Big Head Edik and 140,000 followers. How Vinnytsia Regional Vodokanal became a social media star

Two years ago, Oksana Polishchuk, a communications officer at Vinnytsia Regional Water Utility, was sitting in her office when she saw a post in a local Facebook group that was outraged: someone had allegedly had a tadpole fall out of their tap. Instead of just laughing, Oksana came up with a whole story about Edik the tadpole from the secret laboratories of the US intelligence services, posted it on the water utility's social media page, and in the evening of the same day, several thousand new people subscribed to the page, and well-known brands and national media picked up the story about Edik.

Since then, Oksana has been coming up with interesting stories for the water utility's pages every day and showing the everyday life of its employees, and the number of followers on the company's Facebook page has grown from 1500 to 140,000. LIGA.net spent a day in Vinnytsia and, together with Oksana, visited the sites of sewer breaks and cleaning to understand the phenomenon of communication of Vinnytsia Regional Vodokanal and how sincerity helps build relationships with citizens.

Oksana and all social networks

It's cloudy and raining in Vinnytsia, but it's warm in the car of Andriy Smashniuk, the head of the sewerage network operation service, who everyone calls Andriy Palych, and the phone calls keep ringing. He has the song "I Want to Go Fishing!" on his ringtone, and deep wrinkles on his forehead. He also has a great sense of humor.

Next to the driver sits a 42-year-old slender woman named Oksana, who neither lays pipes nor cleans sewers, but is well versed in all the intricacies of utility work. Oksana knows that the city has 650 kilometers of water supply networks alone, and that the water tastes like iron because there is a lot of algae in the Pivdennyi Buh River. Oksana Polishchuk is a communications officer at Vinnytsia Regional Water Utility. She calls trips to sewage accidents her consolation, a cure for professional burnout.

"We plan one thing, but in fact we have something completely different," Andriy Palych complains while driving. "We were supposed to go to see how new pipes were being laid, but one of the streets had a clogged sewer, and we had to change the route. It turned out that there was a sewer in the street. Here, as in the rest of Ukraine, everything is old and worn out. Sewage is a particular problem because pipes deteriorate quickly due to the aggressive environment inside. And now, with the power outage, pumping stations sometimes stop working until the generator turns on. The pipes we are going to are made of clay, they are so old..."

Andriy Palych's explanation is interrupted by a call. It's the head of the asphalting department: where Andriy's subordinates are carrying out emergency "excavations," he is putting in place improvements. They have a dialog:

- Palich, yo****y this guy, where are you going with my asphalt?

- We have work to do! We take it from the warehouse every day, so why are you outraged?

- So why didn't you tell us you were going to take it? That's why we're outraged!

- Well, I'm sorry about that. For God's sake, we have work to do.

- Go ahead. Thank you.

- We'll be in touch, come on, you too.

Andriy Palych is in touch 24/7. Oksana is also constantly on the phone – in the car, at the location of the repair team, at the operation, at lunch. A few days ago, she added a new job for herself – she started an Instagram account for the water utility and Threads. All social networks – and these are TikTok, Facebookand now Instagram and Threads – she runs them herself.

"I always have to be positive and full of ideas," Oksana's voice comes from the passenger seat next to the driver's, "although I've been feeling close to emotional burnout for the last six months. Age, background stress from the war. But trips like today's, to the guys' place for repairs, help me."

Oksana is 42 years old and has been working as a communicator for the water utility since the summer of 2022. She has a degree in philology and once taught German at school, but she quickly quit because she lacked freedom and creativity. She worked as a journalist for more than ten years, a press secretary at VinnytsiaGas for another three, and a content maker for small businesses.

Oksana came to the water utility by accident. She came to deal with water bills, talked to the director, and he offered her a job – he saw that she had a good understanding of how the water utility works and builds communication.

"At first, I didn't want to, because I value my inner freedom and was afraid that my job would tie me down," Oksana recalls. – "I set the conditions: direct contact with the head of the department, no ten rounds of approvals, and no obligation to sit in the office from day to night. My task was to turn people around and make them understand what was happening at the water utility. There was no strategy, no content plans were written."

We get out of the car, and it immediately becomes clear what Oksana meant when she said that working on site cures her of burnout. A sewerage crew and a washing machine are working at the site. The guys see Oksana and immediately break into smiles. They talk to her as if she were an old friend or even a relative – about her dog, her parents, and who did what in the morning. Oksana is eager to talk about herself – it feels like she is in her element.

Five people are outside clearing a section of the sewer. Most often, it gets clogged with rags, wallets, and phones that accidentally fall into the toilet. The men work with a device that pressurizes the hose, and they use this water to flush the pipeline.

