Final BTC Paper

7/27/2019 Final BTC Paper

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Teresa Millett, Lizzie Majchrzak, Pamela Barry,Lauren Houser and Andrea Glauber

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proportion of the world population that is without sustainable access to safe drinking water and

basic sanitation would be halved. The world is on track to meet this goal, which makes it more

important than ever to mobilize our efforts toward achieving this goal.

Thirsty Turtles UMD was formed out of the need and desire to further the goal set by the

United Nations. We wanted to draw attention to the global water crisis and garner as much

possible support from the University of Maryland community. For approximately every $20 we

raise, one person will get clean water. This means if we reach our $5,000 goal, we will be

helping provide clean water to about 250 people. Our tangible objective was to fund a well in a

developing country, which would provide water to an entire village, and our larger scale goals

were to raise awareness and to help improve the quality of life on a global scale.

Throughout the semester, our group has worked to keep our momentum going and

maintain a variety of platforms to share information and get our target audience involved in our

work. We generally met once a week to plan new events, keep our social media on track, and

generally make sure that we were meeting our goals. The timeline below provides a visual of

some of our key moments throughout the semester.

On February 4, we formed our group, began working with charity: water, set our

fundraising goal of $5,000.00 for a clean water project, and established three distinct social

media outlets. Social media was one of our most significant means of establishing relationships

with our target audience (the University of Maryland community), advertising our cause and our

events, and showing people how they could contribute to our cause.

Our goal for our Facebook page was to post once or twice a day, but also to connect with

our audience, share information with our audience and engage them, and communicate with

charity: water and other similar organizations. To connect with our audience, we shared posts




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from the page on our Facebook walls, invited our own Facebook friends, and shared the page in

our classes, listservs, and on other organizations’ Facebook pages.

Information sharing was a major part of our Facebook use. We shared clean water facts,

quotes, and pictures — according to Facebook

statistics; most of these did very well as they were

both brief and easy to read, or because they were

linked to an interesting image. We frequently shared

the link to our “my charity: water” donation page,

and usually about once a week, we highlighted a

water project that charity: water worked on, so that

donors and potential donors would know exactly

where their money was going. We also worked to

make sure our Facebook followers knew of upcoming events by creating a Facebook event for

the documentary showing we co-hosted and for the end of the year block party. Another

important part of our sharing was our own blog posts on our Wordpress blog, and at the

beginning, Thirsty Turtle Twitter posts.

To engage our audience, we made our wall

public and encouraged followers to post on our page.

We also created “Thirsty Thursday Trivia,” (shown

in the image to the right), which involved clean

water facts that we had previously posted, and

encouraged people to comment the answer. The last

aspect of our Facebook usage involved




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communicating and connecting with charity: water and similar organizations. We often shared,

liked, or commented on charity: water posts, which often led other organizations to like our posts

(because they had heard of us through the charity: water Facebook page). Additionally, we “liked”

organizations that dealt with clean water issues, as well as student groups.

Twitter was another major social media outlet our group utilized. Twitter was originally

used for two primary purposes: to share short, effective clean water facts and pictures; and to

tweet at celebrities to request donations. We also connected to students and student groups by

following people on Twitter, and

followed and re-tweeted charity: water

and organizations with similar

missions. We also used the Twitter page to promote the “my charity: water” donation page. The

Twitter page, because of its limited character nature, proved to be a great way to write short,

catchy clean water messages. It was also much easier to connect to any celebrity or group

through Twitter, because of the easy access to any public Twitter feed.

Wordpress was one of our most successful social media methods. We used the Wordpress

blog for one simple reason: so that our guest bloggers could share their clean water-related

stories. Our guest bloggers usually had a great deal of experience living overseas, and provided a

real-world perspective on the clean water crisis. These blog posts were shared extensively on our

other social media outlets to inform people on clean water issues and give background to the

global water crisis. The blog was also used to show how many days were left in the Do Good

Challenge.

