- UN
- Charity
- Campaign Strategy
Driving the global campaign for safe water for all
Access to clean water, sanitation and hygiene are fundamental human rights still denied to millions.
It was our privilege to partner with Sanitation & Water for All (SWA) — a global alliance of over 280 national governments, donors, civil society organisations and other development partners working to achieve universal access to clean water and sanitation (UN SDG 6).
Our brief was to develop a communications strategy and campaign for 2022 to increase the political visibility and prioritisation of this critical issue on an international scale. In terms of output, nothing was off the table.
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Inspiring a creative route to success
We started with an immersion phase to explore the challenges and establish the most effective strategic positioning for an impactful campaign that would engage our key target audience - ultimately, heads of state.
Working closely with SWA, we explored the inequity of access to clean water and how this ties in with other themes such as race, gender, climate and beyond. We agreed it should be defined as a matter of social and economic justice.
We then ran a 5-week creative sprint to generate big campaign ideas, using the strategy and our defined audiences as inspiration.
We narrowed down 30 initial ideas to five, which we further developed - providing material to validate each concept and help us select the best idea to take forward.
Driving impact, funding and visibility through a “justice-led” narrative
Rooting the narrative in the opportunity to deliver justice, we started at the notion of taking something for granted - as so many of us do when it comes to water.
By using the very moments that go unnoticed to our advantage, we sought to bring real action stories to life to invoke immediate commitment and action.
Bringing the manifesto to life
We designed a striking guerilla takeover campaign to pop up within the toilets at global conferences, carrying our core message that ‘Justice Begins Here’.
Its bold, high-impact look and feel match the urgency of the cause. A range of accompanying assets further brought the manifesto to life, including:
- A microsite
- Social media toolkits
- Activism kits
- A launch film
Impact for the short and long term
The first of these installations was launched at a global water summit, leading people to a microsite which housed a film and ways to take action.
The social hashtag reached 317,000 people, including retweets from UNICEF and the UN Secretary-General's Envoy on Youth, Jayathma Wickramanayake.
The flexible campaign toolkit we delivered empowers the SWA partners to create their own themed and localised materials to support and scale the campaign over the long term.
