Our founder recently hosted a panel on nonprofit video production at the Classy Collaborative. What follows is a summary of that discussion. Want to learn how to create a great fundraising video? Read on!

The Big Picture

1. Plan

Define your audience, your goals, and your measures of success. Choose a producer, or an internal team, that is capable of putting themselves in the shoes of your donors. How can you speak their language and simplify your message to meet them where they are, not where you are. Also, define where you want to deploy the video before you start making it.

2. Create

Design your video around the principles of storytelling, engagement and impact. What does that mean? Check out this blog post for more. If it’s in your budget, choose a creator whose work demonstrates that they’ve mastered these elements.

Use a clear and well-defined creation process. At Planet Nutshell, our process is:

• Discovery/Research
• Scriptwriting (FYI, one minute of video = 150-ish words)
• Storyboard (We use Boords)
• Design
• Animation & Sound Design  

3. Deploy and Measure

Be very intentional about where in your donor pipeline you want to deploy the video. For example, is your video best placed on your homepage, on social media, at an event with a captive audience? Each of these placements will change the content and length of the video.

Use a video host that gives you solid analytics about the performance of the video. Consider Wistia (paid) or Vimeo (free).

Get Inspired

Classy made a list of great nonprofit videos a couple of years ago. Here are a few of our favorites from that list:

And here are a few more animated videos from Planet Nutshell to get your juices flowing:

Tools and Resources for Animation

Animatron makes it easy for anyone to create their own animation, offering tons of free video, audio, and photo files to drag and drop into an animated template.

Vyond is another application with templates that make it easy to develop your own animated video.

The “12 Principles of Animation” is a great video for students and art directors who are new to animation.

Do you have any favorite tools or tips for creating great fundraising videos? Let us know in the comments below…

The team at Planet Nutshell is very excited to announce our 2019 summer intern. Amelie Wang was selected out of about 50 applicants from the Savannah School of Art and Design (SCAD) Career Fair. Amelie’s portfolio shows a strong focus on story. During her time at Planet Nutshell, we hope she will continue to develop her illustration, mo-graph, and character animation skills, while gaining professional experience in the animation industry.

Amelie will graduate from SCAD with an M.F.A. in Illustration in June of 2020. We can’t wait to see what her future holds!

My panel on video production for nonprofits, titled “How to Create On-screen Magic in Your Fundraising Videos,” at the 2019 Classy Collaborative turned out great. I moderated as my panel-mates, Martin Quessenberry, Daniel Lovering, and Susan Hughes shared insights about video production — when to use it, when not to use it, how to hire creatives, how to tell a compelling story, and more — from their perspectives.

Marty, who is director of digital projects and innovation at Shriners Hospitals, had much to say about how to deploy video across multiple platforms (web, fundraising, social media, and more). Meanwhile, Susan, who is senior director of communications at Thread, discussed using video at a smaller organization with fewer resources. And Dan, who is a documentary filmmaker, and I discussed the production process, storytelling basics, and other nuts and bolts of working with creatives.

Want to learn more? I created a handy Google Doc that walks through many of the details of our discussion.

We’re delighted to have a new member of the team. Mollie Davis comes to us with a strong background in motion graphics, frame-by-frame animation, and art history. Already, she’s been helping us immensely with storyboarding, motion graphics, and general wonderfulness. Learn more about Mollie at her website.

Mollie graduated with a BFA in Studio Art from Northeastern University in a joint program with the School of Museum of Fine Arts. In her free time she co-organizes events for the local animation community, AniMAtic Boston, and her short film “Ellen” was released online in 2018.

We just wrapped up a video for our new friends at Thread, a Baltimore-based non-profit with an ambitious mission: Help weave a new social fabric by bringing together young people and volunteers to reimagine and reaffirm the notion of family.

Storyboard

Style Frames

A huge thanks to the whole team that worked on this project!

Writer and Creative Director: Joshua Gunn
Art Director and Storyboard: Jennifer Sanchez
Production Coordinator: Kharma Jones
Illustration: Zara Magumyan
Cleanup & Final Animation: Jennifer Sanchez

Learn more about Thread at thread.org.