In order to keep track of our social media statistics and measure impact quantitatively, we

reported weekly on the different dimensions of each social media site, including Facebook,




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Twitter, and Wordpress. We chose to measure follower gains, interactions, and our own social

media output. It turned out to be quite difficult to measure our social media success

quantitatively because social media advocacy is very much a qualitative measurement. For

example, the number of followers cannot tell you about their active investment in your cause,

whether they take on the role of an informant or a donor. In the future, we would have likely

distributed a survey asking our followers to describe their experiences with our sites. We also

would have designated more specif ic social media “chores” to make posting easy and reflexive

by scheduling specific posts for certain times of the week. In this sense, we should have better

maximized HootSuite’s social media software by creating posts at the beginning of the week and

scheduling them to go live throughout the week.

Our Facebook strategy involved sharing facts and resources on clean water, re-posting

infographics from water organizations, particularly charity: water, and linking followers to our

donation site. We also implemented short post series, such as Thirsty Thursday Trivia, Thirsty

Photo of the Day, and Thirsty Thought of the Day. These proved to be successful in terms of

their reach, engagement, and virality, although we did not implement a specific strategy for them.

They were posted at random times and not regularly, but they likely would have been more

successful if they had.

Our page garnered a total of 236 likes, 154 of which were people who reported on

Facebook that they were from the College Park, MD area. 90.7% of the total likes were from

users between the ages of 18 and 25, meaning that Thirsty Turtles UMD reached its target

audience in terms of age and location: students at the University of Maryland. Interestingly, our

page garnered more likes from females, who made up 61% of our followers between the ages of

18 and 25, than males, who made up 29.7% of our followers between the ages of 18 and 25. This




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All mentions were in response to mentions from the ThirstyUMD account — we were the

major initiators of conversations, and even received feedback from MTV Act, a launch platform

for social good projects, and Elisabeth Epstein, an international development professional who

ended up contributing a blog post to our site.

Our tweets with the highest number of re-tweets and favorites included links to articles or

infographics as well as several hashtags related to clean water and sanitation. Our hashtagged

tweets are also likely responsible for the cohort of our followers outside of the University of

Maryland, whose profiles all indicate that they are passionate about clean water issues. The

majority of our re-tweets, however, are from organizations or students linked to the University of

Maryland, such as Get Help UMD.

Surprisingly, we did not gain a large number of followers after being endorsed by CBS

Sportscaster and former University of Maryland alumni Bonnie Bernstein. Ms. Bernstein

composed her tweet as effectively as possible: “Attn #Terps: @ThirstyUMD =wonderful or g

created by students to raise awareness abt clean water issues. Help here!

http://tinyurl.com/al7y8vp.” Unfortunately, we only gained a few extra followers that week,

possibly because Ms. Bernstein’s followers hail from all over the country and may not be

interested in a cause at the University of Maryland.

Our blog strategy included recruiting guest bloggers with experience with clean water

issues in the developing world and posting updates to our blog as we competed in the Do Good

Challenge. Due to time constraints, we did not provide these updates, but this also helped keep

the blog centered on the clean water crisis. Our bloggers had diverse experiences but all wrote

powerful, eloquent stories. We shared the blog posts on our Facebook and Twitter pages to

garner additional attention, and we even recruited two bloggers through social media — one on




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Facebook and one on Twitter. We tagged each blog post so that people beyond the Maryland

community could find them if they searched for certain terms, such as Djibouti National Park or

Senegal.

The blog post with the most visitors was written by Beyond the Classroom’s Graduate

Assistant, Krista Heiner, about her experience with clean water issues during Peace Corps in

Senegal. This post also had the most tags, which is likely why it received such a large audience.

March was the most popular month because we posted the most during that time leading up to

the Do Good Challenge.

Both the quantitative and qualitative results of data from our social media pages are

important for measuring our project’s impact. The quantitative data demonstrates the breadth of

our reach, and the qualitative data shows the value and depth of our engagement with users.

