Why Your Nonprofit Video Isn’t Raising Money
Episode 3 of 10
One story beats every story. The mistake almost every organisation makes with its fundraising film.
More on this: non-profit video production.
Transcript
The most common mistake we see in nonprofit video is trying to fit the whole organisation into one film. Every programme you run, every initiative, the whole thing you’ve spent years building. It’s completely understandable and it doesn’t work.
Audiences don’t absorb that much in one sitting. What they remember is one person.
A mentoring organisation came to us for their annual fundraiser. They support first-generation students from high school through college, and there were dozens of stories we could have told. Instead of summarising the programme, we followed three of the students through it. Three days of production, honest interviews, and by the end of one of them a student had said more about that organisation in two sentences than any overview could:
All of these doors that were once closed to me are now open. It’s up to me to walk through them.
Nobody wrote that. You can’t. You can only build the conditions where somebody says it, and then be rolling.
Which is the second thing. We’re big believers in conversations rather than scripts. The moments we remember filming almost always happened after the person relaxed, forgot the camera was there, and just started talking. You can’t plan those. You can make them likelier by not treating the interview like a performance.
Third, and this is the one that changes your budget maths. One production day doesn’t have to mean one video. On one job we ran extensive pre-interviews before the shoot day, worked out whose stories best carried the mission, and came away with eight finished videos from a single day of filming. Fundraising, website, social, ongoing outreach. Same interviews.
One story isn’t the only shape that works, though, and it’s worth saying so. On another job we did the opposite: instead of following one person, we brought together a family who’d used the service, one of their donors, and the programme director. Three lenses on the same organisation. Nobody could see the whole thing on their own, and together they could. That works when the point you’re making is about breadth. It fails when you use it to avoid choosing.
The other thing that changes the film is what happens before the shoot day, and it’s the part nobody budgets for. We run pre-interviews. Phone calls, no camera, sometimes weeks ahead, purely to find out whose story actually carries the mission. Half the time the person the organisation nominates isn’t the one. They nominate the success story. The film usually wants the person who’s still in the middle of it.
So before you brief anyone, answer one question. Who is this for? Someone at your gala responds differently to a prospective volunteer, and differently again to a grant committee. That answer shapes everything after it.
One more thing worth building into the plan, because it costs nothing on the day and changes what you can do afterwards. Ask every subject, on camera, to introduce themselves and say in one sentence what the organisation did for them. You’ll never use most of those. But when you need a thirty second cut for an email in eight months, that clip already exists and nobody has to be asked to sit down again.
Then find your one person. Not your best programme. Your one person.
And whatever you do, don’t script the person. We’ve been handed talking points for an interview subject more than once, always with good intentions, and it’s the fastest way to lose the thing you’re paying for. A donor can tell the difference between somebody describing their life and somebody delivering a message about it. One of those raises money.
We’re Luma Creative, a video production company in San Francisco. If you’ve got something coming up and you want a straight answer on what it takes, we’re at lumacreative.com.