08 Jul 1st Annual Operation Hydration Water Drive

Operation Hydration
2016

Happy Friday, all! Today, we wanted to share the outcome of our first annual ‘Operation Hydration’ Water Drive!

Giving back to the community is so, so, so important. It has always been a passion of ours. This year, we decided to truly make it more of a cornerstone in our business. Operation Hydration is the first event we’ve promoted as our own, and we fully intend to make it a yearly event!

Why water?

Hello, we live in “The Valley of the Sun”. When we took a moment to think about how important the accessibility to water truly is, one group particularly stood out to us: the homeless.

A quick look at the numbers should tell you everything you need to know:

When we took a good, hard look at the numbers. We couldn’t believe it! How could we not have known our community has over 25,000 homeless? Almost 40% were in families? As a family that makes a living off providing our friends and families with the opportunity to find a home, this hit us hard. We knew that if we were going to start a charitable campaign, the best place to start was right here.

How we did it

Once we had the idea of donating water, it didn’t take long for us to get connected with the Phoenix Rescue Mission. The Mission is passionate about helping people in our community, and has amazing reach to the homeless community. They offer all kinds of solutions to the afflicted, including shelter and emergency services, women and children services, and addiction recovery solutions.

Phoenix Rescue Mission has many needs to fulfill their vast array of services, and bottled water is surely one of them. Luckily, Costco Business Wholesale in Phoenix makes it easy to purchase 40 bottle cases for just $2.99. Costco then arranges for the mission to pick up donated water by the pallet (that’s 48 cases of water!) at their convenience. The rest was easy!

The Goal

500 Cases in two weeks sounded like a good, round number to us.

Between June 15th and July 1st, we launched an all out guerrilla-like marketing campaign towards all of our friends, family, and clients, to get the word out! We shared that our community had this need, the word spread, and by July 1st, we just exceeded our goal of $1,500, which equates to 500 cases of water! To really up the ante, the two of us personally matched the first 100 cases.

In total, we contributed 600 cases directly to the Phoenix Rescue Mission, and had 12 individual cases leftover to hand out directly to the homeless on the streets of Phoenix.

We loved this amazing opportunity. It truly brought us closer to our community, and made us so grateful for our many blessings that we often over look. We can’t wait to do this again, next summer!

Special thanks to all those that donated, including My Home Group Real Estate; Eric Kilstrom with VIP Mortgage, who helped us collect funds online;  PrimeSource Printing, who donated beautiful signage for the office drop offs; and everyone else who contributed!