1.2 Case Study—Charity:
Water When Scott Harrison created the nonprofit Charity: Water in 2006, he wanted not only to bring clean drinking water to millions around the world, but also to redefine philanthropy by converting thousands of formerly skeptical “non-givers” to join and fund his cause. Born in Philadelphia, Scott was the only child of an accountant and a journalist who were devoutly religious.
The Harrison family relocated to New Jersey for his father’s job—a move that proved extremely detrimental to Scott’s mother’s health. Their new home had a carbon monoxide leak that permanently damaged her immune system. While Scott was growing up, she essentially lived in isolation, spending her time in a “clean room”—a tiled bathroom, scrubbed down with a special soap, and a cot washed in baking soda. She wore a charcoal mask on her face to protect her from ingesting toxins from the air.
At a young age, Scott became a caregiver for her, which helped him to develop his strong sense of compassion. As a teen, however, Scott rebelled against his parents’ religious devotion and the restrictive life his family led as a result of his mother’s illness. He fell in with a bad crowd in high school, barely graduating. He joined a rock band and, after graduation, left for New York to pursue music and attend New York University. It was there that Scott was introduced to the world of nightclub promoters. For the next 10 years, he worked as a promoter for 40 different clubs. It was his job to attract the “beautiful people”—the wealthy and powerful who would spend “$1,000 on a bottle of champagne or $500 on a bottle of vodka,” easily paying $10,000 for a night of partying and the opportunity to be seen in the hippest, most trendy places. In return, Scott received a percentage of the club’s sales, making $3,000 to $5,000 on a good night (Clifford, 2018). Scott became an influencer; one call from him and the beautiful people would follow him to the next “hot” club.
A few phone calls made by Scott to the right people could put a nightclub on the map. Scott even received endorsements, being paid well just to be seen drinking a particular brand of alcohol. By outside appearances, Scott had an enviable life, socializing with rich and powerful people, dating models, driving a luxury car, and living in a lavish apartment. But it was taking its toll: He became disillusioned with his hedonistic lifestyle, believing he was “polluting” himself with drugs, alcohol, and pornography, and feeling disconnected from the spirituality and morality of his childhood (Fields, 2018).
Scott began seeking the “exact opposite” (Fields, 2018) of what he was doing, applying to work with humanitarian efforts. With only his experience as a club promoter to offer, he received rejection after rejection. Finally, Mercy Ships, a nonprofit hospital ship that delivers medical care to places where such care is not available, responded. The organization was looking for a photojournalist to document its efforts in Liberia. For this opportunity, Scott would pay Mercy Ships $500 per month. For him, this was the perfect offer: the opposite of his current life, working in an impoverished country ravaged by civil war with the requirement of paying for the pleasure of serving.
Scott’s first Mercy Ships tour was on a 525-foot hospital ship, equipped with 42 beds, a few operating rooms, and an MRI machine. The ship traveled to Liberia, which had no operating hospitals and only two surgeons in the entire country. The need there was tremendous and the suffering horrific. Scott documented the work on the ship and every patient both before and after medical intervention. The images and stories he documented were to be used to raise awareness and inspire Mercy Ships donors to continue contributing to the organization’s work. Scott realized that all the wealthy and powerful people who had followed him when he was a club promoter could prove helpful in assisting Mercy Ships with its mission. He compiled a list of 15,000 potential donors who could make significant financial contributions to the Mercy Ships mission and began blasting them with emails filled with images and stories of Mercy Ships patients. While he received antagonism and dismissal from some recipients, he found many more were moved by the stories and wanted to help. The storytelling and promoting skills he had developed to lure people to nightclubs were also effective at rallying people in support of a good cause. Scott’s second Mercy Ships tour provided opportunity for him to venture into the Liberian countryside and the villages that were home to the organization’s patients. Scott was struck by the morbid conditions of these villages and their water sources—either a swamp, a scummy pond, or a dirty brown viscous river (often with animal feces in it).
