US$1m Global Water Awards use partnership marketing in Asia to find a solution today for the wate...

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James, and this is the podcast for anybody that's got value locked up in their organization or even in themselves, and they're just trying to find some cost-effective and time-efficient ways to share that. Now, I've been running a PR firm on 3 continents for over 25 years, so I've helped over 500 clients, but I've also set up my own businesses, so I know what it's like to run a company. Have a lot of great things I'd like to share. But not have a lot of resources to do that. So I talk on this podcast a lot about technology and about tools and about some strategies that smaller businesses can use to compete with larger companies in order to get noticed. And I wanted to share some insights today that are drawn from some work I'm doing for a client in Dubai. Now we've been appointed recently to manage the PR in ASEAN for the UAE Water Aid Foundation. Now, this is a division of the Dubai Energy Water Authority, and they have a biannual award for $1 million, which is awarded across 4 different categories. And what they'd like to do is to attract innovators in water purification and desalination to enter their awards. Now, it's a worthwhile venture that they've got there, which is to attract anybody that might have an innovation that could help deal with water scarcity. And that is a problem that is affecting nearly 5 billion people by 2050, of which some 73% will live in Asia. So it's a pressing problem. And Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and the ruler of Dubai, launched this award back in 2008. So it has a history of government and significant financial backing, but the challenge for this award, like any other, is getting people to enter the awards. And this is the opportunity then for any smaller company, as we've talked before on the Speak PR podcast, about entering to win. Awards are great because you might get kudos, but in this particular case, there is hard cash up for grabs. Now, this podcast isn't specifically about this award, although you can of course enter if you're involved in water technologies in any way, and I'll share the, the link in the show notes. But what I wanted to share was the strategy that we as East West PR have proposed to the client in order to help them to get more entrants into the awards. So bear in mind that an awards is really just like any other business. It actually needs to have customers.

It needs to have people that enter the awards for the awards to have some validity to it. So if you're thinking about awards just being sort of a nice way for an organization to, to showcase itself, it is, but it actually creates a lot of work and a certain degree of anxiety for that organization.

So East West PR has been contracted by the Dubai Energy and Water Authority to help them to gain more entrance into these different awards.

There are actually 4 different, uh, awards that we have coming up, and the entrance is now just open and will end in the middle of April.

So the strategy that we are adopting is 2-tier. And this is why I think that it's worth sharing, because many companies, many entrepreneurs go directly for the end customer.

And actually, it's the partner network, the referral network, that can be a huge amount of value for a company or an organization like Diwa, and indeed could be for you. So in the case of Diwa, what we have proposed And what we're doing now is we are researching all the NGOs, all the non-government organizations, and all the universities in ASEAN, in the ASEAN countries including Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore, and Myanmar.

And we are reaching out to those NGOs to ask them to engage and to support the awards by promoting the awards to their communities.

Now, in some of these ASEAN countries, there are not dedicated media for water purification.

There are some regional publications, largely in English, out of Singapore and out of Australia, to do with water, water conservation, for example, creating potable water.

And there are many government and non-government bodies, of course utilities, that are charged with bringing fresh water to the population. Now, the challenge, of course, though, is to get to the innovators, to the inventors, to the companies that are lying either within the ASEAN countries or maybe serving the ASEAN countries from outside. The media pool there is not necessarily covering water on a day-to-day basis because a bit like electricity, people take it for granted really, and it's quite hard to think of it as news unless of course there's a scarcity or an abundance that is causing something topical to happen like a hurricane. So what we need to do is to come up with a strategy to engage all of those organizations in country that know the people on the ground that are solving the problems to do with water scarcity. And we are using, in fact, the tool Prowly for finding some of the media contacts across the region, and that's proven to be very good. We also can be using a group called Telem that have got a fabulous community and network of journalists in country, all with local languages. And also, of course, uh, Cision has a database as well of Asian media. But we also need the NGOs, and these are not by and large covered unless they have their own publication. Some NGOs and some utilities do publish their own publications that go directly to consumers, but on the whole they don't go to, for example, innovators or universities because there aren't basically enough of them in those countries.

So phase 1 of our marketing is going to be to these NGOs.

