How does finance measure brand? An interview with charity: water

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BRADY: Sarah showed not just how sharp she is, but a real curiosity about marketing. That helped build a lot of trust and respect between our teams. She didn’t just want the numbers—she wanted to understand the why behind them. That’s huge.

And honestly, I think we really bonded in the fires of budgeting. It’s one of the most complex and high-stakes parts of Sarah’s role, and because our team is so paid-heavy, it’s also one of the biggest areas for scrutiny, investment—or cuts.

SARAH: I think budgeting is less “fire” and more “rainbows and flowers,” but... yeah. Brady is wonderful to work with. He’s such an expert in his field, and I’ve been so grateful to learn from him.

We’ve developed a strong working rhythm over time. Every month, we sit down to review revenue results and KPIs. We talk through the nuances of Brady’s strategies, shifts he's making, and how those are reflected in the numbers. It's a consistent back-and-forth, and of course, we do a deep dive during the annual budgeting process to make sure we’re allocating resources as effectively as possible.

Why does charity: water care about brand?

BRADY: Our story probably mirrors a lot of digitally focused, performance-driven brands. Over the past five years, things that used to work suddenly stopped working. It forced us to step back and ask: what are we missing?

Discovering concepts like current demand vs. future demand—and James Hurman’s work specifically—was a turning point. It gave us the language to describe what we were seeing. But we realized our proxy data wasn’t cutting it. So we started using tools like Tracksuit to get better answers—not just backward-looking, but forward-looking too.

We eventually aligned on a five-year growth plan: from a $100M org to a $250M org. Huge leap. When we reverse-engineered that growth with Sarah’s team running the models, it was clear—there’s no way we’d get there doing what we’re doing today. We'd run out of runway.

What actually helped finance get on board with brand?

SARAH: What really helped me get on board were the studies and data Brady brought to the table. Finance people need that—we’re always asking, “What’s the ROI?” Brady did a great job showing trends like rising acquisition costs and helping us ask, “How can we shift this?”

Those insights made a big difference for me and my team.

What if my company doesn't have a Sarah?

BRADY: Yeah, I always say—if you can, find a Sarah.

Okay, maybe not the most practical advice. But really, it’s about understanding that finance isn’t just trying to cut spend. They have a fiduciary responsibility to make smart investments. So it’s on us in marketing to make the case in ways that resonate.

One way we’ve done that is through marketing mix modeling and tools like Tracksuit, which help quantify top-of-funnel brand investments in terms finance can understand. We ran a brand-heavy campaign in March. At first, it didn’t show strong direct ROI. But Tracksuit showed awareness among our target demo rose six points in just a month. That’s a leading indicator—and it matters.

Two years into this journey, nearly a year into intentionally investing in brand, we’re finally starting to see bottom-funnel effects take root. Now we’re asking different questions—not “does this work?” but “how much should we spend, and when?”

How does finance actually measure brand?

SARAH: I mean, first and foremost on the finance side, we're gonna look at the bottom line. So what was, what does revenue look like? What are we investing? How are these things panning out? And some of this we're having to be patient with, right? And so looking at the bottom line, we might see that impact six months a year down the line. So trying to instill that patience as we move forward with the strategy, I think is very important.

I think something Brady and I have also talked a lot about is, you know, we don't wanna create a really rigid set of metrics and expectations around this, so. That like might tell us to turn off brand spend too prematurely before we really see that payoff. And so that's like another piece of the patience that we're always talking about. We want to be really diligent about understanding the results; we definitely don't wanna be too premature in terms of turning off that spend. It's such an important piece of this.

Attribution matters (a lot)

BRADY: Recently, we wanted to change some of our attribution rules. From my side, it was about improving data quality and getting more apples-to-apples comparisons. But Sarah had to weigh the trade-offs: the lift on her team’s side, the downstream impacts.

In the end, we went for it. I think it’s going to be worth it.

SARAH: Yeah, I’m excited about it. It’ll help make the data more aligned across teams—and reduce the translation layer between what finance sees and what marketing sees.

BRADY: That’s part of why I pushed to oversee marketing and revenue growth—so decisions like these feel less biased. Still biased, of course. But less biased.

It also aligns our data infrastructure with what already exists—Google Analytics, our ad platforms—so there’s less manipulation needed. Eventually, everyone should be looking at the same numbers with less confusion.

In conclusion

SARAH: It's undeniable how much our brand has contributed to our growth. And don’t worry—I’ll still be bugging Brady every two seconds about metrics. But yeah, it’s an exciting time. We’re rebuilding our brand muscle and setting ourselves up for long-term growth.

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