The Miracle Machine turns water into wine in just three days! The only hiccup, it’s a hoax, a hoax that garnered over 500m impressions for the non-profit Winetowater.org. We talk with Chris Noble of Cause Media & Studio Good, about what we can learn from creating the press wave and how to gather usable data.

The True Miracle from The Miracle Machine on Vimeo.

Example of Google.com/trends showing searches for “World Water Day”.

Episode 5

This is Using the Whole Whale a podcast that brings you stories about data and technology in the non-profit world. My name is George Weiner, your host, and the chief whaler of wholewhale.com. Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 1: It’s March 22 and I have got an amazing thing to report on. Apparently there is a device, follow me now, there is a device that can turn water into wine in three days. I mean jump on Kickstarter, get to it now. We’re gonna devote, y’know, the next 17 podcasts to this incredible device. I know I read about it on CNN, read about it on Time, on New York Post, on so many major platforms, on Huffington Post, so this must be true.

I really hope that you have not only heard of the Wine-to-Water Machine, but also the fact that it was a fake and this came out about a week ago. And the, the fake was about actually about drawing attention to an amazing organization, winetowater.org. Which does, in fact, sell wine to support their water efforts in, in under-developed countries.

But how do you think about something like this as a way of bringing a non-profit to a global stage to get more attention?

When you’re thinking about the media, it’s, it’s tough, it’s hard to control, of course, and so I look at it as, you can either ride the wave. Meaning today actually is World Water Day. Happy World Water Day. Or you can create the wave. It is significantly more difficult to create the wave to create your own sort of newsworthy stories that go out and draw attention to what you’re doing.

And in this interview that I did at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in March, we’re talking to Chris Noble who is doing good in his company was able to be a part of this marketing campaign, that convinced a significant amount of media outlets that this device existed, and then they announced again that this was, in fact, a hoax but to draw attention to winetowater.org. So, let’s hear the story of how they executed this and what are some of the data points that came out of it.

[pause 0:02:30 — 0:02:34]

Speaker 1: Brilliant. We are here at NTEN 2014 Conference for Non-Profits and Technology. My name is George Weiner and I’m here with a guy named Chris Noble. Chris, who are you? What do you do?

Speaker 2: Well, actually George, I do really whatever needs doing, depending on the day.

Speaker 1: at least a company.

Speaker 2: Exactly. My actual title is CEO of Causemedia Group. We’re a collection of digital agencies that work primarily in the social good sector bringing brands and causes, and occasionally celebrities together to both fight for a good cause and win consumers over to new business.

Speaker 1: Brilliant. And so you were telling me about th