Mark Tiele Westra and Jesse
We are working on a series of do-it-yourself projects to involve yourself and your existing social networks, hopefully without moving too far away from traditional fundraising models of raising money by getting out of your comfort zones, but hopefully a lot more fun.
The festival toilets.
We worked closely with our partner Earth Water to drive donations at distinctive toilets at the Parade Festival, featuring real water and sanitation projects like this one and this one, that people could donate to on the spot. This model can easily be reproduced at lots of the festivals happening around the UK.
So why not your local festival? At the Parade, it looked something like this:
We are working on a way to involve artists in the design of the toilet entrances. These toilets were designed by local artist Vincent Wijers of Circus of Thoughts.
How to get involved
Do you know someone who knows someone who is involved with a festival? Would you ask them to have funkier toilets, and while doing that raise funds for a wide range of water and sanitation projects around the world?
Akvo creates and shares internet and phone-based tools that help people fund and follow many thousands of new water and sanitation projects. Money flows quickly to field projects because donors choose what to fund, and follow progress online. People can use these storylines to build exciting new campaigns and networks.
Akvo provides Really Simple Reporting and the Akvopedia, a wiki-type knowledge database of technology around water and sanitation. On our site you can get widgets of individual projects as well as projects grouped by country, continent, partner etc which can easily be embedded on websites and in blogs, as here and here.
Akvo Widget for Jointhepipe.org
Organisations such as Aqua for All can sign up to Akvo and you can fundraise for their projects.
We will provide you with a presentation pack – either on paper, as pdf, power point slides or multimedia on CD and online. The finished festival toilets reflect the unique work Akvo does, with various projects from the database visualised on screens and doors.
Akvo will then take care of the installation and provide people to staff the toilets, however you can volunteer your time there, fundraise, be the toilet attendant, you can involve your friends and other volunteers you can recruit, or not, depending on their sense of humour.
At the Parade festival we have raised EUR 31,000 in the 8 weeks the festival was travelling through the Netherlands, with a total of 270,000 visitors.