IA-AWWA adds ‘color for a cause’

It’s a tight budget season for many, and that often means important programs get a haircut.

At the Iowa Section of American Water Works Association, section leaders offered a hair color instead.

Each year, their budget includes allocations for programs that support attracting and developing water professionals, including Water Equation, summer internships, student chapters of AWWA, summer programs for high-schoolers, and community college scholarships for water and wastewater operators.

“As our costs increase and our budget gets tighter, we knew we needed to come up with a creative way to fund some of these because in a budget, those are the kinds of things that end up getting cut and we didn’t want to do that,” said Julie Sievers, immediate past chair of IA-AWWA.

Instead, Section leaders (Sievers, Chair Jon Harger, and Chair-Elect Christina Murphy) put out a call for donations, and they added a twist: They would dye their hair if they met fundraising goals.

Called “Color for a Cause,” the fundraiser was part of the Section’s annual conference. They collected donations online prior to and during the meeting: $500 meant they had to dye their hair one color; $1,000 meant they’d have to dye it in stripes.

“[Section members] thought it was the funniest thing,” Sievers said, “and we brought in funding from people other than conference attendees.” The Section website kept a tally for each officer, so visitors could see how close they were to the goals (and dying their hair).

Because the fundraiser was online, Section members shared it with their colleagues. Anyone — even those not attending the conference — could donate. “I found out afterward that my husband contributed,” Sievers said and laughed.

They raised $1,900 collectively, which exceeded their expectations and meant all three had to dye their hair — Sievers, green; Murphy, red; and Harger, pink. It also means that the Iowa Section can continue to fund each of its programmatic causes.

“We were pleasantly surprised we could do this,” Sievers said. “It generated a lot of fun and a lot of conversation.”

An unexpected benefit, too, is that at the conference, while they announced the donations and allowed the crowd to choose the dye colors for each officer, more people visited the silent auction — which benefits Water for People — than ever before.

“It set a record, so we were thrilled with that,” she said.