"Oksana always cheers us up," says one of the workers. "At first we didn't really like being filmed or telling her anything, but she's the kind of person who can make you feel good. Now, when we're not working, we send her a photo or video of what we did today or what we found."

While the boys are pulling garbage out of the sewer well, Oksana stands a meter away and records the process on her phone camera. She says she has a habit of doing things here and now. She moved away from the scene of the "operation" and posted it.

"Once I spent the whole day with them, counting how many buckets of garbage they pulled out of each well," says the communicator. "I don't like it when water utilities or other utilities publish something dry and incomprehensible on social media. People need to know not only where and when there will be no water. They are interested, for example, in what is being pulled out of the sewer system – what people have flushed down the toilet at home. Mostly teaspoons, clothes, socks, underwear. Near one house, the guys have already come to clean it five times and keep pulling out a woman's bra. There is definitely an interesting story behind this..

"I love it when something breaks through in Vinnytsia"

The total length of Vinnytsia's water supply networks is about 650 km, of which 76 km are mains, transporting water over long distances and in large volumes. Any accident on such a section can leave half the city, and sometimes the whole of Vinnytsia, without water.

Vinnytsia Regional Vodokanal serves about 400,000 residents, with the main consumers being residents of high-rise buildings. Tariffs for households have remained almost unchanged since 2022, but the real costs of water, electricity, reagents, and repair of water mains far exceed the company's income. This makes it difficult for all water utilities in the country, and residents of different cities are often dissatisfied with the quality of water or services.

Every morning at seven o'clock, all the employees of the water utility gather for a meeting. They find out how the night went, what problems and plans they have for the day. Oksana works a more flexible schedule, and her office doesn't even have a computer. Her only working tool is her phone. She is always with it.

For the first year, Oksana worked like this: she would wake up in the morning, call the guys in charge of the sewerage and water supply networks, find out what was going on in the city, where there were problems or something interesting, and then go to the site. It took her days to figure out which "thing" was responsible for what.

"Only when you understand how everything works can you communicate," she says, "People don't need complicated terms and dry answers. They will be grateful and empathetic if you communicate with them in simple language and show them life as it is. Plus, these trips helped me to form a very important thing for me – an emotional connection. I only do work that I love and with people I can love. When my boss invited me to work, he said: "I am not an expert in communications, you are. So you can work as you see fit." In three months, we had the result we had agreed on – the first grateful comments. Before that, the water utility's pages were full of hate.

Oksana does not delete comments from haters, which have become much less frequent over the years of her work at the water utility. On the contrary, she tries to engage in a dialog with them. She says that deleting a comment is a sign of her own failure: "You either have a hat or you don't. It's impossible to be good for everyone."

A water utility, Oksana says, is not just pipes. It is the river from which the water is taken; the station where it is purified; the networks that supply it. And the people who maintain it all. Several tens of thousands of views on TikTok videoandriy Palych sent the communicator. It shows repair crews trying to get to the largest water main in Vinnytsia – 1200 mm in diameter, which supplies water to more than half of Vinnytsia. It is located in the woods, and the weather made it extremely difficult to reach it – the equipment could barely pass, the cars were stuck in the mud, and the guys working loudly swore.

Oksana dared to post this video on TikTok, leaving the live, unfiltered speech. She felt that in this situation, there was no other way:

"No one will drive in such conditions and say: 'Oh my God, it's dangerous here!', 'Damn it!', etc. I'm not showing this to make someone laugh, and thank God there are no such comments. I do it to evoke emotion and show how difficult the work of these people is. In general, I really like it when something breaks through in Vinnytsia at night, it's always good content."

"Bastard," Andrii Palych jokes quietly after hearing this story, and he and Oksana laugh. The woman tells us about a neighbor with whom they cross paths while walking their dogs. One day, he confessed that he had subscribed to the water utility's page and praised the submissions: "You write interestingly, it even gives the impression that the water utility is doing something.

"I said: "I don't understand. I'm going to let the dog out!" Oksana jokes. – "As a resident of Vinnytsia myself, before I came here, I didn't like the water utility a priori. The first thing that came to my mind when I read about some outburst was that I was fed up with that water utility. Although, if you think about it, what does the water utility have to do with it? The water utility is the one who is accommodating this impulse. And such a prejudice was the first thing I started to fight against in communication."

Previously, the water utility published dry messages about water outages and supply. They received neither shares nor grateful reactions; on the contrary, Vinnytsia residents were outraged by the outages and the work of the water utility. When Oksana started running the water utility's Facebook page, it had about 1,500 followers.

