we’ve had like three or four big breaks, you know? This week I didn’t find out Justin Bieber was doing his birthday until the weekend and then we had our two biggest traffic days in the history of the organization.

During the September campaign, Will and Jada Smith jumped onboard. That was the other biggest traffic day in our organization.

So, it’s more of a consistent momentum and I think that’s part of being a start up. In many ways we’re kind of riding a wave and just trying to execute as much as possible. The biggest thing though is what enables us to get places is each and every supporter. You never know what supporter’s going to be able to provide a big break.

Will and Jada Smith, for example go onboard because they’re lawyer who’s quite a well connected figure in Hollywood, had done a birthday campaign before and had an amazing experience. So, there’s that follow on affect that you never know and almost every day you can have that connection.

So, I think it comes down to those really (inaudible) brand principles. If people can love the brand, can connect with the brand and can connect with what the brand stands for, which for us is 100 percent model proving it and for a cause that we believe is extremely worthy, you get that underpinning and then you just need to execute to get results.

MICAH SIFRY: So, I’m going to ask a question now that -- if anybody else has a question just hit *6, we have about 10 minutes left.

Paull, a lot of the people listening and who will listen to this call when we put it up as a podcast, I think are probably saying to themselves, but they’re a new organization. CharityWater didn’t exist five years ago and so it has the benefit of sort of launching into without any of the baggage of the sort of bricks and mortar techniques and overhead that many organizations still have.

So, I wonder -- and I’m sure you’re asked this question a lot, which is how would advise a small or medium size non-profit that does has been operating in a more traditional way, what are the easy and what are the hard changes that you think they need to make in order to work effectively in a networked age?

PAULL YOUNG: Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s actually something I think about a lot because my background [email protected] was all working with large brands. And I was doing the same type of things I’m trying to do here, but I was doing it for example New York Times or Greco Children’s Products or a live telephone company in Australia. And so I can certainly understand how difficult it is with an older (inaudible), just a much larger brand how it can be harder to do some of these things that might look easy.

I think a lot of it starts from the top, which you know you can do by educating people internally. A lot of it starts from the top in terms of a commitment to content. When you have the pure commitment to content, to design, to branding, to producing content that elevates the brand, that’s a huge success metric within social media. To be able to produce content that will inspire people is really powerful and we try to never lose focus on the ability to inspire.

The other connection I think is important is that everything can be measurable, so it might be hard to think about walking into your (inaudible) suite and telling them we should do more stories online. But there’s two things in your favor; one, it’s incredibly cheap. Putting together a web video, a great one, I think -- my marketing budget last year was $2,000 that we raised -- total marketing budget that we raised $11 million on, so it can be incredibly cheap to do these.

MICAH SIFRY: But making videos cost money, too.

PAULL YOUNG: Well part of that’s paying the videographers and then yes, there’s internal staff. You’ve got the skill sets internally, you can just do them.

But if you compare the cost of making a video for the web versus making a TV product or buying traditional advertising space, you can do some really great things, but the thing is as well it can all be measurable so think measurement and then it’s pretty easy to start making a case to get more resources behind these elements.

The other thing is really the fact that across the board we are a digital organization, have an understanding here is very helpful. (Inaudible) knows how to Twitter. That’s a big step. So, for my experience working with big brands this is the case as well, training people and helping them understand the new online space is one of the biggest hurdles because if people don’t understand something, their likely response is to say, no, especially if they’re a lawyer. When they start to understand things, more opportunity gets out there.

I think the other really big opportunity too, is untapping the potential of the people that you’re already connected with. Think about your donor base and don’t think about them as wallets, thing about them as people. And thing about them as people that you can build a rewarding relationship with that involves them doing things for you, but also involves you doing things for them.

For example, at the end of the year, it’s a high -- every non-profit gets a ton of revenue at the end of the (inaudible) when people dump dollars before tax (inaudible). That means that most of the emails you get from causes you’re connected with are asking you for money. Our end of year emails are thank you for their time and to report on the work that we’ve done this year. It’s hopefully going to inspire them to feel good about organization because of the efforts that we’ve done together.

So, it’s really that different angle of coming together. But if you commitment to content, you’re open to working openly with the people that you’re connected with, your supporters, your fans, and you’re ready to do it wrong quickly, almost anyone can have success in this space.

MICAH SIFRY: Great. I’m going to ask one last question and folks, if anybody has another question one last chance to hit *6 on your phone so I can call on you.

What resources do you follow or people you follow for inspiration and as you innovate in space, what do you rely on for good advice or ideas?

PAULL YOUNG: That’s a good question. I’m big on input so I read a ton of stuff. It’s interesting, my background as I said comes out of the for-profit world, not the non-profit world, so I’m still getting more connected in the development sector in the non-profit sector in what works there.

