What happens when one of the world’s most innovative nonprofits starts thinking like a modern brand?
In this episode of That’s What I Call Marketing, Conor Byrne sits down with Brady Josephson, VP of Growth and Brand at Charity: Water, to talk about building a brand that competes for hearts, minds and wallets in the same arena as Nike or Netflix, but without their budgets.
They discuss how nonprofits can use brand tracking, future demand thinking, and marketing mix modelling to grow sustainably; how Charity Water turned trust into a growth engine; and why experimentation, intuition, and creativity matter more than ever.
In partnership with Tracksuit, the always-on brand tracking platform helping nonprofits measure what matters.
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02:45 Brady’s path from teaching to purpose-driven marketing
05:30 The chip-on-the-shoulder moment: “How cute you work in nonprofit”
07:10 Solving the salary and perception problem with two bank accounts
09:00 The birth of Charity Water’s brand: intuition over focus groups
11:00 Proof, storytelling and tech: building Waterproof and donor trust
12:45 Rethinking competition — “We’re fighting Nike, not other nonprofits.”
15:00 From paid performance to brand tracking with Tracksuit
17:10 Future demand vs current demand: lessons from a plateau
19:45 Building brand salience when no one’s “in market”
21:00 How to run brand building on a limited budget
23:00 Experimentation, hypothesis thinking, and the difference between try, pilot, and test
27:20 Channel mix: why dominance matters more than diversification
31:10 TV, YouTube and MMM — what really drives donor acquisition
34:00 Segmentation, salience and Byron Sharp for nonprofits
36:00 The nonprofit plateau: learning from data, not instinct
37:10 AI, automation and the next frontier of giving
38:00 Brand trust and the simplicity of doing one thing brilliantly
41:00 Purpose, mastery, and marketing that matters
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