Back to all client storiesWater For People Saves 13 Hours a Week With Brandfolder
Water For People is an international nonprofit based in Denver, Colorado, working toward the goal of bringing sustainable water, sanitation and hygiene services to communities around the world. They believe in a world where everyone has reliable access to safe drinking water, forever.
Water For People continues to work toward this ambitious goal by partnering with local community members, businesses and governments to help them bring sustainable water and sanitation systems to their communities. To drive this impact, it is important that their staff and partners, which include 25 workplace giving companies (a specific group of partners that support Water For People through employee donation programs), 50 volunteer committees and more than 200 other corporate partners, have the communications tools and resources they need.
Martha Snowbarger
Designer
Kat Leitzmann
Marketing & Communications Manager
Julie Kauffman
Business Development Manager
Company Stats
Currently working in 9 countries
4.67 million people reached so far with reliable water services
3,913 community interventions
1,583 school interventions
The Necessity for Consistency
Prior to Brandfolder, the Water For People team worked with a notoriously unreliable shared drive to organize their digital assets. Over time, accessing it became an issue for their global team. For instance, if a team member in Malawi needed to access a file from the shared drive, it could take upwards of several minutes to load. Several minutes here and there added up quickly and began to seriously hinder the teams overall productivity. This led to their global teams' taking liberties and creating their own marketing materials, which in turn hurt their brand consistency.
While brand consistency is important to many organizations, it is absolutely essential to an organization such as Water For People. The ability to be recognized and trusted on a global scale allows them to fundraise more effectively, which in turn drives impact in helping them make clean water accessible to more people. So, as their brand consistency needed to be strengthened, the Water For People team decided it was time to invest in a tool to solidify and enforce their brand identity. This led them to Brandfolder.
Fundraising Made Easier
Since onboarding Brandfolder, the Water For People team, including their designer, Martha Snowbarger, has been able to consistently ensure that on-brand materials are available and accessible to the entire global team. With communications colleagues and partners in the US and 9 program countries working to provide localized support, Water For People's team uses Brandfolder to make sure these partners always have immediate access to the files they need in order to reach their goals. This means less time searching for files and more time focusing on initiatives that drive fundraising efforts.
The idea of how we grow and how we reach more people from a fundraising perspective becomes easier and faster because we have Brandfolder. – Martha Snowbarger, Designer
Brandfolder templates ensure that Martha and the marketing team can be confident that, regardless of where in the world marketing and communication materials are being edited, downloaded, and used, they are always consistent and on-brand.
Additionally, Water For People's external teams, including board members, volunteers and committees, also have access to marketing materials within Brandfolder. This empowers them to leverage the latest approved marketing materials so they're able to raise awareness, participate in campaigns and fundraise creatively.
The biggest benefit of Brandfolder is having one resource that our external partners can go to to find things. It's a link they've had for years, one that never changes. And we can easily update information when needed. – Julie Kauffman, Business Development Manager
600 Hours Saved Per Year
Today Water For People credits Brandfolder for saving their marketing team a combined 13 hours a week. That's over 600 hours a year that would otherwise be spent recreating or tracking down preexisting assets that team members couldn't find.
By leveraging a reliable, single source of truth, the marketing team can rest easy knowing that the wider global team can easily find the on-brand assets they need. Marketing materials can easily be found, shared and edited if need be, empowering everyone to be better equipped to reach the goal of bringing sustainable water, sanitation and hygiene services to the entire world.
With so many different branches of the Water For People team constantly needing marketing materials, having Brandfolder empowers the marketing team to:
- Expand their reach externally and expose their mission to a larger audience for fundraising efforts while having more control over their brand identity
- Free up more time internally to focus on larger initiatives
Moving forward, the Water For People team plans to use Brandfolder to help them organize and expand their video efforts. They're continuing to grow and learn more about what Brandfolder has to offer, and they're excited to continually leverage new features and improve adoption.
That speaks to the power of the platform: Despite having been users for so long, there's still so much to continue learning and optimizing. It does not feel as though we've reached the limit of what we can accomplish with Brandfolder. – Kat Leitzmann, Marketing & Communications Manager