Charity makes waves with Web word of mouth

By Tracie McMillan

updated 6:04 a.m. ET Jan. 28, 2008

In 1989, South African advertising executive Trevor Field wasn’t looking to start a charity. He just couldn’t help himself.

One day, during a visit to an agricultural fair outside of Johannesburg, he stumbled across a curious invention — an irrigation system powered by a merry-go-round. As children ran to spin it, they powered a pump that pulled gallon after gallon of water from the ground.

It didn’t take long for Field to realize that he was on to something big. He already knew that about as many people die from bad water in South Africa as from HIV or malaria, and most who do are under the age of five. So why not attach the same kinds of pumps to freshwater storage tanks and bring clean drinking water to sub-Saharan Africa? Paying for it would be a snap, he figured; convince a company to slap an ad on the side of the tank.

Today, some 18 years later, Field’s accidental advocacy campaign, called PlayPumps, has swelled into an international aid organization with offices on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s built more than 900 such water systems at a cost of $14,000 each, serving roughly 2 million people in four countries. It’s also been able to woo AOL founder Steve Case as a donor and recently got a $10 million grant from the U.S. government, with the blessing of first lady Laura Bush. “I keep pinching myself,” Field says.

But Field is just getting started. His new goal is to get 4,000 more pumps in the ground by 2010 at a cost of $60 million. Can he do it? To be sure, severe water shortages will continue to keep his “play pumps” in demand and donors interested.

But to get from 900 pumps to 4,000 more, Field knows, he’s got to exploit another precious resource—the Web’s new social networking communities — not only to battle global thirst, but to help unearth a new stream of donor dollars. “In Africa, the water pump is a natural gathering point for the women of the village,” Field says. In much that same spirit, PlayPumps wants to use the Cause Web to gather new donors.

A rush to new fundraising strategies
PlayPumps is not alone. Other charities, from the American Cancer Society to new issues advocacy groups, such as the Save Darfur Coalition, are also feeling hard-pressed to go beyond using the Net the old-fashioned way — to simply distribute information. Now, as the Web morphs from an information hub into a social one, the most strategic charities are targeting social networks — and their potential to raise sizeable sums  from a multitude of small, individual donations — to beat the competition for new dollars on today’s charity-flooded landscape.

Just ask GlobalKids, a New York City-based charity to help inner-city youth. Using cutting-edge technologies to turn its ordinary youth development programs into video games and experiential forays into the virtual world of Second Life, it has been able to more effectively tout itself to new donors for a twofold increase in donations. In addition, says development director Jonah Kokodyniak, having cutting-edge tech programs helps GlobalKids compete for new funding: “There’s a lot of foundation money being invested in nonprofits that use technology, so the fact we have leading tech programs helps us a lot,” he says.

But not everyone is getting it right. Indeed, for many groups, just making sense of the basic Internet is still a challenge — and some nonprofits still don’t use it to its full fundraising potential.

“With technology, nonprofits tend to be pretty late adopters,” says Benjamin Stokes, a Web expert with the MacArthur Foundation, a leading grant maker to nonprofits seeking to get to the next level of techno-literacy. Even cheap and effective options, like Google’s Ad Sense — an inexpensive way for nonprofits to put relevant ads on their Web sites to earn extra income — have yet to catch on among many nonprofits, Stokes says.

Web 2.0, with its odd virtual worlds, burgeoning blogs, and oh-so-hip social networking sites, can be even more baffling to build.

“Before, people said, ‘I’ll put up a Web site and people will come,’ but then found out it wasn’t that simple,” Stokes says. “This next phase of Net development isn’t simple, either.” For example, says Stokes, “When people design things in the physical world, they know the ecology. I would never, therefore, build my office out in the middle of a corn field. People don’t have the same sense of the ecology when they’re designing within virtual communities.” The future is here, experts say, and nonprofit strategists will need to start using these new tools just to keep up.

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