Driving the global campaign for safe water for all
Access to clean water, sanitation and hygiene are fundamental human rights still denied to millions. Our brief was to develop a communications strategy and campaign for 2022 for the UN-hosted partnership, Sanitation & Water for All (SWA), to increase the political visibility and prioritisation of this critical issue on an international scale.
Working closely with SWA and the UN, 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.
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.
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 assets further brought the manifesto to life, including a microsite, social media toolkits, activism kits, and a launch film.
The first of these installations was launched at a global water summit, leading people to a microsite that 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 target sign-up rate was exceeded fivefold.
The flexible 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. It’s been promoted at international events such as LatinoSan, COP27 & UN 2023 Water Conference and informed pre-election campaigning in countries including Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Pakistan.
