Water is Life Kenya: Social Media

Fall 2023

Fellow: Carsen Vespe

Team: Gianna Furfari, Natalia Pereira, Kaylie Porcello, Sydney Rose

Community Partner

Water is Life Kenya (WILK) is a non-profit organization that helps Kenyans survive and thrive through clean water, sanitation, and hygiene projects, as well as income generation programs such as Livestock As a Business (LAB), Beaded Handicrafts Division, and Hope for Widows Program. These programs exist to spark personal, economic, and community development in marginalized communities, helping Kenyan women and men prosper by helping them develop economic sustainability to improve their quality of life.

Read our Media Report

Design Question

The design question we created after learning about WILK was, “How can we produce content in a way that inspires the audience to directly engage with WILK’s organization?" This design question was developed after we realized the importance of storytelling and producing unique content that our audience could feel connected to. After meeting with our community partner, we learned that contributors often feel disconnected from WILK’s efforts in Kenya and in turn, this leads to low engagement on their socials. In creating this design question, we wanted the audience to have the ability to recognize that their donations will have a lasting positive impact on the community and to further connect them to WILK’s mission without being present on the grounds in Kenya.

Our overall goal is to story-tell by showing empathy, to build trust, and alongside all that is a culture around WILK. A culture of people who are trying to help, to change, to improve lives in Kenya. We understand we are communicating for WILK on behalf of the people they serve, so in order to truly impact them, we have to communicate with the donor in mind in order to show that we are doing our part to help them, empower them, give them what they need to live good lives of dignity.

Strategic Thinking

In determining how to best improve WILK’s social media, we began by comparing mentor accounts like @wateraiduk, @thirstproject and @charitywater on Instagram that held a similar mission and captivating presence. Through these mentor accounts, we successfully examined and contrasted the effectiveness of various media in capturing audience attention while conveying information about their organization's mission. Combining inspiration from these accounts helped us to brainstorm ideas to create informative content in the form of graphics, reels, and posts to help promote WILK’s story and encourage their audience to donate.

Additionally, we applied the concept of the “Golden Circle” by author Simon Sinek, a widely adopted organizational framework embraced by notable leaders, inventors, and organizations. In this model, we look into the importance of identifying the 'why' behind actions or organizations. The Golden Circle introduces a communication strategy that discusses a core purpose, belief, and cause, progressing from the innermost why—questioning the fundamental reasons for our actions—then outlining how we will accomplish them, and finally defining what we aim to achieve. We determined WILK’s “why” is that they exist to spark personal, economic, and community development in marginalized communities; believing in helping Kenya women and men prosper, and building economic sustainability to improve their quality of life. Using this, we were able to progress our knowledge of the organization and capture the most important and impactful information to target in our content creation. These strategic thinking processes paired with bi-weekly meetings with Aaron helped to drive forward our creation process; allowing us to provide various different design options and wording for feedback before posting.

Co-Creation

In collaboration with Water is Life Kenya, our group had bi-weekly meetings with our community partner, Aaron Lemma. In these calls, we kept him updated on the projects we were working on. When creating content for the WILK Instagram, our group worked very closely with Aaron, and from these meetings we developed a distinct brand guide that we all agreed to follow, including fonts, colors, and graphics. After presenting this to our community partner, we created posts following these design elements in order to stay consistent.

We began by individually making posts, so our partner had several options to choose from. We would set time aside outside of class to create our own designs, so we could dedicate time to critiquing each other’s work in class. With each member of the group coming prepared with their own designs, we were then able to collaborate more effectively as a team in order to execute the best version of these designs. This would further lead to us co-designing based off of our original creations. This technique allowed us to expand WILK’s brand and create one distinct vision. Next semester, we believe that it would be more beneficial to meet with the community partner more frequently. This way, the group would be able to receive quicker feedback from their community partner.

Impact Story

Throughout this semester, Water is Life Kenya focused on maintaining a consistent posting schedule with a focus on their programs such as Livestock as Business (LAB), Hope for Widows, and Clean Water Projects, in order to aid in creating a successful Giving Tuesday campaign with a focus on Women Empowerment. In terms of boosting engagement, we have been creating and editing reels with relevant hashtags (such as #watermatters #waterislife #kenya) and captions. This semester, one of the biggest things we learned was that with social media, it takes time to build. That mentioned, we allocated a lot of time in order to learn about WILK and their programs so we could further share their message. Once we became familiar, we partnered with each other and Aaron to create an array of graphics for the Giving Tuesday Campaign. Our graphics served as inspiration and strong starting points which later developed into final versions of content for the campaign.

Reels

Episode 1: “Meet the Maasai People”

Tune in to learn more about the process of retrieving clean water, the harmful effects of dirty water on the Maasai community, and why water truly is life.

Episode 2: “What is LAB?”

Tune in to learn more about our Livestock As a Business (LAB) programs and how they help the Maasai people breed healthier livestock to increase family incomes.

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