How a Maverick Tapped Into a Wellspring of Giving

Jeremy Snell, Courtesy of charity: water

In his new memoir, Scott Harrison, founder of Charity: Water, pauses the action to sum up how the satirical publication The Onion might report his story: “Former nightclub promoter, thousands of dollars in debt, starts charity from friend’s cozy drug den.”

The book, Thirst, recounts the unlikely rise of Harrison, who left first a fundamentalist Christian upbringing in New Jersey and then the relentless whirl of New York nightlife to return to his faith, volunteer with the medical charity Mercy Ships, and then in 2006 found the fast-rising and innovative nonprofit Charity: Water.

To date, Charity: Water has raised $320 million and supported more than 28,000 clean-water projects in 26 countries. The organization, the book recounts, was cobbled together with a strong dose of improvisation; its innovations have proved influential among nonprofits.

Although many charities still struggle with digital communications, Charity: Water has always boasted a strong online presence, based on an indelible brand. (Its signature yellow jerry can appears on the cover of Thirst; proceeds from the book go to the organization.) It pioneered the idea of getting people to solicit donations on social media for their birthdays, and now that idea is raising hundreds of millions for lots of charities. And, thanks to a program called the Well, where donors underwrite the nonprofit’s administrative costs, Charity: Water promises other supporters that 100 percent of their gifts will go to the charity’s mission of delivering clean water to the developing world.

What’s more, a monthly giving club called the Spring continues to prime the donation pump for Charity: Water. In 2017, the group raised $50.3 million in total, with $35 million earmarked for water projects.

Harrison spoke to the Chronicle about his journey and what he sees ahead.

An emphasis on online communications and online fundraising was baked in from the beginning at Charity: Water. Why was that important?

I had the advantage of timing and age. I was 30 when I started Charity: Water. I didn’t have any of the trappings of working in an established charity. So I didn’t really know how they worked or how they raised money.

Direct mail to me was something that was so foreign. I would never respond personally to someone who bought my physical mailing address, sent me a bunch of paper, and asked me to write a check and put it in self-addressed stamped envelope. Nor would any of my friends. So we just kind of ruled out any form of snail-mail physical communication from the get-go.

We really stumbled into the birthday idea, this idea of asking people to donate their birthdays and instead of asking for gifts or throwing themselves a birthday party, they would ask for their age in dollars. So a 7-year-old would ask for $7. We were the first to build a platform around it. Now 10 years later, it’s become very popular on Facebook, but that’s really just in the last year.

And interestingly, now the birthday idea has really scaled across other charities. I remember when Heifer International asked me to donate my birthday, I knew that the game was up!

We, then, on our 10th anniversary began to pivot to subscription, to a giving program called the Spring. And that’s really where we see all our growth. Charity: Water grew 39 percent last year. This year we’re up 70 percent in the first half of the year. And we’re seeing our growth come out from this online community that now has members in 100 different countries, all giving an average of about 30 dollars a month.

That’s fantastic.

I’ve heard that flat is the new up, in revenue. But we haven’t been seeing that. We’ve been seeing a lot of revenue and a lot of growth. The last time we did a study, 55 percent of our donors are millennials. And we know that millennials don’t give through the mail.

There’s a line in the book: “Honestly I think many charities wish they never had to deal with donors.” What’s the evidence you see of that?

Many charities — I mean, I’m not going to name any names — they look at donors as not sophisticated, not having the ability to understand the complexity of programs. They see donors as wanting certain things for their money, one being transparency, one being stories of impact. Many charities treat those donors as nuisances: If we could just tap the money and go about our important, sustainable work, then that would be better than having to cater to the whims of these donors.

And I think from day one, the real vision of the organization is to reimagine the charitable experience. The mission is to provide clean drinking water. But I firmly believe if our mission was Charity: Shelter or Charity: Education or Charity: Health Care, we still would have raised a third of a billion dollars. Maybe some of those issues would actually be easier than water.

We have tried to create a different kind of giving experience for people. We love our donors. We celebrate our donors. We’re always asking them how we can serve them better. Because I believe that by being hypertransparent, by connecting donors to the impact of their gift, when we can show the 8-year-old where her $6 specifically went, showing her photos, and the GPS coordinates and a satellite image of a well that her $6 contributed to, we believe that we’re igniting a virtuous cycle of more giving.

