Name: Where Charity: Water Gets Its Biggest Donations
Uploaded: 2016-09-22
Duration: 3 min 56 s
Description: It’s not just celebrities

Part of the, partly because of these donors that you have, when I think of Charity Water, I sometimes think of these very wealthy, connected, glamorous celebrities and tech entrepreneurs. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Well there are 115 of them now, that make up a small giving program called " The Well ". They fund all of the overhead. 78 staff in New York. All the flights. Everything that is not a water project. But then that's made it possible, those 150 names, for a million people, that you haven't heard of, to give in a pure way. Right. And the stories out there are incredible. I mean And there nine year olds that are giving up their birthdays. Mm- hm. Foregoing birthday presents, foregoing parties. And running around knocking on doors asking for nine dollar donations. We have, there's a little girl in Seattle that ran 12 consecutive lemonade stand for charity water. And she convinced a local band to perform on the sidewalk. To attract lemonade buyers. She sold $ 5500 of lemonade, so that's really the Charity Water community made possible by these generous type donors that are funding the unsexy costs, funding the overhead. And we treat them like investors and we take them to the field and They love giving on that side. Do you think that there's been an evolution in how this current crop of Silicon Valley investors and philanthropists is different from those before them? How are they different from The ones in, maybe, a previous generation, would you say? I don't think they want their names on buildings. Yeah. Those 115 families, they're not asking for anything, except many of them want to involve their kids. Mm- hm. Many of them, they're really thinking about legacy and thinking about getting their kids involved in this kind of generosity. But it's not the, hey, I wanna name a building with a $ 10 million gift. That's not what we're seeing, that's not who we're attracting. We finally care about transparency. They wanna know when things aren't going well. And they want to see the impact, They wanna know, hey, what is my money actually doing? And they're happy to pay a software engineer who's writing code. They're happy to pay for that salary. But they wanna know where it goes. And I think that's the big change because a lot people think charities are black holes. They operate with great opacity. And every once in awhile some scandal comes out and Someone like you will chase down a bad [ UNKNOWN ] CEO and he slams the door on your face and half of America throws up their hands and says, that's why I don't give. Yeah, one of the things you set out to do was to not just create a charity, but really create a brand, so how did you go about doing that? Because it really is, it does seem like it's a Well, I married the creative director. How would that help? [ LAUGH ] So, I've been married to the brand for the last nine and a half years. You look, I think when I started there was no Nike, there was Apple, there was no incredible, imaginative, inspiring Charity that people my age wanted to be involved with. And some of these huge charities that had deep legacies, I don't even know what they did anymore. I mean, I walked through the office recently when the March of Dimes mailed me a dime. And I asked our staff, does anyone know what this organization actually does? And nobody could tell me. Mm- hm. The closest I got was something with kids. So, I thought that if you were gonna make a huge impact on a problem as big as the water crisis, you're gonna get people to care. About people suffering thousands of miles away with the problem they've never had. People here don't walk eight hours to get water from pods, they don't give their kids water to make them die of diarrhea so we would need an inspiring, imaginative Epic brand. They would be based on hope and inspiration and not the shame and guilt. I'd seen so many organizations, you know, the kids with flies the slow motion that, they make you feel so dirty that you pull out your wallet. And it works but you don't want to wear that t- shirt, you don't want to associate with that charity. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]