Fundraising activities play crucial role in a modern world, because global community is continuously struggling with various problems that need external assistance. One of the nonprofit fundraising campaigns is Water Is Life. This organization has a mission “to provide clean water, sanitation and hygiene programs” (Waterislife.com). In the developed countries, people take such utility as water as a must and often do not think that other communities value clean water as a precious thing and experience many problems due to insufficient amount of clean water. Water Is Life wants to make a difference and encourages everyone to donate to the improvement of life of children and adults in Africa, who are suffering from diseases because of the absence of access to clean water. Water Is Life strive to save lives of children and to transform the communities and the way they live by providing utilities and offering easier access to such things as clean water in day-to-day life for those who need it (Waterislife.com).
Water Is Life is a charitable organization and its fundraising activities imply raising the awareness about clean water among communities. As an incentive to raising the awareness, WIL provides statistical data on its website, which reveals shocking facts about the life of those who do not have appropriate access to clean water and are suffering from it. Thus, WIL states that around 780 million people do not have an access to clean water, and diarrhea that becomes the consequence of polluted water causes approximately 1.5 million deaths every year. Those numbers already represent an integral need in the global assistance. What is more, children become the most vulnerable group of those who suffer from diarrheal diseases, because they compose about 90% of the total number. In order to draw attention to the problem and to show the deepness of the issue, WIL team members gathered the data about children fatalities from diarrhea. They found out that in the global community, more than 4000 kids under 5 years old die from diarrheal diseases every day, which implies that every 21 seconds the absence of access to clean water causes a child’s death. Those facts are terrifying, and WIL wants everyone to think about the fact that many of us do not even think about toilet water use, while millions of people cannot imagine even this cleanness of water and have it only disease-infected and badly polluted (Waterislife.com)
One of the team members of Water Is Life is Kristine Bender, whom you can easily access on Facebook. Kristine is the president of Water Is Life, and through her dedication and with her working experience and leaderships skills she is building a strong large community of those who care about the access to clean water and those who need this care. Kristine Bender want to create something more than a community, but more a family. She is constantly travelling to the project countries and supervises the activities that are improving the life of people in the region and save the lives.
Access to clean water is an important issue for the global community, because along with other global issues it has a strong impact on social and economic life of the world. United Nations have designed a list of Millennium Development goals that underline the major problems and emphasize the points towards which the community should work. Those goals are:
Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger,
Achieve universal primary education,
Promote gender equality and empower women,
Reduce child mortality,
Improve maternal health,
Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases,
Ensure environmental sustainability,
Global partnership and development (Un.org).
Among those goals, we can see the ones that have strong connection to the access of clean water. As far as the absence of clean water causes severe diseases and high rate of child mortality, Water Is Life is fighting to reduce child mortality, which is one of the United Nations MDG. In fact, United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) states that insufficient access to clean water and adequate sanitation is the world’s largest cause of illness, especially among children. Clean water, in turn, is a scarce resource for many countries and it is a great challenge for the future of the global community. Many people in the modern world do not realize the scope of the problem and do not think that other people have real problems and are struggling for life (Bennet-Smith, 2012).
Water Is Life has several projects and the campaigns official web page encourages individuals from the whole world to donate to different projects, such as projects in Haiti, in India, in Kenya, in Ghana. WIL is composing appealing videos that film people from those regions in their everyday surroundings and that represent how they actually live. WIL is working hard on achieving its goals, and their ads spread fast around the world, making many people to rethink their problems and to donate to those who really need it. For example, in 2012, the Haiti project of WIL campaign featured people from Haiti reading the tweets of people under the hashtag “Firstworldproblems”, one of which stated: “I have when I leave my clothes in the washer so long they start to smell” (Edwards, 2012). When ordinary Haitians who have a limited access to clean water and who, consequently, severely suffer, read those tweets, we can see the irony of the world and we start to realize that everyone who has an opportunity should give a hand a make a change.
