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Your Water Is Our Promise: How Coachella Valley Water District Launched Its New Public Relations Campaign
The CVWD employees depicted on this billboard working on a late night emergency pipeline repair are all local Coachella Valley residents.
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data for policy decisions. The committee was formed by a group of water agencies to try to better understand data.
Municipal Water Leader: Please tell our readers about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
Katie Evans: CVWD was founded in 1918, and until 2018, most of our outreach focused on water conservation. In 2018, we pulled back the conservation outreach and launched a 100th anniversary campaign. After that, in 2019, we saw an opportunity to refocus our efforts and use research to make our communication strategy more intentional, strategic, and effective. We hired a public opinion polling firm and did extensive customer opinion research to find out more about our customers’ attitudes, their perceptions of CVWD, which communications methods were most effective, and the strategies we might employ for improving our messaging. Our research included two focus groups, a survey in both English and Spanish, and follow-up communications. We found out that a lot of people knew what CVWD was. About 63 percent approved of the job CVWD was doing, 7.4 percent thought we were doing a bad job, and 29.6 percent didn’t know. We were focused on the 29.6 percent who weren’t
oachella Valley Water District (CVWD) provides domestic water, sanitation, recycled water, agricultural water, storm water protection, groundwater replenishment, and water quality conservation services to 300,000 people across a 1,000‑square-mile service area in Southern California. Several years ago, CVWD decided to revamp its communications strategy, which had previously focused primarily on water conservation, to try to meaningfully improve public perceptions of the agency and to emphasize its close connections with the local community. In this interview, CVWD Director of Communications and Conservation Katie Evans tells us about the ideas behind the strategy, how it has been implemented, and its results.
14 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | January 2022
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PHOTOS COURTESY OF CVWD.
Katie Evans: I have worked in the water industry since 2008, primarily in communications. I took over as CVWD’s director of communications near the end of 2017, as we were moving toward our 100th anniversary. I’m also the steering committee chair for the California Data Collaborative, which is focused not on communications, but on using water
Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about how CVWD developed its Your Water Is Our Promise campaign.
