Inspiring campaigns: Walk to the Well

Many of us take clean drinking water for granted. But for some, it’s a precious resource they have to walk miles to collect.

Earlier this year, Just a Drop, a charity dedicated to providing safe and clean water, launched a disruptive social media campaign to highlight the issue of water scarcity.

Walk to the Well

With the help of creative agency VCCP London, the charity created the longest ever Twitter thread to emulate the length that people in countries like Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, India, Nicaragua, and Cambodia have to walk every day, to access clean water.

The immersive thread, which comprised of more than 2,000 drone-captured pictures and videos, documented the journey of Ann, a 32-year-old mother from Kenya, as she embarked on her daily, four-hour walk to collect water, with a 20 kilo jerrycan strapped to her head.

Powerful

The campaign laid bare the struggles Ann faces as she walks alone across the Kenya landscape. It explains that her walk to the well takes over an hour. She then has to wait an hour or more in the blistering heat to get to the front of the queue. When she finally reaches the well, sometimes it’s completely dried up. When this is the case, she’s forced to collect dirty water from a nearby scoop hole.

She then starts the long walk home, carrying the full tank of water.

Challenge

The campaign challenged social media users to join Ann on her journey, by scrolling through the Twitter thread (it took over an hour to scroll through the entire thing). Once they reached their scrolling limit, users were encouraged to donate, and ‘like’ the tweet they ended on. This triggered an autoreply which showed them the distance they’d covered, and how much further Ann still had to go.

Results

The emotive campaign struck a chord with the public.

The thread was viewed over 19 million times in one week, with 332 Twitter users getting all the way to the end. 

The campaign was also nominated for two awards at the prestigious Cannes Lions Film Festival.

Rightly so.

Comment

Fiona Jeffery OBE, founder and chairman of Just A Drop, said of the campaign: “Having access to clean water can change someone's life. This is why we are working on creating long-term solutions by partnering with communities, supporting, and training them.

To raise awareness of the work and show how someone’s potential can be limited when their access to water is restricted, we are challenging people to scroll through the longest Twitter thread ever to show how far people need to go.

The aim is to raise awareness and funds for Just a Drop, to create a sand dam for Ann and her community where they can access water safely.’

Up for the challenge?

The Walk to the Well thread is still available on Twitter, (now X). Check it out here.

You can also donate via the donations link.

On the hunt for a social media-savvy fundraiser to create an innovative digital campaign? We can help. Give us a call on 0203 750 3111 to get the conversation started.