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Multi-Faceted PR Campaign Taps Into a Global NeedLike, food, clothing and shelter, water is an essential resource, yet many the world over take it for granted—a tragedy considering the fact that not having access to clean and accessible drinking water is the second universal cause of death for children under the age of 5. To remedy this plight, a grassroots initiative called the Tap Project was launched in 2007 to help UNICEF, the world’s leading children’s organization, provide clean and accessible drinking water to children around the world. More than 300 New York City restaurants invited their customers to donate a minimum of $1 for the tap water they would normally get for free, with the proceeds going to UNICEF and therein enabling a child to have clean water for 40 days. The inaugural Tap Project event, held on UN holiday World Water Day (March 22), 2007, was so successful that this year it expanded into 14 cities across the country. Recently, the program took place during World Water Week (March 16-22). Trickle-Down EffectThe Tap Project came into fruition in late 2006 as a result of a challenge that Esquire magazine posed to David Droga, founder of Droga5, a New York advertising agency that conceived of the campaign. Droga had been featured in the December 2006 “Best and Brightest” feature, which, according to Esquire Editor-in-Chief David Granger, “identifies agents of positive change in many different disciplines.” Esquire asked Droga to create a brand following a meeting with him.“It’s easy for people to talk about changing their industry in fundamental ways,” says Granger in describing the meeting with Droga. “[When that happens], we tend to be suspicious. We asked him to do a demonstration project—to show us rather than us writing a flattering blurb about it. We asked him to come up with an idea. So he came up with an idea: He was going to create a brand out of nothing and make people like it. He had six different ideas, but the one involving tap water seemed the most intriguing.” When an Esquire staffer discovered that there indeed existed a World Water Day, which was connected with UNICEF, the idea began to take shape. Droga and his team came up with a plan of action that paired the Tap Project with UNICEF. “David Droga brought it to us for consideration as a project that we could turn into a fundraising program,” says Kim Pucci, the director of marketing for the U.S. fund for UNICEF. “So, literally we answered the call. And it seemed like such a great idea—simple, easy to execute. The whole look and feel of it was that it seemed like something special, and that we should become a part of.” According to Pucci, Droga5 acted as the creative catalysts of the Tap Project, while UNICEF functioned as the “engine” of the entire operations, handling all aspects of marketing. This type of synergy was necessary to meet the program’s goals. Picking up SteamNext up, Droga’s team, with assistance from Esquire, created an illustrious board of directors that boasted renowned New York chefs such as Eric Ripert of Le Bernardin and Tom Colicchio of Craft, in addition to celebrities along the lines of Mary-Louise Parker, Rosario Dawson and Peter Sarsgaard. To promote the launch of the Tap Project, two ads ran in the December 2006 issue of Esquire; a Web site, www.tapproject.org, was also created to heighten awareness.Held on March 22, 2007, the Tap Project’s one-day effort that encompassed the New York culinary community alone ended up raising $100,000. The money was turned over to UNICEF to be used in countries where it was needed the most. Following the inaugural campaign, the Tap Project was honored in June 2007 with a Titanium Lion Award at the International Advertising Festival. Shortly after winning the award, Droga was inundated with phone calls from some of the nation’s top ad companies that wanted to get involved. As a result, the campaign went nationwide for 2008. Ebb and Flow“[This year], we had 13 participating advertising agencies that all donated their services to create pro bono locally branded Tap campaigns in top markets,” says Pucci. “Any restaurant around the country could participate. We had big media campaigns going on in the 13 markets for which there was an agency partner … so there would be more buzz in the Seattles and the Bostons of the world, but so you could also participate if you were in Fairbanks, Alaska. We ended up with 44 out of 50 states having at least a handful of restaurants.”However, despite the widespread participation, soliciting and securing the support of the participating restaurants was a hurdle to overcome. “The challenge was how do I make this turnkey for the restaurants?” Pucci notes. “It didn’t seem to be an issue for the restaurants when they signed up, but I’m constantly looking for ways to make it easier for them to participate; it’s just the challenge of being a couple of layers removed from the contributions.” “We have to get a restaurant to say yes