Beyond donating money for the access to clean water in general, WIL also has developed several tools, such as filters and drinkable books, for which volunteers can pay so that those who are in need will be able to use it. The donations that individuals make to Water Is Life campaign are tax deductible, and this charity organizations ensures that all the money that you have donated are going to saving lives and providing necessary sanitation for the communities at risk of the lack of clean, potable water. It will be useful to represent the importance of what WIL together with people’s help is doing on the real life example of Nkaitole, who is a 5 year old id living in a village Maasai in Kenya. WIL has composed a film that showed the life of this kid, and the only thing he needed for life with his family was clean water. After the release of the film, Nkaitole got a chance to survive and have an access to clean water in his village, because the movie helped to raise the awareness significantly and led to numerous donations from individuals from all over the world, who wanted to help him (Waterislife.com).
It is also crucial to mention that Water Is Life is one of the best nonprofit website designs of 2015 so far. WIL web page has appealing call for actions and, as we have mentioned in the beginning they are providing shocking facts that represent the severity of the issue. On its website, WIL is trying to make big points that will briefly capture the scope of clean water and sanitation issue and will encourage people from all over the world to help to reduce those problems (Act.everyaction.com).
Therefore, we can see that Water Is Life works hard and strongly relies on individuals’ conscious assistance and contribution. The book “Fundraising for Social Change” underlines that most of fundraising campaigns try to appeal to the philanthropic feelings of individuals and encourage them to donate in order to make a difference. The book reports that approximately seven out of ten adult people in United States donate money, though this number may vary from state to state. In addition, the findings show that a greater number of people is donating money than voting, and that there are millions of volunteers all over the world, who do not pursue any benefits, but want to change the world for the better (Klein, 2011).
Another more important aspect is that individuals mostly give money for charity when they are asked about it. Nonprofit organization often provide incentives for people to donate, such as giving free reusable bags or bumper stickers. People often donate without conscious understanding that they are helping to save lives, but rather for tiny benefits that they can receive. However, there are also many people, who donate out of altruistic motives, because they really care and believe that a particular organization will be able to improve the situation (Klein, 2011). Water Is Life nonprofit fundraising campaign encourages people to donate because they want to make a difference and want to change the world, because every small help and contributions can create a great thing for those who are in need and makes the world one step closer towards the improvement. Therefore, WIL is relying on altruistic feelings of people and is working on raising an awareness in individuals’ minds about the seriousness of clean water problems.
Thus, Water Is Life is a nonprofit charitable organization that is working with the aim to provide the access to clean water to those who are in real need. Water Is Life is underlying the elements of nonprofit fundraising campaign, which is constantly attempting to bring the good to the global society and to eradicate serious global problems that cause severe consequences to different levels of life, such as economic and social. Water is Life is doing a great job and with its influential video campaigns and strong emphasis on social media propagation it manages to draw the attention of more and more people every day to the problem of clean water and sanitation at risk countries. Water Is Life is calling everyone for action and, with help of the global community and donations, WIL team members make a real difference in the world.
References
Bennett-Smith, M. (2012, October 10). First World Problems Read By Third World Kids: Ad Campaign Makes Use Of Ironic Meme (VIDEO). Retrieved April 18, 2015, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/05/first-world-problems-read-by-third-world-kids-ad-campaing_n_1943648.html
Edwards, J. (2012, October 5). Poor Haitians Reading #FirstWorldProblems Tweets Might Be The Best Ad Of The Year. Retrieved April 18, 2015, from http://www.businessinsider.com/ddbs-firstworldproblems-haiti-water-ad-2012-10
Klein, K. (2011). Fundraising for social change (6th ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Imprint.
The 100 Best Nonprofit Website Designs of 2015 | Mobile Wonders. (n.d.). Retrieved April 18, 2015, from http://act.everyaction.com/100-best-nonprofit-website-designs-of-2015/mobil
True Story. (n.d.). Retrieved April 18, 2015, from http://waterislife.com/you-wil/true-story
United Nations Millennium Development Goals. (n.d.). Retrieved April 18, 2015, from http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/mdgmomentum.shtml
Water Crisis. (n.d.). Retrieved April 18, 2015, from http://waterislife.com/about/the-water-crisis