He learned that 50% of the country was drinking unsafe, dirty contaminated water, which was contributing directly to many of the illnesses and suffering of Mercy Ships patients. Scott had gone from witnessing wealthy club patrons buying $10 bottles of designer water, which they didn’t open, to seeing people die from a lack of clean drinking water. The contrast was not lost on him, and he had found a cause that deeply resonated with him. Although he was truly committed, he had no money, was $30,000 in debt, and had no experience in charity work or building an organization. Still, when he returned to New York, he jumped in, making 8–10 presentations a day to interest others in his mission of providing clean drinking water for the 1 billion people in the world without it. His presentations met with little success in the way of donations but provided Scott with a great insight. He discovered there was a profound distrust of and cynicism toward charities.
To be successful, Scott would have to “reimagine” the giving process, reaching the disenchanted and giving them something in which to believe. Scott created Charity: Water to do just that, establishing a four-pronged plan to reinvent the charity model. The first element was to guarantee that 100% of donations would directly finance clean water projects. He followed the model of multibillionaire Paul Tudor Jones of the Robin Hood Foundation, establishing two separate accounts. All the funds from every public donation go directly into the first account to be used exclusively to fund the water projects.
The second account, called The Well, pays the salaries and overhead of the organization and is funded by a small group of private donors dedicated specifically to financing operating expenses. The second prong was “proof.” Scott wanted donors to visibly see the impact of their contributions, and technology provided the answer. Pictures of every Charity: Water project are posted on Google Earth and Google Maps. The organization’s partners in foreign countries are trained to use GPS devices, take photos, and upload and post the GPS coordinates and pictures for each project on the internet.
Third, Scott wanted to build a “beautiful” brand. He felt that most charities had a “poverty mentality” around their marketing, with most still using direct mail to solicit donors. He believed direct mail would be replaced by digital transactions and developed his business plan accordingly. Instead of using stories, images, and language intended to illicit guilt like other charities did, Charity: Water tells stories focused on hope, opportunity, and fun. Scott promotes the idea that giving should be an opportunity and a blessing, not an obligation or a debt. Charity: Water offers a “grand invitation” to join the effort in creating a world where every person has clean drinking water.
The last prong is to use local partners in the countries where Charity: Water has its projects. For the work to be sustainable and culturally appropriate, it should be led by local people. Charity: Water’s role is to “raise awareness, engage people in an issue that does not directly concern them, and then raise the money to make it happen and then go out and vet and grow the capacity of the local organizations to deploy that capital and lead their communities and their countries forward” (Fields, 2018). The locals would be “the heroes,” receiving the money and using it to bring clean water to the community.
When Charity: Water began, it was at the start of a major world financial crisis, but still managed to raise $1.7 million in its first year. Donations grew 490% in the first three years of operations, while net giving in the United States dropped by 8% during the same period. Charity: Water now has raised more than $300 million, with more than 1 million donors from more than 100 countries (Fields, 2018). Charity: Water has provided more than 9 million people around the world with access to clean water, with 35,000 projects in 27 different countries (Charity: Water, 2019).
Scott wants the global water crisis solved in his lifetime. Citing that “the number of people without access has dropped in the last 12 years from a billion people to 660 million,” Scott says that it is still not enough. “1 out of 10 people without clean water is still astonishingly high in this day and age with the technology we have” (Fields, 2018). True to his vision, however, Scott, an influencer turned social entrepreneur disrupter, has radically changed the charitable giving landscape, successfully shifting perspectives, tapping into people’s desire to make a difference, and, through his commitment to complete transparency, raising the standards for an entire industry.
Scott is most recently the author of the New York Times best-selling book, Thirst: A Story of Redemption, Compassion, and a Mission to Bring Clean Water to the World. No surprise, 100% of the net proceeds go to fund Charity: Water projects around the world. And true to his promise of “proof,” his website notes that over 7,700 people now have clean water due to a matching funds campaign for book preorders, and there is a special link for individual purchasers of the book to see for themselves how their purchase is affecting lives (Charity: Water, 2019).
Question:
Identify three Leadership traits or abilities that contributed to his successes.
Northouse, Peter G.. Introduction to Leadership (pp. 16-19). SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.
