Video is a great way to tell your story, but more importantly video can inspire people to act. Nonprofits are increasingly turning to video to aid their fundraising and awareness initiatives. Whatever your institution’s goals are, at the end you want your audience to do something with the information you’ve given them – whether they are contributing their time or money.
Paull Young, Director of Digital for charity: water, spoke with Vidyard about why he choses video as the primary marketing tool for the organization. Young’s goal for charity:water’s video campaigns wasn’t for donations. His goal was to raise awareness about a problem that affects 800 million people: lack of access to safe drinking water.
Young notes that charity: water doesn’t bombard their audience with videos, rather, his team focuses on select videos and the effort shows. Putting significant time and effort into each video they produce, they end up with a focused video eliciting emotion and inspiring viewers to take action. Interestingly enough, increasing awareness with videos led to increased donations.
How to Follow the Example of charity: water
If you haven’t already, think about creating a video strategy plan. To craft a video that works, you need to know your audience and your intended goal.
Here’s a few thoughts Association of Fundraising Professionals recommends considering:
- Does your video target people who are already familiar with your organization? Or new viewers who may have never heard of you before?
- Is the goal to raise awareness or to gain time-sensitive donations?
- What sort of emotion do you want the video to elicit? Inspiring and bringing joy to viewers or exposing unfortunate realities without a notion of hope will bring out a different response from your viewers.
After you know exactly what you want to do and who your target audience is, you can begin production on your video. Keep in mind you need to write and edit the script carefully, or better yet have a professional write it for you.
Think of creating a video as a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Don’t overlook the power of music; you can build energy during the course of the video with the help of an engaging soundtrack. The right visual and audio style will ensure you guide your viewer’s emotions in the right direction. If you give your video a lot of TLC, it will show in the final result.
Here’s a animated video we did to help Trinity College School raise awareness about their 150th Anniversary fundraising campaign:
Want to know more about Trinity College School’s success story? Click here to watch their testimonial.
If you have any questions about adding video into your organization’s fundraising campaign, feel free to contact us – we’d love to help guide you in the right direction.
