dirty water for $1

Read about this UNICEF campaign over at Artsy Time.

For the dirty water campaign, UNICEF placed a "dirty water" vending machine in Union Square in New York. The vending machine provided consumers with 8 options, themed around diseases contracted from drinking contaminated water.

The campaign was created by communications firm Casanova Pendrill as an initiative of UNICEF's Tap Project, founded in 2007 to raise awareness about (and funds to combat) the poor quality of water in developing countries.

Operating on budget of $0, all materials and services were provided pro bono.

Video for the campaign

The end of this video is really disturbing: two idiotic girls making jokes about diseases that "make you skinny" because they involve throwing up and diarrhea... "yea, i mean if it doesn't kill you, it'll just make you skinnier." Tap Project responds with the message "There's still a long way to go." Good for them for keeping this in there - it's a reality check that these issues are not present enough in the public dialogue. You would never see people publicly making a joke like that about a disease like cancer.

It's unfortunate that people like this exist, and a mass-impact campaign will most likely never change their perceptions. What it does do though is:

1) raises funds using a combination of the brilliant vending machine concept (forgo the pack of m&m's to provide a child with 40 days of drinking water? i think so), text messaging and a probably less immediately successful, but still very accessible online donation option
2) provides people with something physical and visual to make sense of the pressing issue - rather than mere statistics, it uses a bright vending machine in the middle of one of the busiest areas in Manhattan and then, the bottle of dirty, brown contaminated water
3) makes the very critical connection between the 8 life-threatening (but PREVENTABLE) diseases and water sanitation & access. This provides a reminder, and in some cases newly informs people that these diseases are directly related to the dismal state of water quality in developing regions like Africa and India.

According to UNICEF, for every dollar raised, a child will have enough water to drink for 40 days. Donations raised by the Tap Project fund targeted projects that increase access and improve sanitation of water in a few countries within Africa, South America and in Iraq.