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WeDrink’s First Appearance
by Andrew
A few weeks ago WeDrink partnered up with Thirst Aid Live, a promotional company with similar goals of addressing the Global Water Crisis, and made plans for visiting a number of joint-effort weekend events. So, 7am Saturday I hit the road with my mapquest directions to the Atlanta Underground.
It was the Go-Green expo in downtown Atlanta, and close to a dozen other regional Green Businesses (most of whom I got to meet, and were all great people) also took part, setting up similar booths, all to the background of live music.
However, it also happened to be an outdoor-ish event located at the epicenter of a Vietnam-scene-from-Forrest-Gump sized monsoon that afternoon… After raining for the first 4 hours, the festival never really recovered, and about ¾ of the people that actually showed up were drunkards from downtown Atlanta. In addition, our manufacturer had messed up about half of our bottles, and our credit card machine decided to stop working.
I had good conversations with 4 people, and sold 1 bottle.
When I finally got home late that evening, I was definitely in one of the often-called “entrepreneurial low” moments. In fact, it was probably the lowest I’ve felt in the entire roller coaster of running WeDrink.
Dragging into my room, I noticed my roommate had left on the desk some mail I’d gotten that afternoon. It was a letter, from PlayPumps.
“Dear Friends of PlayPumps International,We would like to extend our appreciation to you for supporting PlayPumps International’s efforts to bring clean drinking water to children, families, and communities in Africa. Your generosity and support, in the amount of $290.86, in support of the WeDrink campaign, will help us bring the life-changing gift of clean water that will lead to improvements in health, education, gender equality, and economic development.”
It continued for a few more thoughtful paragraphs, and was signed by Shudine Covel, the Program Coordinator.
We had sent PlayPumps their portion of our first charitable distribution a couple weeks ago. It wasn’t much, being from just our first couple months of sales. (side note: it’s still was more than Ethos Water gives to charity after selling over 5800 of their bottles)
But when I read the letter, everything turned around. I remembered why I was doing this, why I needed to make WeDrink a success. It was more than just one weekend, and I wasn’t going to let awful weather and a series of other compounding misfortunes make me give up.
WeDrink will succeed. Collaborative Micro-Philanthropy will succeed. Even if it takes years, we will change the way businesses, and ourselves as individuals, think about charitable donations.
