Qualy #80 - The four pillars of charity: water that helped it overcome the stigma of nonprofits and become successful

**Peter Attia** (0:05)
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What I think is elegant about the way you've done it is you've literally separated the financial streams.

**Scott Harrison** (1:10)
Yeah, they get audited separately. By keeping them in different numbers.

**Peter Attia** (1:13)
That is so brilliant.

**Scott Harrison** (1:14)
It's not fungible.

**Peter Attia** (1:14)
No, that is so brilliant.

**Scott Harrison** (1:16)
And we took it a step farther than Robin Hood, because I just, I love like black and white, before and after. Like I just, I don't do well with gray. So I said, well, if we're gonna be out there, I'll talk to you about-

**Peter Attia** (1:26)
That is the theme of your life, Scott. You do not, despite the fact that you're sitting there in a gray sweatshirt right now, you do not do well in gray.

**Scott Harrison** (1:34)
So you'll like this. I say, well, I can't be up there talking about 100% unless we also pay back all the credit card fees.
So from day one and to this day, if you went online right now, you pulled out your American Express, and you go to charitywater.org, and you give 100 bucks, I wish-

**Peter Attia** (1:50)
MX gets 3% of that.

**Scott Harrison** (1:51)
You got it.
So I get 97 But what did you give?

**Peter Attia** (1:56)
You gave 100

**Scott Harrison** (1:57)
So what do you expect? $100 to go to the field. So in the other bank accounts, and I can talk about how we do that later and all the trials and that, but we actually pay back that $3, and we send your $100, your intended $100 to the field. So that was pillar number one. Pillar number two was then, when you have two bank accounts, I just realized, okay, we've just created a non-fungible, non-black hole scenario. So why can't we use technology to track these dollars as they go out and just show people where they landed? So if we were going to build a well in Malawi, we could say your money went here or to Bangladesh or to India or to Cambodia or to Bolivia.
And I lucked into meeting the Google Earth founder when I was starting Charity Water. I met him at a conference and they were building Google Earth and Google Maps, and I just realized I was going to be able, from day one, to geolocate every water project using their free platform. And all it was going to cost me was $50 handheld GPS devices. I think they were Garmin devices at the time. You could go buy a Best Buy.
And we would be able to fund a water project that helped people get clean water, turn on a GPS device, take a picture of the GPS, take a picture of the project, and then upload it and say, this is proof. But you'd be able to see a satellite image of your well.
So if 100% was the first pillar, proof then became the second pillar, and proof would look very different in many different ways. We would have, hopefully, myriad ways of being creative and connecting people to what their money did.
The third thing that I wanted to do differently was I wanted the brand to feel unlike any other charity that I'd ever encountered. I wanted to build an epic brand, a beautiful brand, an imaginative, inspiring brand. And when I saw most charities, I saw marketing that I didn't want any part of. I saw shame and guilt and almost toxic marketing. And you may remember the commercials from the 80s and the 90s with Sally Struthers and the flies that land on the kids' faces in slow motion as they look up and lock their sad eyes with the camera. And then the 800 number slowly creeps across the screen and you give, and you give out of, and you give out of like shame often or guilt for feeling that you're in your comfortable living room and these kids in Africa have flies crawling on their face.