Everyone wants to make a difference, but few people actually go out of their way to do it. Sure, we’ll pop a few coins in the collection tin and we’ll wear our jeans/boardies/pyjamas/red noses when the day calls for it but that’s generally where our buck stops.
Meanwhile, three bright university students discovered that 900 million people in the world don’t have access to safe drinking water and that we Aussies spend a whopping $600 million on bottle water every.single.year so they decided to actually do something about it.
Setting up a social enterprise back in 2008, Thankyou began by selling bottled water but have now branched out to other household items we already buy every single week. Helping disadvantaged people just by buying things already in your trolley? Certainly seems like the easiest way for a lazy person to make a difference in someone else’s life. We caught up with the co-founder of Thankyou Daniel Flynn, the Victorian Young Australian of the Year for 2014 and our first Pedestrian Coach of the year, to chat social enterprise and making a difference.
Why did you chose a social enterprise over setting up a charity?
From day one, we loved the idea of empowering people to change the world through a simple purchase in their everyday lives – the idea of making an impact through buying an everyday product. Because of this, we decided to start a social enterprise, a business that exists for a social cause. We’ve always loved what charities do, but there are already so many fantastic existing charities doing great work. As a social enterprise, the idea was that we would work with these charities to implement our projects, because they are the proven experts in development. Our aim was to partner with the best in order to implement great development projects and achieve as much impact as possible. Our current project partners include Red Cross, Oxfam and World Vision.
Can you give us a quick breakdown as to where the money you raise goes?
As mentioned earlier, we work with reputable charities to implement our projects. How it works is that any registered NGO can submit a project proposal to us, and as long as the NGO is a signatory of the ACFID code of the conduct and providing that the project meets our strict requirements, we’ll consider funding the project. If all the boxes are ticked, we’ll then provide funding to the project partner for the project and after that, we track the progress of the project through detailed and regular reporting from the project partner. Through selling our food, body care and water products, we’re able to fund a range of water, food and health and hygiene projects. Our food range includes premium muesli, muesli bar and oats products with each box sold providing one week’s worth of access to short-term food aid for someone in need, plus funding for a long-term sustainable project. Our body care range includes hand wash and hand lotion products, with each bottle contributing to providing health and hygiene training for one person, and our bottled water products provide at least one months’ worth of water to someone in need. We allow you to see the exact impact of your purchase through our unique reporting program, Track Your Impact. To date, Thankyou has helped 67,896 people gain access to safe water across projects in nine different countries and has also provided 60,388 people with health and hygiene training across India and Myanmar.
Why did you choose to start with water first?
At the age of 19 years old, our MD and co-founder Dan came across the World Water Crisis. He discovered the alarming fact that 900 million people at that time didn’t have access to safe water, while at the same time Australians spend $600 million each year on bottled water. He and a group of friends got together and dreamed up a business idea that incorporated these two extremes – a bottled water company that would fund water projects overseas. While water was our focus for the first four years of our journey, the truth is that we never saw Thankyou as being just a bottled water company; we knew we’d eventually branch out into other products in order to tackle other huge global issues. Throughout the early years, this began to really hit home as we visited countries like Cambodia and Kenya, and we saw that there was a real need for solutions such as short-term and long-term food aid and health and hygiene training. It was this realisation that lead us to eventually launch our food and body care ranges in July 2013.
How long did it take from that initial idea of starting a water company to selling your first bottle of water?
We officially launched the business in August 2008. It took around 4-5 months to turn the initial idea into reality. During that time, we had to register the business, find a factory and a bottle mould, as well as find distributors to take the product on.
After campaigning on social media, you finally got Coles and Woolworths to stock your products. What’s next?
This year our focus is to really on build brand awareness and see Thankyou become a household name in Australia. Essentially, the more people who know about our brand and buy our products, the more people we can help. We’re also looking at expanding our current product ranges with some new products, so watch this space.
What’s been the hardest thing so far?
The biggest challenge we’ve faced was the initial launch of Thankyou Water back in 2008. We were told that we would need hundreds of thousands of dollars to launch the product, which was pretty tough for a group of university students to hear! But by getting people to believe in what we were doing enough to get behind it, we formed the right partnerships and relationships that helped us get the idea off the ground. By some kind of miracle, we were able to launch the business without the amount of cash we were told we’d need.
At what point were you able to stop and think, “wow, we’re actually making a difference”?
When we first headed over to visit the projects we’d funded in Cambodia. Seeing the water solutions we’d helped fund, and meeting the people who had benefited from the solutions was an incredible experience. It was a great feeling to actually see the result of what we were doing, and it inspired us to work even harder to drive the growth of Thankyou.
You’ve achieved a lot in the past five years, where do you hope to be in another five years?
At the end of the day, we want to help millions of individual people with safe water, food aid and health and hygiene training. Our motivation is impact, and it’s really the thing that drives us to grow Thankyou. In line with that, our aim is to become a household name in Australia so that more people buy our products which will then help us impact more and more people in need.
If you’d like to hear more from the brains behind Thankyou, sign up to get coached by the trio.