and participate. Then we rely on the management to receive those materials and actually put them out there and encourage their staff to get their customers excited about it; then they turn the money in to us,” she says. “So, from an operations standpoint, [it’s a challenge] just making sure that we do everything we can to support these restaurants, to keep them engaged in the program and the future.” For the 2008 campaign, American Express was a corporate sponsor, while Turner Broadcasting subsidized the portion of the program that made it possible to hire the volunteers, who have been its pulse and lifeblood. Here “thousands of people were able join together to recruit their restaurants,” relates Pucci. “[The key to the success of] this program is the volunteers. We could not do without the 3,000 volunteers who went out and recruited a restaurant or two, and that was made possible by Turner.” Besides attracting a wider network of support, the 2008 campaign changed by expanding from one day to one week. A prime reason for this, according to Pucci, had to do with simple economics. “In doing a business plan for this program, there’s a certain amount of funds you have to spend to execute, to get the Web site created, to get the materials that the restaurants need to implement and to do all that for one day wasn’t cost-effective,” Pucci says. “So, we made it a week. Next year it’s to be determined. I don’t think we would ever shorten it. But it’s a lot to ask a of restaurant if it’s ongoing. And, if you focus the media on a week, it creates a bigger win for the program because it’s so focused.” Currently, the figures for the 2008 campaign have not been determined yet—the team is still waiting for the contributions to be sent it via the participating restaurants, but the team is hoping for $1 million. Pucci says that drawing attention to the fact that thousands of children die daily of preventable and unacceptable causes, of which lack of clean water is one, has been a huge ROI for the recent Tap campaign. “I think we put that issue on the map,” says Pucci. “People take water for granted, but there are others around the world that don’t have it and are dying without it. Ultimately, as the brand person for UNICEF, my job is to create awareness [of this issue]. Five thousand kids die daily without [clean drinking water]. There are a billion people without access to it. People are now talking about this issue [as a result of this campaign].” Another plus for the program is the support it’s generated from the community and public at large. “[This program has given us] so much support and visibility,” Pucci says. “Even through serious crisis, like the devastating South Asian tsunami, this has been the most amount of coverage that we’ve gotten for our issue and our fundraising program. [To support the Tap Project], people kept coming out of the woodwork. Rachel Ray would do something, or Ellen [DeGeneres], or Tyra or Emeril, [the latter offered his restaurant in New Orleans as participant in the campaign].” What made this program work, says Pucci, was that it deviated from the norm and did not seem like a typical UNICEF initiative. “It wasn’t like we wrote a brilliant marketing plan,” she admits. “We had a very unique program—easy to implement, attractive. People liked the concept. The whole look and feel of it was edgy, irreverent. That was deliberate. It felt like something really fun and very insider. People just joined in. That was the beauty of the campaign. We defined very limited guidelines. We just said hey make it what you want—this is your cause, your issue. If this matters to you, you create what is best for it because at the end of the day we want to change the situation that’s facing these kids around the world. And I think we started that.” Having acted as the initial catalyst for the Tap Project, Granger admits he’s in awe at how much it’s grown in a short time span. “It was amazing the kind of work [Droga5 and UNICEF] have done—to create this little charity and to get so many media entities and corporate entities to participate.” For Pucci, the lessons learned from working on the Tap Project are simple: Don’t spoon-feed your target audience. “You don’t need to give everybody all the speaking points and all the messages. You should define broadly your objectives and a few points. If you allow people to own it and make it their own, great things can happen.” Sidebar 1Simplicity is KeyFor other companies or nonprofits looking to launch or attach themselves to a similar cause-branding initiative like the Tap Project, Kim Pucci, the director of marketing for the U.S. fund for UNICEF, has these sage words of advice:“You’ve got to hit on a very simple concept—simple for the public to understand and embrace—and simple to execute. It should be unique to your organization leveraging the best of what you can do. I think if you stay true to who you are and what you can do, [it will be very successful].”
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