According to our follower numbers, we reached our target audience in terms of location and age:

our primary goal was to inform students at the University of Maryland, as they were the logical

low-hanging fruit. In terms of the quality of our interactions with users, however, the results

appear to be shallow. Although our posts were informative for those who viewed them, they did

not invite people to engage or take a particular interest in clean water issues as much as we had

hoped. In the future, we would recommend a more defined and specific social media strategy,

including a schedule for our more engaging posts, such as the Thirsty Thursday Trivia Facebook

series.

Below is our social media tracker, which we used to quantitatively evaluate our social

media activity.




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Other than our social media efforts, we did several activities to promote Thirsty Turtles

UMD. On March 5, we partnered with Beyond the Classroom for a showing of Water on the

Table. This documentary told the story of Maude Barlow, a key figure in the movement to make

water a universal human right. We gave a short presentation on Thirsty Turtles UMD at the

beginning of the documentary, and then participated in the documentary and the discussion.

Throughout March, our group worked to partner with groups on campus that we felt

would be interested in the charity: water mission. Through email and general body meetings, we

established partnerships with the following organizations:

Terps ProDev (a group that advocates for international development)

Engineers Without Borders (the UMD chapter of the national organization that

works to create sustainable projects around the globe)

Global Communities (a living learning community that shared our events on

listservs and social media)

Central Catholic High School (a supporter of Thirsty Turtles UMD’s alma mater)

Our partnerships with ProDev, Engineers Without Borders, and Global Communities

were generally mutual agreements to share and attend events as needed. Central Catholic High

School, located in Wilmington, MA, raised $500.00 for our cause because of the work of one of




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their alumni, and one of our most enthusiastic volunteers, Sebastian Serrano. The Central

Catholic Campus Ministry dedicates each month of the semester to a different cause, and the

school community donates pocket change and works to fundraise for that cause. Sebastian

worked with Campus Ministry to dedicate one week to Thirsty Turtles. Because of his efforts

and the generosity of the campus community, this partnership was one of our most influential in

terms of fundraising for the clean water project.

Throughout March and April, we worked on celebrity outreach with the following UMD

alumni:

Bonnie Bernstein (sportscaster and executive)

Vernon Davis (tight end for San Francisco 49ers)

Torrey Smith (wide receiver for Baltimore Ravens)

Bonnie Bernstein tweeted at Thirsty Turtles, endorsing our cause and asking people to get

involved. She also posted a status on

Facebook about our project. Vernon

Davis donated a signed jersey for us

to raffle off, and Torrey Smith donated a signed football.

Ultimately, our most effective forms of community outreach were the partnership with

Central Catholic (this raised $500.00 for the campaign), our blog (we had a dedicated following,

compelling and frequent postings, and effective advertising for it on our other social media sites),

and our celebrity outreach (Andi Glauber’s father’s connections with Vernon Davis, Bonnie

Bernstein, and Torrey Smith enabled us to receive more publicity, funding, and memorabilia to

auction off). Fundraising was our biggest challenge as our target audience was University of

Maryland students, whose wallets have a lot of other priorities. We had a lot of support in people




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sharing and liking our posts and blog posts, but fewer people were willing to actually donate

money. For a while, our only means of fundraising was posting the donation link on the

Facebook page, and this was ultimately ineffective because we were consistently reaching out to

the same ~230 people, and not branching out enough. Ultimately, our project managed to inform

a sizeable amount of people on the water crisis through three very active social media sites, and

we are trying to continue raising funds and awareness as we complete the semester.

Thirsty Turtles UMD contributed to the good of society through social media as well as

fundraising. As previously mentioned, our group was able to raise awareness of our cause and

our local community to make a difference through social media platforms including Facebook,

Wordpress, and Twitter. On Wordpress, we enlightened our audience on the topic of water

insecurity using first hand accounts of people who have experience living in a water insecure

region. We allowed people to come together on Facebook to express and understand the issue of

clean water accessibility, and via twitter, we reached out to celebrities such as Bonnie Bernstein,

who helped spread our message beyond the UMD campus. Social media allowed us to do “good”

in a very simple way- by simply opening the minds of students to a new issue, and providing

them with opportunity to make a change.

