

WaterForward - rssems
https://waterforward.charitywater.org

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RyanZAG
Just as a heads up:

 _" Charity evaluator GiveWell published a review of charity: water in
December 2012. Their overall conclusion was that charity: water "stands out
from other organizations we have considered in some respects (such as
conducting evaluations that include frank discussions of problems), but we
remain uncertain about the humanitarian impact of their work and the relative
effectiveness of their partner selection process."_

[http://www.givewell.org/international/charities/charity-
wate...](http://www.givewell.org/international/charities/charity-water)

~~~
themgt
I really despise this sort of tug-on-heart-strings, give-no-details-how-
you'll-help charity marketing blitz.

Reading through this review it seems like this is a problem that extends far
beyond their website. I would urge everyone to read the review before
promoting this charity any further.

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jpalomaki
Nice site. Couple of pages and my feeling was "Shut up and take my money".
Then more clicking. Oh, you want me to spam my friends? Hmm, I'd rather not do
that. Ok, I'll click that scary button anyways. As an IT pro I know you can't
actually send emails on my behalf. Good, there was actually a way to proceed
without sending emails. Then click-click-click, more pages. Hey, now I can
finally give some money! Page even says that payments are processed by PayPal.
But.. Something is missing, I can't see any button to actually pay via PayPal.

Summary: giving should be easy. Nowadays I'm not very likely to give money (or
even purchase stuff) if I can't do it via PayPal.

~~~
timdorr
I understand the storytelling nature of what they're trying to do. But for
more functional folks like you and I, they _really_ should have a button in
the middle of that bottom black bar that says "Donate now" and skips ahead.

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Centigonal
I mentioned this about the Apple Mac Pro page when it came up on this site,
and I'll say the same thing about this page:

It's very well done, but _it 's just a slide show_.

It's a good presentation, but it has very little to do with UX if the only
user interactivity involved is clicking a button to go forward.

EDIT: The title of this story has been changed since I and others made this
and similar comments. The previous title said something to the effect of
"Story Telling: Some of the best UX I've seen."

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gokulk
I am not sure why they have a big blue button to go to next slide. I expect
some kind of in page action for a button. As Centigonal said its just a
slideshow. The message is good and everything but the design is not very.

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tga
The way I see it, it's a nice set of slides -- barely any UX though. I also
think the UX is flawed because there is no visible way to go back to the
previous slide or to the beginning (other than the browser's back button so
it's not _terrible_, but many people associate the back button to the previous
site).

If you are instead trying to spread the word about this in an indirect manner,
I understand, smooth move.

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cupcake-unicorn
Wow, the slide in sharing with friends had one of those microscopic "skip"
links that I usually associated with services trying to trick people into
buying a paid upgrade. I was stuck on the slide to share it with my friends
and was thinking, "OK, so this is like some massive chain letter, everyone
will KNOW about the water crisis, but no one will be able to donate..."

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evanlivingston
This site is a good example of the interpassivity in activism I find so
frustrating. Without actually doing anything except clicking a few buttons, we
are made to feel like we are active in solving problems.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpassivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpassivity)

~~~
smacktoward
The term I would probably use is "slacktivism":

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacktivism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacktivism)

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shaanvp
hey guys - CEO of the company here (Waterforward was made by my team at The
Monkey Inferno here in SF).

Thanks for the feedback, hopefully we'll be able to improve the site. It's an
awesome cause, and I'd love to see this raise money and awareness for them.

Here's a bit of background info:

We made the site, because we've been supporters of charity:water for years.
They have a wonderful story, and are a top notch non-profit (they give 100% of
donations to the cause...even going so far as to reimburse credit card fees).

One challenge they face is finding ways to scale. The vast majority of
donations come in through the web, but those are from supporters they create
in offline events. We wanted to find a way to grow their base of supporters,
by telling their story simply and elegantly (that's the plan at least). Put
more simply, we wanted to "make charity go viral". They have raised over $95M
in the past 5 years, but they are trying to tackle a $1B problem here, so we
did our best to scale their efforts. We normally work on for-profit ventures
(www.monkeyinferno.com), so this was a unique challenge.

Attempt #1 took a year, and ultimately failed. (too complicated, viral
coefficient = 0.7)

[http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/08/michael-birchs-
waterforward...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/08/michael-birchs-waterforward-
is-kind-of-a-chain-letter-pyramid-scheme-for-charity/)

Attempt #2 is the product you see now at waterforward.org

30+ iterations in 30 days, trying to make this slide-show story concept work.
We just went viral overseas (4M shares so far), but unfortunately haven't
raised a ton of money. Biggest problem is that we are super viral in India,
but can't process Indian Rupees.

Anyway - thanks for the constructive feedback. We'll work out some of the UX
issues over time, but for now, we appreciate the general support.

-Shaan @shaanvp

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nawitus
Hmm, $40 million to 'benefit' 2.5 million water. That statistic doesn't
exactly state if those 2.5 million now have access to clean water. However
assuming that, then the charity can provide access to clean water for
$16/person. Assuming furthermore that it'll cost the same amount to give water
to the remaining 800 million people, it should cost about $12.8 billion to
give access to clean water to everyone.

The total foreign aid per year is more than $100 billion, so using effective
foreign aid access to water could be solved easily. Unfortunately, foreign aid
is extremely inefficient.

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tehwebguy
Very cool.

What if instead of asking me to send a form email to my friends it had a phone
based call to action? All manual, but wouldn't it be cool if it showed a short
video of someone calling a friend and just explaining it?

"Write down 5 of your friends' names on a piece of paper or in a text editor
and one-by-one give them a ring and tell them about this."

Not sure if that would annoy some people even more, it just seems like email
is the easiest thing ever to disregard.

~~~
smacktoward
They want you to use email because they want to get your email address and opt
you in to their email list. (Note that you opt-in by default unless you
specifically choose to opt out.) The messages that go to the friends are a
nice side benefit, but they're not really the point of the exercise.

A valid, working email address is very valuable to fundraisers, because they
can then hit you up directly in future for additional donations. Can't do that
if you tell people to go offline and call their friends.

This also answers the question elsewhere in this thread of "why not ask people
to share it via Facebook/Twitter instead of email?" In those cases there's an
intermediary (Facebook/Twitter) who can stop your marketing messages. So your
email address is more valuable to them than, say, your Twitter handle.

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44Aman
How about instead of a one-off donation of 20, they had a further site for
recurring payments? I got to the end (without spamming my friends), hit the
payment page (would have auth'd with paypal but no option to), then didn't end
up doing anything. It's well presented but needs more than one funnel for
people who give up at the end.

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beefman
Want to give money to an effective charity? Look for rules like these:
[http://www.gatesfoundation.org/~/media/GFO/Documents/Who%20W...](http://www.gatesfoundation.org/~/media/GFO/Documents/Who%20We%20Are/GuidelinesForDonations.pdf)

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josephpmay
Why is there only email? This isn't 2000; there should be Facebook and Twitter
share links.

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minikites
I've always been a fan of water.org

