WaterAid
Turning Christmas dinner into a lesson about what happens when there's no clean water
Challenge
Christmas is the most competitive fundraising moment of the year — a period where charities compete for attention against an avalanche of emotional appeals and festive messaging. For WaterAid, the challenge was even harder: making a global issue feel urgent and relevant to UK audiences at a time when research shows people are increasingly focused on causes closer to home.
With 1 in 10 people worldwide still lacking access to clean water, WaterAid needed a bold, disruptive idea that would cut through the clutter, make an abstract global issue tangible, and drive donations during their most critical fundraising window.
Strategy
We knew that if WaterAid was going to break through at Christmas, a distant global issue needed to be anchored in something deeply familiar, culturally shared, and emotionally resonant.
Christmas dinner provided that entry point.
The strategy was built on a simple but uncomfortable truth: Christmas dinner cannot exist without water — yet we never think about it. Rather than relying on traditional charity storytelling, we chose to remove the very thing we take for granted. By dramatising Christmas without water, we could make its absence immediate, physical and impossible to ignore.
Idea
We created The Driest Christmas Dinner Ever — a fully dehydrated Christmas dinner, available to purchase through the WaterAid Shop, with every drop of water removed.
Working with a specialist food experiential company, we produced over 100 bespoke dehydrated Christmas dinners — complete with delectably dry turkey slices, parched potatoes and a homogeneous glob of gravy dust. The packaging deliberately borrowed the indulgent language of premium food advertising, applying it to something desperately stark. High-impact studio imagery captured the meal plated on a festive table setting — juxtaposing British Christmas abundance with the reality of global water poverty.
The campaign was delivered across four integrated channels:
The news story — media outreach centred on the dehydrated dinner's launch, supported by original consumer research on low awareness of global water poverty and culturally resonant angles around the divisiveness of Christmas dinner traditions
Media and influencer seeding — 30 media titles and 50 influencers and content creators received meals, all secured entirely organically. Participants included Paloma Faith, Big Zuu and Vanessa Feltz — many of whom explained the issue directly and donated themselves, demonstrating genuine engagement rather than transactional posting
Pro-bono OOH — industry relationships secured pro-bono digital out-of-home placements across multiple high-footfall London locations, including Waitrose in Kensington — deliberately juxtaposing festive abundance with extreme scarcity
The WaterAid Shop — the dinner was available to purchase directly, with a clear donation call to action embedded across all coverage and social content
Impact
330 million total earned media reach — more than double the KPI of 150 million
72 pieces of coverage including 20 broadcast hits across TV and radio
96% of coverage referenced the dehydrated dinner; 94% included a donation CTA
514,000 organic video views with a 4.2% average engagement rate, against a 2.5% charity benchmark
81% influencer conversion rate from organic outreach
£383,000 raised in donations during the two-week campaign window — a 106% increase on the previous month
33oM
earned media reach£383,000
raised in 2 weeks106%
increase in donations