Case study · Bergen County, New Jersey
Bergen Volunteer Medical Initiative hired us in 2015, before we had a name for how we work. They noticed something about the way we ran interviews, and referred us to another nonprofit because of it. That referral is where our framework came from.
2015
Our first nonprofit gala film
5 hospitals
Filmed across Bergen County
One referral
That became a Telly winner
Hackensack, NJ
Where the work was based
The client
BVMI provides free healthcare to Bergen County residents who work but cannot afford insurance. It runs on volunteer physicians and nurses out of the Lynn Diamond Healthcare Center on Essex Street in Hackensack, and has been doing it since 2009.
They came to us in 2015 for a film to play at their gala. We had been making films for nonprofits since 2012, starting with Safe Homes of Orange County, but this was the first one built for a gala room.
2015 · The first gala
By 2015 we had been making films for nonprofits for three years and had won a Telly for our work with the Metropolitan YMCA of the Oranges. What we did not have was Story + Heart = Action. No research behind it, no name for it, nothing written down.
What we had was an instinct that the problem with most nonprofit video was in the interviews rather than the camera. That came out of a campaign to save a swimming pool, where the film worked and finding the story afterward took hours it should not have. So we ran them differently. Longer conversations. Fewer questions. Long enough silences that people stopped giving the answer they had prepared in the car.
It worked. We just could not have told you why, or handed the method to anyone else.
Access
BVMI's care depends on specialists across the county who see their patients at no charge. Telling that story meant filming where it happens, which meant working inside working hospitals.
Over the course of the relationship we filmed on location at Valley, Holy Name in Teaneck, Hackensack University Medical Center, Englewood, and Bergen New Bridge.
A hospital is a different kind of set. There are areas you will not be entering. There are consent rules that are not negotiable and should not be. There are clinicians who cannot stop what they are doing because your shot needs another thirty seconds. Most production companies have never worked under those conditions, and a healthcare nonprofit can tell within ten minutes whether the crew in the building has.
The referral
BVMI had worked with production companies before us. What they told us stood out was not the finished film. It was how we ran the interviews, and how different that was from what they were used to.
They referred us to The Phoenix Center, another nonprofit, for their 25th anniversary gala. Nobody asked them to. That referral is the most useful thing any client has ever done for us, and it happened off the first gala film we made.
2016 · What came of it
Working on the Phoenix Center film, we went looking for why the interview approach had worked at BVMI. That search turned into research, and the research turned into a framework we could name and repeat: Story + Heart = Action.
The Phoenix Center's 25th anniversary film won a Bronze Telly. Four years after we delivered it, their executive director, who had been the principal when we made it, told us they were still using it.
The same year, our gala proposal to BVMI introduced them to the method their own project had helped produce.
Everything downstream of that comes back here. The framework became Stories That Move Mountains, and later a workshop we teach to nonprofit teams.
What they said
"WE LOVE THE VIDEO! You guys are very talented. I am so glad I met you guys!"
Amanda Missey, President and CEO, Bergen Volunteer Medical Initiative
We worked with BVMI from 2015 through 2019.
Bergen County
Bergen County nonprofits are competing for donors against organizations in Manhattan, twenty minutes away. The bar for what a fundraising film has to accomplish is higher here than the size of the county suggests.
We are based in Monticello, New York, about an hour and a half north, and we have been making films for Bergen County and North Jersey nonprofits for a decade. Galas in Hackensack, healthcare storytelling across the county, and the hospital access that comes with having done it before.
If your organization is in Bergen County and your next film has a job to do, that is the work we do.
Tell us what the film has to accomplish and when. We will tell you honestly whether we are the right fit.
Most of these begin as a fifteen-minute call.
Last updated September 2026 · Nimble Dragon Studios · Monticello, New York