Our Approach
As an organization, we hope to impact the global water crisis through two main avenues: fundraising and awareness.
Uniting Businesses and Consumers to Solve the Global Water Crisis
A Drink for Tomorrow uses cause marketing to raise awareness of the scope and urgency of the water crisis while raising funds to provide clean drinking water to those in need.
This picture was used with the permission of the Blue Planet Run Foundation.
Cause marketing involves the sale of a product or service with designation of a certain percentage of profits or dollar amount to a specific cause or non-profit organization. Cause marketing creates a mutually-beneficial relationship between a business and the organization it supports. By pairing its product or service with ADFT, a business will increase sales, improve brand image, generate great PR, and help saves lives. Our organization will be able to generate greater awareness of the global water crisis and raise money to fund clean water projects. This approach allows businesses to engage in an important social issue while giving the general public an easy way to help out - by simply choosing a partnering business product or service over another.
Partnerships can be short- or long-term. They may be in the form of a promotion, lasting anywhere from an evening to several months. Others may be ongoing partnerships. Short-term partnerships often involve the contribution of a percentage of profits on a wide variety of goods purchased during a certain time frame, while a long-term partnership involves the designation of one specific product or service for which the business will consistently donate a percentage of the profits to our organization.
Through partnerships with businesses across diverse industries, we aim to mobilize the for-profit sector to attack this pressing issue, just as this sector has been mobilized to fundraise for cures for both AIDS and breast cancer.
A crucial element to our strategy is that not only does it involve the generous support of the partnering businesses, but it also allows the general public to contribute to a solution to the global water crisis. Through the purchase of items designated to donate a certain percentage of profits to our cause, consumers have the opportunity to make a financial contribution by simply selecting our partner's brand. In the face of a problem as overwhelmingly large as the global water crisis, it is important to provide individuals with an easy and direct way to contribute to a solution.
Our promotions and campaigns provide the general public with this avenue of contribution.
Awareness
In addition to mobilizing funds, ADFT is dedicated to raising awareness among businesses and the general public of the urgency of the global water crisis.
By promoting our cause through the products of our partners, we attempt to bring the global water crisis to the forefront of today's social issues. We believe that if citizens are more aware of the facts and figures of the global water crisis, and how directly their money can be used to provide clean water around the world, these individuals will join us in eradicating this problem.
The United Nations General Assembly has proclaimed the ten year period between 2005 and 2015 as the "Decade For Action: Water for Life", in the hopes to give the world's goals "a greater focus on water-related issues, while striving to ensure the participation of women in water-related development efforts and further cooperation at all levels."
The UN General Assembly lists as one of the main objectives of the "Decade for Action: Water for Life" an effort to "infuse a sense of urgency and ensure acceleration of effort by all stakeholders in order to meet the 2015 Millennium Development Goal water and sanitation targets". Another objective of the UN's campaign is to "catalyze and scale-up the participation of civil society towards building greater societal commitment for the Water for Life effort."
At A Drink for Tomorrow, we are taking up this call to action and inviting not only Americans, but also citizens from around the world to join us in a collaborative effort to provide every person with the basic human right of clean drinking water.
We aspire to act as a catalyst in uniting businesses and consumers to focus on this issue, especially on World Water Day in March. World Water Day, observed internationally on March 22, is an initiative that originated at the 1993 UN Conference on The Environment and Development. The month of March, and particularly March 22, serves as a great platform to turn the world's focus to the issue of global clean water provision. While each campaign we launch will be focused on a particular industry, it is on this day and in this month that we invite businesses from across industries to unite in support of this cause.
To learn more about World Water Day, please visit www.worldwaterday.org.
