How charity: water speeds up creative decision-making with Lyssna
We speak with Brady Josephson, VP of Marketing and Growth at charity: water.
Summary
Discover how charity: water uses Lyssna to quickly test creative assets, improve top-of-funnel strategy, and bring more confidence to their paid media campaigns.
charity: water is a leading nonprofit organization on a mission to provide clean and safe drinking water to every person on the planet. We spoke with Brady Josephson, VP of Marketing and Growth, about how they use Lyssna to improve the performance of their marketing campaigns, boost confidence in their creative direction, and make fast, data-informed marketing decisions—while staying lean and cost-conscious.
Challenge
charity: water’s marketing team uses paid media as a primary channel for growth for acquiring monthly donors. With a relatively large budget and an abundance of strong creative assets, they needed a fast, reliable way to determine which creative concepts to prioritize — and avoid wasting valuable resources on the wrong ones.
"When you have a lot of great creative and a relatively big budget, one of the things that you really need to figure out quickly is, what's the right creative, and what should we be spending on?" shared Brady.
Although they had experience with A/B testing and campaign optimization, they recognized these methods didn’t always uncover the "why" behind performance and often led to wasted budget, making it harder to make informed decisions before launching a campaign.
"Unfortunately, a lot of optimizations, especially on paid, don't actually teach you a lot about the why, and they certainly don't predict performance before you start spending," Brady explained.
Their team needed:
A lightweight pretesting tool to evaluate creative before launch.
A fast, intuitive platform that wouldn’t bog down the team.
Access to specific audience segments beyond their superfans.
A cost-effective option suitable for nonprofits.
Take the guesswork out of creative decisions.
Test your concepts with Lyssna’s Preference testing and launch with confidence.
Solution
charity: water turned to Lyssna for fast, real-world feedback about their creative assets before investing heavily in campaigns. With a strong internal creative team producing a wide range of variations, they needed a way to quickly identify which options would perform best. Using Lyssna’s preference testing feature, they could swiftly gather feedback on audience perceptions and make data-backed creative decisions without relying solely on internal opinions.
"We needed a quick, easy way to get some real-world data and information so it wasn't just an opinion fight."
Brady Josephson
VP of Marketing & Growth
Lyssna stood out for its ease of use, speed, and cost-effectiveness, especially compared to larger, more complex (and more expensive) alternatives like Conjointly.
"We don't want to spend a day and fill up more briefs just to do pre-testing. We want to be able to get ideas to pre-test really easily, really quickly." Brady says.
He also values Lyssna’s ability to precisely target specific demographics through the panel—an essential feature for charity: water’s top-of-funnel testing, particularly when evaluating campaign creative with a fresh, unbiased audience.
Rather than using their own audience, they used the Lyssna panel to reach their ideal customer profiles.
“We need to recruit people who don't know very much about us. When we do the profiles and panels, we can get really specific about hearing feedback from a particular group's feedback,” Brady Josephson explained. “For example, we intentionally use the Lyssna panel because it's hard to get a representative sample from our own audience - we'd mostly get superfans, and for top-of-funnel campaigns, that’s not who we’re targeting. We can target exactly who we need, quickly and efficiently, such as those with higher household income oryounger demographics.”
The team primarily uses preference testing, and asks follow-up questions based on the campaign stage and their creative needs.
Validate your creative ideas with real feedback
Use Lyssna’s preference testing to quickly test ideas with your ideal customer profiles. Get fast, actionable feedback without the complexity or high cost of traditional research tools.
Results
Using Lyssna has helped charity: water move faster, boost internal confidence about which creative assets to take to market, and support a more scientific approach to their brand and marketing strategy. With this approach, they've been able to increase awareness in key demographics, improve top of funnel creative performance, and help lower their bottom funnel cost of acquisition.
"It increases confidence and I think that increases speed. When we feel like we don't have to hem and haw – we’ve got six good options, we'll go and run a quick test, and then we'll get down to three. I think it frees up creativity, it frees up creatives, it frees up some discussions.”
Brady Josephson
VP of Marketing & Growth
This has also been instrumental as charity: water leans further into building a data-driven, scientific foundation for brand marketing and top-of-funnel efforts — combining testing with brand tracking and marketing mix modeling to create a more complete picture of their campaign performance.
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