When it comes to doing good, most people are keen to help but sometimes they don’t know how to help. So we needed to create an easy way for them to get involved and help Waves For Water bring access to clean water to others in need.

An animation made only with annotations that can run on top of any YouTube video and empower them to broadcast a message to help people. First, we created the animation on the YouTube annotations panel using lots and lots of text-boxes, speech-bubbles and spotlights. Then, we developed a script to compile the annotations into a bookmarklet. Now anyone can add them to their video with only a click.

Many YouTube users (including famous video bloggers, professional surfers and even Barcelona FC’s Neymar) added our annotations to their videos to support Waves For Water’s project to bring access to clean water to 100,000 people on World Water Day (March 22nd). From the moment they added the annotations, we started tracking their videos’ view count and the sum of all is now resulting in over 1 million impressions of Annotations For Water. This certainly helped Waves For Water raise the funds used in the project (US$72,000 – source: http://www.wavesforwater.org/project/WWD)