7/27/2019 Final BTC Paper
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/final-btc-paper 1/14
7/27/2019 Final BTC Paper
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/final-btc-paper 2/14
Teresa Millett, Lizzie Majchrzak, Pamela Barry,Lauren Houser and Andrea Glauber
2
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
7/27/2019 Final BTC Paper
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/final-btc-paper 3/14
Teresa Millett, Lizzie Majchrzak, Pamela Barry,Lauren Houser and Andrea Glauber
3
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
7/27/2019 Final BTC Paper
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/final-btc-paper 4/14
Teresa Millett, Lizzie Majchrzak, Pamela Barry,Lauren Houser and Andrea Glauber
4
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,
7/27/2019 Final BTC Paper
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/final-btc-paper 5/14
Teresa Millett, Lizzie Majchrzak, Pamela Barry,Lauren Houser and Andrea Glauber
5
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
7/27/2019 Final BTC Paper
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/final-btc-paper 6/14
7/27/2019 Final BTC Paper
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/final-btc-paper 7/14
Teresa Millett, Lizzie Majchrzak, Pamela Barry,Lauren Houser and Andrea Glauber
7
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
7/27/2019 Final BTC Paper
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/final-btc-paper 8/14
Teresa Millett, Lizzie Majchrzak, Pamela Barry,Lauren Houser and Andrea Glauber
8
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.
7/27/2019 Final BTC Paper
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/final-btc-paper 9/14
Teresa Millett, Lizzie Majchrzak, Pamela Barry,Lauren Houser and Andrea Glauber
9
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
7/27/2019 Final BTC Paper
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/final-btc-paper 10/14
Teresa Millett, Lizzie Majchrzak, Pamela Barry,Lauren Houser and Andrea Glauber
10
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
7/27/2019 Final BTC Paper
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/final-btc-paper 11/14
Teresa Millett, Lizzie Majchrzak, Pamela Barry,Lauren Houser and Andrea Glauber
11
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
7/27/2019 Final BTC Paper
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/final-btc-paper 12/14
Teresa Millett, Lizzie Majchrzak, Pamela Barry,Lauren Houser and Andrea Glauber
12
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.
7/27/2019 Final BTC Paper
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/final-btc-paper 13/14
Teresa Millett, Lizzie Majchrzak, Pamela Barry,Lauren Houser and Andrea Glauber
13
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
7/27/2019 Final BTC Paper
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/final-btc-paper 14/14
Teresa Millett, Lizzie Majchrzak, Pamela Barry,Lauren Houser and Andrea Glauber
14
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.
Top Related