Food & Water Watch has spent 20 years partnering with communities across the country to protect everyone’s right to safe food, clean water, and a livable climate. Their digital program powers a high-volume mix of advocacy, fundraising, and email marketing.

Katy Kiefer, Digital Director, shares how Engaging Networks equipped her team to run sophisticated, high-volume advocacy campaigns — and win.

The Challenge: Disconnected Tools in a High-Stakes Environment

“We were looking for a platform that was all-in-one, so advocacy, fundraising, and email marketing all together. We went through a whole process of vetting lots of different options, and pretty unanimously decided that Engaging Networks would be the best fit for us.”
– Katy Kiefer, Digital Director, Food & Water Watch

Food & Water Watch’s digital program had outgrown its infrastructure. Advocacy, fundraising, and email marketing were running on separate systems, and the fragmentation created frequent friction. Data didn’t flow cleanly between platforms, workflows were slow, and they weren’t getting the responsiveness or support they needed to keep improving.

For an organization that mobilizes supporters around fast-moving policy threats, disconnected tools aren’t just an inconvenience; they’re a liability.

The Solution: Sophisticated Advocacy Campaigns Powered by a Unified Platform

Food & Water Watch migrated to Engaging Networks to bring their entire digital program under one roof. Advocacy, fundraising, and email marketing are now unified in a single system, with a native Salesforce integration that keeps supporter data current and accessible across the organization.

With nearly 300,000 supporters on their email list, the ability to segment audiences and tailor messaging at scale is critical. Engaging Networks makes it straightforward to target different audiences based on their history with the organization — whether they’re a first-time action-taker, a frequent activist, or a donor.

“We do a lot of conditional content and it just makes it much easier to do that,” said Katy. “It doesn’t take hours in the day to set up something that could be complicated in other systems.”

Food & Water Watch put these new capabilities to work almost immediately — running a time-sensitive, multi-channel advocacy campaign to defend a critical clean water regulation from repeal.

Defending Clean Water Under Trump

In early 2025, Republican congressional leadership signaled plans to repeal the Lead and Copper Rule Improvements — a Biden-era regulation requiring lead service line replacement for millions of homes across the country — using the Congressional Review Act (CRA).

The CRA gave Congress a narrow 60-day window to act, after which the rule could no longer be repealed using that mechanism. Critically, a successful CRA repeal would also have prevented any substantially similar rule from being enacted in the future. Food & Water Watch made it a priority to preserve this rule and protect clean drinking water.

They only needed two or three Republican House representatives to break ranks and vote against a CRA repeal. Their digital toolkit for the campaign included:

• Email-to-target and call-to-target actions: Pressuring members of Congress through emails and phone calls was a key pillar of this campaign. Engaging Networks maintains a database of congressional representatives and their contact information, making it easy to mobilize supporters and ensure messages are delivered to the right targets.
• Warming up the audience with a survey: Before the campaign launched, Food & Water Watch surveyed their list about the policy threats they expected under the new administration. By the time the first action email went out, supporters were already primed to engage with this specific issue. The first send achieved a 2.4% action rate.
• Conditional content: With a high volume of emails in a short timeframe, the team wanted every message to feel relevant to the person receiving it. Supporters who had already taken action got a version that acknowledged what they’d done and asked them to take the next step. First-time action-takers and previous donors received their own tailored asks.
• SMS for urgent actions: Alongside email, Food & Water Watch ran a weekly “RESIST” text messaging group for supporters who wanted to receive urgent action alerts.
• Funneling advocacy into fundraising: For World Water Day, Food & Water Watch paired their annual fundraising ask with an advocacy action — and saw double the typical post-action donation rate.
• Seamless integration with offline actions: The digital campaign ran in parallel with offline efforts, including local rallies, in-person petition deliveries, press outreach, and face-to-face meetings with congressional targets. People who took action online were invited to attend in-person actions as well. Engaging Networks provided a unified system to track supporters’ engagement across all levels of the campaign.

Their campaign was a success: On May 8, 2025, the 60-day CRA window expired and the repeal was off the table.

“We won that effort, which is really exciting, and Engaging Networks played a big role in being able to have the tools that we needed to communicate on a mass scale about it,” said Katy.

A Partner for Ongoing Mission Success

The Lead and Copper Rule campaign was proof of what the platform could do — but for Kiefer, the ongoing support and responsiveness have been just as important as any specific features.

“There was a lot of help along the way [during onboarding] and, ongoing, there’s been a lot of communication and back and forth,” said Katy. “It feels like we have more of a partner with Engaging Networks to be able to make sure we’re getting the most out of the tool.”

That partnership also means feedback actually goes somewhere. When the team identifies something that would make the platform work better for them, it gets heard — a meaningful contrast with previous vendor relationships.

“We’ve had a lot of trouble with other vendors who don’t tend to listen to client feedback as well,” she said. “We’ve been really happy with the amount of feedback we’ve been able to give and the responsiveness to what we’ve asked for in the tool.”

Key Takeaways

• Food & Water Watch replaced disconnected advocacy, fundraising, and email tools with a single unified platform, eliminating data silos and improving team efficiency.
• Engaging Networks’ email builder, conditional content, and segmentation tools have reduced production time significantly — making it faster to reach the right supporters with the right message.
• A strong Salesforce integration ensures supporter data stays current and usable across the organization.
• Responsive, ongoing support gave the team a true partner rather than a platform they had to figure out on their own.
• With the right tools in place, Food & Water Watch was able to run a coordinated, multi-channel advocacy campaign that helped protect the Lead Out of Water Rule from repeal.