Just a Drop's Fiona Jeffrey explains how charities can use different forms of PR to expose themselves to new audiences
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We have recently embarked on a trailblazing campaign, during which we teamed up with a VCCP to use the power of social media for good. By synergising the creative agency’s expertise in marketing and digital communications with our established work in water, sanitation, and hygiene provision, we were able to produce the #WalktotheWell campaign.

Our campaign harnesses the power of Twitter to raise awareness about the people we serve, raise money for our work, and to boost our charity’s global brand. The #WalktotheWell follows the journey of Ann, a 32-year-old mother from Kitui County in Kenya, and the 9km walk she faces every day just to provide often unsafe and dirty drinking water for her family. Choosing Ann’s walk as a story to amplify, came down to it being endemic to the lives of so many of the women in the countries where we work. Women are usually those who fetch water, and doing so exposes them to immeasurable danger on journeys where they are both vulnerable and exhausted.

VCCP helped us to transform Ann’s story into a powerful and illustrative social media challenge, alerting millions to the struggles faced by women every day of their lives.

Our #WalktotheWell challenge consists of the longest Twitter thread ever created, comprising over 2,000 individual Tweets with each one representing 4.4meters of Ann’s journey. The thread challenges Twitter users to complete Ann’s 9km journey on Twitter. When a user gets as far as they can walk, they are asked to ‘like’ the tweet which they finish on, which triggers an auto-response notification telling them how much of Ann’s journey they have managed to complete and encouraging them to donate to the campaign. The thread as a whole both impresses the distance and difficulty of Ann’s journey, as well as containing pictures and captions which interactively tell the user about Ann’s walk for water.

VCCP’s knowledge of the public relations environment has allowed us to employ a multi-disciplinary approach which a small-medium sized charity would otherwise struggle to access. What has characterised this campaign also has been the strength of partnership between Just a Drop and VCCP with both organisations fully committed to creating a campaign that is both visually beautiful and delivering a powerful message, reinforcing the critical nature of Just a Drop’s work. We sent a visual media professional to meet Ann and our local team in Kenya to record her journey, which the VCCP team then converted into a detailed and informative editorial thread for the campaign. In addition, we have been able to access celebrity endorsements from individuals such as Gordon Buchanan, Stanley Tucci, and Alexander Armstrong, as well as our campaign being featured across national radio and press in only its first week.

After the first week, our Twitter thread has been viewed by almost 11 million people and thousands have participated in and shared the campaign. This is a level of visibility and reach which was only possible with the help of the creative talent, and multi-disciplined approach of the team at VCCP Media. The nature of the partnership created between Just a Drop and VCCP showcases the potential of partnerships such as this to create a meaningful impact and channel PR and marketing talent into worthwhile life changing causes. With VCCP’s help, we have both been able to receive specialist support to make the campaign a success in all aspects of PR, and communications as well as allow knowledge transfer from the VCCP team to Just a Drop’s own Communications team.

We hope that our campaign will inspire more creative and PR agencies and charities to partner, investing collective time, effort, talent and passion to create ground-breaking campaigns like the #WalktotheWell and as a result create purpose-led work that helps drive change whatever the cause.

We would encourage everybody who can, to experience and take part in the #walktothewell and donate to the campaign.

The link to which is available here.

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