Make the invisible… visible.

Why Educational Communications is Essential to Your Branding Strategy

Every business lives within a community. What happens when the community is your client, but you are invisible? How do customers know who you are, that you are part of the community and that they rely on your business as much as you rely on them?

Ontario Clean Water Agency (OCWA) has this cloak of invisibility. They operate and maintain over 800 municipal water systems and yet few of the 4.5 million people who rely on OCWA know they exist. 

OCWA has to compete with multi-national companies to provide clean water and wastewater treatment and services to Ontario municipalities. However, as a crown agency, it can only break even. It cannot lobby customers like a private company and its cost structure is geared to the salaries of government employees. 

OCWA also had no brand recognition. Residents turn on the tap to fill their kettles and flush their toilets without thinking one iota about who or what is making that happen.

OCWA needed to build its brand. It needed to tell the end-user - residential households - about its services, who was making their drinking water and who was cleaning up their sewage. Creating recognition was one of the few ways they could affect the municipalities’ decisions to continue to contract their services. 

The most effective way to communicate the essential work of OCWA was through youth education, so we developed a program that made the invisible, visible, in many tangible ways.

We wanted to tell the story of water in the community and how OCWA shepherds the entire process from lake, river or underground well and back – returning what was used in an improved form – recycling the resource for the better. We called this program OneWater™. 

Our thinking was that if youth understood the story of water in their communities they would go home and tell their households. But more than that, we wanted them to do something about it. Households stand at the centre of the community water cycle. What happens at home effects everything down the line. If we change water use behaviours at home, the entire system benefits, and costs can be better contained.

We put into place a hands-on experiential learning program where youth had to conduct activities that simulated the process of providing clean water and then treating wastewater. We put them in the driver’s seat. And we asked OCWA water operators to work with youth in the process.

Not only did this develop water literacy among youth, but it also personified the OCWA brand. It made the previously abstract OCWA operator a real person in PPE at the students’ desks. Youth saw their home water systems in terms of the Ellen’s and Matt’s whom they now knew as real people and who had this dirty job of cleaning up a mess in the sewers if the wrong things were flushed. Youth identified with their orange-garbed mentors and wanted to help them. Now, they knew that precious clean water had to be “made” – and they better respected what went down the toilets – only the 3 Ps (pee, poo and paper.) 

Preventing residents from pouring their fats, oils and grease down the sink was also tackled. Even the environment teacher thought it was okay to pour the stuff down the sink as long as you flushed it down with hot water. No one was aware that as soon as it  cooled, it coagulated and clogged the pipes and pumps. Pulling a pump costs around $30,000. As one municipal representative told us, “If I can prevent that, I can build a skateboard park.” 

And OneWater™ did change behaviours. Nearly 80% of those surveyed said they had changed their household behaviours – better water conservation and fats now put safely in the food recycling, and not down the drain.

Youth education engages households in ways that change residents’ behaviour. It helps youth know what you know. And it closes the loop on community. Businesses are closer to their community when the community knows the “why” of the business. And they now know that OCWA stands for much more than water. OCWA’s brand became a person. And the cloak of invisibility has been lifted.