video transcript

WaterForward is a viral fundraising campaign that aims to help increase access to clean drinking water through social media. Devised by Alex Tew, the creator of The Million Dollar Homepage and Bebo co-founder Michael Birch, the fundraising effort taps the power of online connections in a novel way. This video was created to explain the concept. NATURAL SOUND OF ONLINE VIDEO "There area a billion people in the world living without clean water. Soon there'll be a billion people in the world using social media. Idea. What if we could get the billion with clean water to help the billion without. With everybody working together, the problem doesn't seem so big. We'll represent all these people in a big online book. A sea of faces. All the people chipping in to end this water crisis and each slot in the book costs ten dollars and 100 percent of the money goes to water projects in developing countries." The funds raised by this campaign will go to support charity: water, a non-profit organization that was started five years ago by former New York nightclub promoter Scott Harrison. SOUNDBITE: Scott Harrison, charity: water founder saying (English): "The problem is this: a billion people around the world, one out of seven people don't have access to clean water and what that looks like is women and children walking hours every day to fetch water from swamps, from ponds, from rivers, from green sources. Sharing water sources with cows and hyenas - unthinkable stuff to us...The irony is that there is water in so many of these communities and it's right under ground. So by hand-digging a well to 15 or 20 metres, bringing in a drilling rig and drilling to 150- 200 metres we can tap into the clean drinking water." To date, charity: water has raised more than 40 million dollars, funding close to 4,300 water projects. Bebo cofounder Michael Birch has been an enthusiastic backer, collaborating with Harrison on a previous fundraising site called MyCharityWater before helping to come up with the idea for WaterForward. SOUNDBITE: Michael Birch, Monkey Inferno founder saying (English) "The concept is that you pay ten dollars to put your friends in a book online so each photo, you're buying a digital good, each photo costs ten dollars. You can put in as many friends in as you like and when you do they get a message saying I've paid it forward to you with ten dollars, now you pay it forward to your friends. So although you may only donate say 50 dollars, you may raise 500 dollars because of that chain effect." Harrison's embrace of technology has paid off. He says 73 percent of charity: water's donations are generated online SOUNDBITE: Scott Harrison, charity: water founder saying (English): "Our issue travels so simply through social media - a billion people don't have clean water, here are the solutions and here's what it looks like when you've helped." WaterForward is still in its early stages, but has already close to 160 thousand dollars...reaching page 32 of the online book...and potentially rewriting the fundraising handbook in the process. Matt Cowan, Reuters.