When we started out, I came across this poll that said 42 percent of Americans distrust charities. So that was the audience we were after: Not people who were already giving, but people who didn’t trust the system.

We were after the cynics, we were after the skeptics, and we wanted to say, Hey look, we’ve created a new business model. A hundred percent of your money will go directly to the projects. We’ll use technology to connect you to the impact of your giving. We’ll build a brand that doesn’t feel like you’re giving back out of a sense of guilt: As if, you’ve taken so much that you should finally throw some scraps to the poor. We’ll try and make this a fun and redemptive and enjoyable and exciting experience.

You created the Well specifically for supporting administrative costs. A lot of charities struggle to get that kind of support. How do you get donors to cover that stuff?

The donors that are in that program — they are 131 families from around the world. Many of them are entrepreneurs. Many of them have started their businesses, and they understand how challenging it is to build a business. They understand the need to pay people well, how difficult it is to recruit and retain top talent.

We speak the language of investors. Donors who give on that side, they have to trust the organization and to trust the leadership. Many of them will go through 10 years of audit reports and really get familiar with how we’re spending our money. Others just say, Look, I don’t want my name on a well. I don’t want to go build a rainwater-harvesting system. I want to help you pay for the things no one else wants to pay for.

And their sacrificial giving has now made it possible for over a million people to have a pure giving experience. When a donor who is giving to the overhead side hears the story of someone giving to charity for the very first time in their life and citing our 100 percent model as the only reason they gave, there’s a little bit of a win there, and a proof of concept.

I don’t believe the 100 percent model is right for most organizations. Most social entrepreneurs that I mentor, I try to talk [them] out of [it]. Donors want transparency. Donors are open to a lot of different value propositions, but they want to know where their money is going and what it will accomplish.

Coming into Charity: Water as a novice freed you to rethink some of the traditions, like direct mail. What other nonprofit sacred cows are due for reconsideration?

Branding and marketing have improved over the years, but often there is a poverty mentality, where a charity says, If our office looks too nice, if our website looks too nice, people will think we’re spending money on the wrong things. We actually think it’s the opposite.

I think if you value excellence, then donors respond to excellence in a really positive way. I’m not saying you should waste money. There have been plenty of charity scandals, where people have decorated their offices lavishly. I’m just saying, putting excellence through your design, your branding, your online presence, your workspace is so important.

Many charities think only of excellence when it comes to their mission and not in instilling excellence all the way through their culture.

Direct mail, I know it’s still working, but I just think it’s going away. I was with a CEO last year who told me, Oh, my direct mail business is only down 1 percent. And I remember thinking, Wow, this guy’s in denial. That number is going to zero at some point. It is going to zero.

Do you think monthly gifts — the Netflix model, what you’ve created with the Spring — will be part of the future for a lot of charities?

I do, and we’re seeing a lot of people move in that direction. It allows for greater predictability when it comes to planning your revenue. We’ve got programs across 26 different countries and over 600 people that are employed working on those programs. It’s so important that we know that we have reliability in our funding.

The idea of subscription is that you can grow it in a reliable way. Now, you’ve got to steward those gifts, to make sure you’re providing your community with value. So when they lose their credit card, they’re compelled to come and sign back up. To say, Hey I need to be a part of this, it’s important to my identity.

Charity: Water was originally supposed to be the first of several projects aimed at solving global issues, like Charity: Health, Charity: Education, and so forth. Is that still possible?

There are no plans to move from water. We’ve been able to help 8.5 million out of 663 million people. That’s about 1/78th of the problem solved.

I’ve been able to mentor some other social entrepreneurs who’ve taken the Charity: Water model into those other spaces. But we plan to stay directly focused on access to clean and safe drinking water until this problem is solved. In some ways, we feel like we’re just getting good at this.

Toward the end of the book you write about how in 2015, you briefly thought about stepping down. Have you and your organization mapped out a succession plan?

It’s definitely something that we have a dialogue about at a board level and an executive level. I have got an amazing executive team. We’re in a really great place where I’m able to really add value to the organization through fundraising, through storytelling, through innovation and kind of the big ideas.

I’m 42 years old, and I probably have a pretty good run still ahead of me. And if at some point I did decide to step down, we’ve got great leaders in this organization who, as we grow and develop more experience, I think might even throw their hat in the ring.

The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.