Thirsty Turtles raised $750, which we will contribute directly to Charity: Water. Charity:

Water informed our group that, “No matter how much your group raises, the funds in your

campaign will be included in one of our quarterly grants and sent to the field to fund water

project costs. Eighteen months after your funds are granted, we'll provide a completion report

with photos, GPS coordinates and community information, to show you the project you helped

fund!” Because every single one of the dollars we raised goes directly to funding the

construction of a well, we were able to make a large impact on a village and on people who may




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be living halfway around the globe.

The gift of a continuous source of clean water for a village has a wide range of positive

affects on the community. The picture below demonstrates the different areas that benefit from

the implementation of a clean water source. A clean water source directly improves Sanitation,

Hygiene and Health of people living in the community. People are able to wash their hands in

clean water, and water-borne diseases, which are normally abundant and potentially life

threatening, are made sparse. Women and children normally spend countless hours a day

walking and gathering water. Access to clean water saves time, and allows these women and

children more opportunity to work and improve their lives through education. Economic

Development is also spurred by access to clean water, and clean water sources allow families the

ability to cook with clean water, grow their own gardens, and thus have access to more reliable

food sources. Our donation to fund a water source did “good” for society by reaching beyond the

direct issue and creating positive change across several developmental issues.




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Because of our fundraising efforts, the lives of 36 individuals have been greatly improved,

if not completely saved. Thirty-six children, men, and women now have greater security, are able

to produce their own food, spend time in school, and have been spared from sickness, because of

the money our community has come together to raise.

When it comes to ending this semester, we are planning to end with a large event

where all the hard work we have put into this project will culminate. The Thirsty Turtles Block

Party that we are hosting next Thursday May 9, will be the biggest event we have planned this

semester and mark the end to our work on this project. Complete with raffles, games, and

educational activities, we feel that this event will be a great final chance to raise a large amount

of money as well as a lot of awareness about clean water issues. The event will be held in the

Commons 1 courtyard from 4-6 PM, which is a time that many students will be walking through

that area, giving us a large amount of visibility. We have two items that we will raffle off, both

of which are signed football memorabilia by Maryland alumni who are currently NFL stars. The

raffle will be the main way we hope to raise money, however we will also be accepting donations.

To be raffled we have a football signed by Torrey Smith, a Baltimore Raven and 2013

Superbowl Champion as well as a jersey signed by San Francisco 49ers player, Vernon Davis.

We will sell raffle tickets to friends and family leading up to the event as well as during the event,

holding the drawing at the very end. We hope this will encourage people to stay the whole time

and learn more about our project! We are partnering with the Commons Area Council who will

be helping us publicize the event as well as helping us out with food and activities. We plan to

create various activities that will be fun, but also teach people about our project and charity:

water’s mission. We also might even have a special guest, Testudo, coming!

We are planning the Thirsty Turtles Block Party both as a last big effort to raise money




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and awareness as well as a grand finale to our involvement with Thirsty Turtles. We have to end

our project at the end of this semester because four out of five group members are graduating

seniors who will not be around next year to carry on Thirsty Turtles’ work and it would be a

huge amount of responsibility for one person to take on alone. We are more than willing to pass

on the project to future Beyond the Classroom students, however we would like to end our time

with the project on a strong note, given that may not happen. Despite the fact our work with

Thirsty Turtles will end, we have all gathered a strong passion for the issue of clean water needs

and will continue to do work in our own way to combat this issue in the future. Because Thirsty

Turtles was just created this semester, we do not have an audience that is too strongly invested,

so we hope that people will not be too disappointed. The great thing about our project was that

we have a set $5,000 goal to build our well and the project would end once we raised that money

either way. While we may not be able to reach that goal, charity: water has informed us that no

matter how much we raise, that money will be used to battle the global water crisis. Once the

money is used to build a well, we will receive all the information about it’s location and Thirsty

Turtles will be recognized as taking part in its creation.

We have all enjoyed our time working on this project and as mentioned before, have

grown to be very passionate about this issue. While we are sad to end our time with Thirsty

Turtles, we all feel that we have put a lot of hard work into the project and are very proud of all

we have accomplished.

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