Charity:Water’s accountability and simplicity of purpose has made it a popular charity in New York, Hollywood and increasingly the Valley. Here’s the value proposition: One-out-of-six-people on the planet doesn’t have access to clean drinking water. $5,000 buys an African village a well. Every dime you donate, goes to these wells. You can even watch the wells being tapped for the first time via Web video. The non-profit is turning three in a few weeks, and it’s raised more than $10 million over that time—much of it in $20 increments from a base of some 60,000 donors. It was Obama-fundraising-math before that was invented. As a result some 700,000 people in the world now have access to clean drinking water.
It was all started three years ago when Scott Harrison, reformed bad boy and Charity:Water founder, asked people to come to a huge New York party for his September birthday and donate $20 at the door instead of giving him a gift. He raised $15,000 and built six wells in Uganda. They were cheaper than the wells Charity:Water usually builds because three were shallow wells and three were rehabs of existing wells. Like any great accidental entrepreneur, Harrison knew he was on to something.
In addition to all kinds of creative fund raising, detailed in the video below, the following year, Harrison opened his birthday to everyone via the Web, asking them to donate $32 dollars, since it was his 32 birthday. That year, he raised $59,000 and other September birthday babies brought the total to $150,000, which went to wells in Kenya. Not bad, but they had to HTML hand-code each participant’s site. Pretty laborious work for a small non-profit.
What Michael Birch Did after Selling Bebo and How He Thinks You Should Celebrate Your Birthday