Now what we're going to send them is a press release which has been amended. So we have a press release that's gone to the media, which I've just edited and written today, that talks about the value of the awards to the global context of finding solutions to water scarcity. And in this particular case, They have expanded to use renewable energy sources as well as an innovation. So anybody that's using a renewable energy source in solving the water scarcity problem, either by finding, extracting, or purifying water, or distributing water.

And in keeping with our Speak PR methodology, where we talk about storification and personalization, The key part of personalization is identifying the heroes of the narrative, and the hero is not the company, or in this case, Diwa, the event organizer, but rather the winner of the awards. So we are reaching out to this company in Singapore called the Liquinex Group, who had won first place in the Innovation Research and Development Award. By creating a suitcase-like compact water purification system. Now, this had got the ability to provide World Health Organization quality drinking water at a rate of 50 liters per hour from the size of a suitcase, meaning it could benefit about 1,700 people per day, but operating on a 12-volt power—

in other words, the sort of power that you get from a car battery. So solving the problem for some 1,700 people with the size of a suitcase is obviously a great contribution because it's portable and it is low energy.

So what we're doing now is finding the heroes of the awards in the past and showcasing those into these NGOs and saying, do you know other people like this, because often people could read news or information about, for example, an award, or even about a new product or a new service, but they don't necessarily understand how it appeals to them. But also, and certainly in the case of awards, people often believe that they didn't have a chance of winning. So what we're doing is we're showcasing people that have won before and and really making it seem an acceptable and an accessible award, even though it's taking place all the way in Dubai.

The reason I'm sharing this is because if you are looking at, you know, building your own brand and trying to find a funnel to get sales inquiries, the best thing one can do is to find people that have already succeeded along with you, be it your team members your partners or your customers and highlighting those people.

And the second part of the strategy is to find other groups and other organizations that are related, that are in the same field, that are not competitive but have an interest in promoting what you're doing to their community.

In this particular case, we're reaching out to, for example, the water utilities in Malaysia and Philippines and Thailand, and we're reaching out to NGOs in those countries, and we're also reaching out to academics and universities.

So if you've got a product or a service that you're introducing, especially if it is an innovative product, maybe a market-leading product, and you're struggling with getting straight media attention because maybe it's a little bit ahead of its time or it's too niche and therefore doesn't appeal to mainstream media, but there aren't enough media in your niche, partnership marketing is a very effective way of building a brand and building a funnel.

And of course, what we're doing is creating the content through people that have been through the experience before and having them as testimonials and giving a guide to others about what they could do and how they could get engaged and how they could ultimately in this case, be a winner and possibly get part of that $1 million prize money.

So I share that today because I've worked with many clients who are thinking about directly getting media coverage and are ignoring the ecosystem of all the partners that are out there that could help them and could actually be a benefit without them even needing to go to mainstream media.

And in fact may have found that mainstream media are just not interested. Partners often have their own channels, their own social media channels.

Some of the bigger ones like the utilities, the universities, for example, will even have their own internal magazines.

Or in the case of, for example, some of these NGOs, they'll have big conferences as well where they invite outside speakers, and we will be promoting Diwa. To speak at those conferences to talk about their role in helping to find innovative companies, individuals, and associations that are solving the water scarcity problem. Now, in this particular case, we are delighted to be able to work with DIWA because, as we've done with the PAI, which is the group tracking the Mexico Accord on access for women to universal healthcare in Asian countries, We've enjoyed being able to find partners that share a common mission and are receptive to find another party that shares the mission, and that they can collaborate and engage with their communities to create a higher, a higher purpose and a higher result than their own individual organization can attain on their own. So on Speak PR, we cover public relations in the broadest sense, where I like to think of public relations being all the touch points relating to communication between an organization and its internal, its partner, and its external audiences. In this particular episode of Speak PR, I'm talking about the partner relations, and I hope that this maybe resonates for you.

If you look at the number of partners that you do have, is it possible to increase that number, even to double it? To find ways to build messaging around what you're doing without really any incremental cost to your marketing, but by teamwork rather than going it alone. So thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James. If you like this, please do subscribe. We've got a newsletter at eastwestpr.com. I've also launched a Speak PR Mastermind, and we are going to be having the next intake The week commencing the 1st of February, and you can find out the sign-up details at speakpr.co. Thank you so much for listening, and until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable enterprise, and that if you're looking at communicating, think about partners, because that could be the key to unlocking a great deal of value and letting those partners flow your information to their communities.