Scott Harrison: Awareness and Experience Fundraising

Fundraising day number 1. This is a little sad, but the only thing I knew how to do was to throw a party in a club. I'm like, let me see if I can redeem this lost decade. I threw my 31st birthday party in a nightclub. I got 700 people to come out. I gave them open bar for an hour, and I charged them $20 at the door. But the main difference was I did not pocket the $15,000 this time and we took 100% of that money to a refugee camp in northern Uganda, a place called Bobi where 31,638 people were living. And there was one water project. So we wish we could have done more but we did 6. We rehabbed a bunch of wells and then we sent those photos and the GPS back to the 700 people that had attended the party. And they were like blown away. Some of them didn't even remember attending the party. They were like, wow, I guess I was generous. But in all seriousness, they never expected to hear from the charity again. I mean, they gave $20. And here they're getting photos and GPS and proof and a video of what this night, what this gathering of people did for people across the world. And we said this is very powerful. Let's continue to close the loop. Let's show people their impact. And let's keep doing this until we solve the problem. OK, try to come up with creative ways to get people to think differently about water. So I wanted to shoot rich people in New York City in the same situations as the people we were serving around the world. So these kids in the bottom right, they go to a $35,000 a year private school. Imagine if they had to carry 40 pounds of water on the Upper East Side. I mean, their parents would never allow this. Imagine if your mom or your grandma had to drink water like that that had bone and hair in it, like the woman on the left told me. Send some of my banker friends up to Central Park lunch break, say go get water. We would never allow this. We started to try to partner creatively with brands. This was the biggest coup ever. We went to Saks Fifth Avenue. And we said, you know, you guys have figured out how to sell $5,000 handbags to women. That's amazing. We have $5,000 water projects. We should totally partner. We're both in New York. So I was not booted from the CEO's office and they liked this idea and they wound up shooting their catalogs in water for 2 seasons. They gave us the windows of the Fifth Avenue store after Giorgio Armani took his windows down and we put up pictures, we built a well in the window. And they started telling their employees, their customers, their vendors the story. And they raised over $700,000 to help 140 communities. Soon after that, the Macallan came to us and they said, we make whiskey, lot of water in the making of whiskey and there is a lot of water in Scotland. That's what we said. We were like, and? So their marketing team said, well, we have a 64-year-old whiskey. It's the finest we've ever made. What if we took it on a world tour and if you wanted to taste our whiskey, you have to drop $5,000? And we were like, who would pay $5,000 to taste your whiskey? They wrote us a $605,000 check from the single bottle. It broke the Guinness World Record 3 times over. We love social media. We were the first charity to reach 1 million followers on Twitter. We were not only the first charity to use Instagram but one of the first 3 brands to use Instagram. We were early adopters. We were hiring young people. And this is where we lived. It was a great way to get our story out. People need water. Here are the solutions. We'll prove them to you. Great way to engage some of our supporters creatively around the world. We opened up the NASDAQ a couple of times. By the way, you could do this just by asking if you're a charity. Sometimes somebody goes bust like the night before, so we're now the go-to. They call us up and say, can you be here at 9:00 in the morning? Same thing with the New York Stock Exchange. Exposure for free to 100 million eyeballs. Tried to reinvent the gala, and instead of those boring, stuffy, sit-down, rubber chicken dinners, We invite a couple thousand people to New York and we create experiences for them like the Water Walk. So they walk on a fashion catwalk littered with death and disease and dying and statistics. And if they carry these heavy jerry cans, it unlocks donations from companies. So last year, just by carrying the cans, you earned $500 for every person that walked.