"At first I asked the readers why they don't like us. They don't like us because there is no water, because no one likes us when there is no water. So, what should we do? Explain and show why there is no water, what is done with it and why. At first, I gave people time to get used to being spoken to normally, in human language. And in a few months, we got messages: "Thank you, I really didn't know that." And then came the creativity, humor, and memes."

After the changes in communication, people began to actively subscribe to the water utility's page. Not only Vinnytsia residents, but also residents of other Ukrainian cities. Currently, there are 140,000 followers on Facebook and 6,300 on TikTok.

"Edik's mom"

In January 2024, Oksana was sitting in her office and scrolling through the Vinnytsia Blacklist group, a local community where people talk about poor service, corruption, and fraud. "And then I saw that someone had written that they had seen a tadpole in the water utility's tap. It made me laugh so much! In general, my colleagues are used to hearing me laughing to myself in the office. A communicator is a repeater of everything dry and boring in human history. That's why you need to be a little bit out of your depth."

Oksana began to fantasize: she imagined the chief engineer and the manager secretly launching tadpoles into the water supply system so that they would "disperse" around the city. This gave birth to the character of Edik, a small tadpole from a secret biolab in the United States, who was supposedly bought for a lot of money and assigned to "inspect" the condition of pipes and sewers.

Oksana invented a whole story about his trials, adventures, and first steps in the "service." She published on Facebook, and a boom began. Overnight, more than 3,000 people subscribed to the page, and they began to actively comment on the post and write versions of how to find Edik.

The interest quickly grew nationwide: media, bloggers, Nova Poshta, Monobank, Kyivstar, Naftogaz, DTEK – all picked up the story. That evening, Oksana went to her friend's house to drink wine, but instead spent the entire time on her phone answering comments. The story stayed on the wave of popularity for about two weeks. That was the first time the whole country started talking about the water utility's communications, and Oksana was interviewed.

A week later, the communicator made a sequel: Edik was "found" in a sewer, soaked and exhausted, and was "rehabilitated" in the aquarium of the chief engineer. In total, the page gained almost 15,000 followers thanks to this story.

Facebook is still the most active social network of the company. All the storytelling and memes are there. On TikTok, Oksana posts stories about the daily routine of the utility company in a humorous style, creates memes, and explains how the networks work. She also has a Telegram channel where she posts only notifications about water outages and resumption of water supply.

"You have to make a story out of everything"

The car with Oksana and Andrii stops at the next location of the water utility's work in the Staryi Misto neighborhood, where they are replacing the water supply system – renewing about half a kilometer of old, worn-out pipes and connecting the new network to the existing one. As a result, a large part of the neighborhood was temporarily left without water. Oksana visits such locations to show the process live so that Vinnytsia residents can understand that it's not "just a simple cut-off because the water utility wanted to," but real work is underway.

Another of Oksana's tasks is to explain through communications why not everything depends on the water utility and that some complaints cannot be resolved by the utility, no matter how hard they try.

For example, residents of Vinnytsia often complain about the taste and odor of their tap water. The reason, Oksana says, is simple: the only source of water supply in the city is the Southern Bug River. Comparing it to water from alpine springs or wells is like comparing long with green. The Southern Bug has the highest, fourth class of pollution. In particular, because of algae blooms. During such periods, the water can turn yellow and smell like fish, and that's when people are most outraged.

All the water is treated at the main water treatment plant, which was built in the 1960s when the river was much cleaner. The station has hardly been modernized, and the water has become more difficult to purify over the decades. Oksana explains that even the most modern technologies cannot completely remove the odor. What can we say about the outdated equipment of the Vinnytsia Regional Water Utility?

"People don't know all this," says the communicator. "You can't dump it on their heads in one fell swoop. You need to dose it and think about which goat to ride. You have to make a story out of everything. That's why the river and algae came to life and became active characters in my posts. But I don't do gags for the sake of gags. Behind each jokingly presented post, which, for example, tells the love story of a sewer pipe and a willow, there is specific information about what the water utility does.

Every day Oksana writes stories and figures out how to tell about the work of the water utility in a way that will be interesting to readers. In the evening, she comes home, where her dog Cosmos is waiting for her, turns off her phone and lies in silence for an hour. She recovers so that tomorrow she will have the strength to give emotions to the water utility's subscribers.

***

It's getting dark in Vinnytsia and the rain is starting to fall. We arrived at the last location for the day, where water utility workers are repairing a pipe. The men are knee-deep in mud in the rain, but they are in a good mood – everyone is exchanging jokes. Oksana, as always, with her phone in hand, is talking to them. When we are about to leave, one of the workers hurries over to the communicator and holds out a package: "Ms. Oksana, stay, I'll give you a cake, and greetings to Cosmos!"