Aside from that, I mean true to form, social media is my biggest learning resource. So, Twitter’s a really useful tool if you follow the right people and you get that casual connection. My favorite tool is my Google Reader which I’ve been stuffing for years with various marketing blogs and thoughts ranging from the likes of Seth (inaudible) as I’ve mentioned before, his CharityWater support to (inaudible) and the resources on Personal Democracy Forum.

But the biggest thing I think is to find the people that provide valuable insight for you and then follow who they’re following. Micah, if I think you’re really, really bright and I can tell that you think five people are bright, they’re probably worth following.

One tool that I’ve become really excited about recently, I don’t know if you use it at all, Micah, but Quora.com. It’s a neat Q&A site. It’s awesome. It’s like Yahoo Answers if all the answers are by smart people writing intelligent lengthy pieces. So, take a look at Quora.

But really online, we pass a lot of books around the office and they tend to be things like you know, Rework by 37 Signals, It’s More That Kind of Approach or something by Clay Shirkey then kind of a traditional development tone. But social media’s a great place for learning.

MICAH SIFRY: Excellent. We do have another person in the queue wanting to ask a question. Go ahead.

PARTICIPANT 6: This is Barbara in Washington, DC. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about Facebook. We haven’t had much luck in general fundraising on Facebook. I don’t know how you all use it.

PAULL YOUNG: Oh, good call, I didn’t really mention Facebook either, my apologies. Facebook for us is probably something that we’ve been focusing more on since I joined the organization. You know, we have 1.3 million Twitter followers but we only have 150,000 fans -- 155,000, bit of a Bieber affect there as well on Facebook.

Facebook for us is not a fundraising venue and this is an interesting thing. We actually don’t ask for money anywhere in social media. We don’t ask for money on Twitter, we don’t ask for money on Facebook. We use these as connection points with the organization.

So, the way I kind of envision CharityWater within Facebook that this is an audience of our closest fans and the couple of right ways that I think about it like that. If you say you like something on Facebook, you’re telling all your friends you like it. It’s kind of like putting a bumper sticker on your car.

It also means you’re opting in to having that cause talked to you every day and that’s really powerful, you know? I think over 50 percent of Facebook users log in every single day and there’s 500 million people there.

So, we’re really focused on (inaudible) and at the same time for us, since Facebook launched their open (inaudible) to you then you lock buttons all over the web, we saw 1000 percent increase in traffic from Facebook. So, our supporters are using Facebook to push our message to their fans.

So, once again it comes down to trying to create amazing content, trying to connect deeply with Facebook and make sure the sites are connected closely with it so that our supporters can pass it on to their audiences in Facebook. And really try to build a community that can connect with us.

So, we try to put on great content, we try and ask questions. I think we’re going to do a lot of different things to try and engage people a bit more. You know, back in September we gave away some t-shirts and stuff and asked some trivia questions. We were using a tab from a company called Buddy Media, it’s a great New York based brand to try and drive some more engagement.

So, there’s a few things there but certainly it’s a valuable strategic initiative to try and do the Facebook audience of the next 12 to 18 months because we think it’s going to be a long-term asset for the organization.

MICAH SIFRY: Paul, last question. Do you blog about these sorts of strategic experiments and what you learn from them?

PAULL YOUNG: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you can follow me on Twitter, but there’s a little bit of a (inaudible) there. For example, yesterday I was celebrating Ireland beating England in a cricket match. I blog personally at PaullYoung.com, P-A-U-L-L, though I’m a somewhat informal blogger because I tend to focus most of my stuff on CharityWater side.

I am planning on trying to put together a blog post specifically about our experience with Justin Bieber this week and share some numbers and what not just because it’s really interesting.

The other are that I’d encourage if anyone wants to engage with me is Quora.com. We have a CharityWater area in there and I’ve already answered a few questions for people about how we do digital and whatnot. If you’ve got a question that you’d like answered, got to Quora.com, find Paull Young and ask your question of me. I’d be most happy to answer it in that venue as soon as I get time.

So, yeah, really happy to connect with people in any of those venues.

MICAH SIFRY: Excellent. Thank you, thanks everybody for listening. We’ve spend another really, really stimulating hour together, really appreciate your time, Paull Young from CharityWater.

Just a reminder that we’ll be getting together again in two weeks this time with Bryan Sivack, the former Chief Technology Officer of the City of Washington DC who’s going to talk with us about the lessons he learned on the inside about how you create a new culture of digital government. This is I think a really fascinating call. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with Bryan and learning from him.

So, looking forward to everybody joining in again in two weeks, March 17th, 1:00P Eastern Time for the next PDF Network call. Thanks again to AT&T, our ongoing sponsor for these calls and thank you Paull for really bringing it and keep up the great work with CharityWater and we’ll see everybody online.

PAULL YOUNG: Thanks Micah!

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