How to Make a Fundraising Video for a Nonprofit That Actually Raises Money

Most nonprofit videos are about the organization. Its history, its programs, its numbers, a montage of smiling faces and a request at the end. They are usually well made. They usually raise very little, because a video about an organization asks the audience to admire something, and admiration is not what opens a wallet.

A fundraising video is a different object. It exists to make one specific group of people give at one specific moment, and every decision in it should serve that. Here is how to build one.

1. Decide what the video has to do before anything else

“A fundraising video” is not one thing. A film that plays in a ballroom seconds before the paddle raise, a film that anchors a year-end email appeal, and a film that opens a capital campaign are three different pieces of work with different lengths, different endings, and different people in them.

Start by writing down the moment the film will be shown, who will be watching, and what they are being asked to do the second it ends. If that sentence cannot be written, the project is not ready to plan. If it can, every later decision gets easier, because there is something to measure each choice against.

2. Follow one person, not the mission

Organizations are hard to love. People are not. The single most reliable way to make an audience feel something is to let them spend three minutes with one real person whose life the organization touched, and to let that person tell it in their own words.

This is uncomfortable for many nonprofits, because it leaves out most of what they do. That is the point. A film that covers six programs gives the audience six reasons to nod and none to act. A film that follows one student, one patient, one family, gives them somebody to care about.

Choosing that person is the most important casting decision in the project, and it should be made deliberately, after meeting several candidates, rather than defaulting to whoever the board suggested.

3. Settle the story before the shoot

The most common reason a fundraising video fails is that nobody decided what the story was until the edit. The crew shot broadly, the editor assembled what looked best, and the result is competent and unmoving.

The alternative is to write the story first: who it follows, where it starts, what changes, where it ends. All of it agreed in writing before a camera comes out. This feels slow, because for the first two weeks there is nothing to watch. It is also the only version where the emotional structure is a decision instead of an accident, and it is what protects the deadline later, because nothing has to be found or reshot.

4. Put the numbers where they belong

Statistics have a place in a fundraising video. It is usually not where organizations put them.

Research on charitable giving has found that presenting statistics alongside a single person’s story can reduce giving compared with the story alone, because numbers move people into analytical thinking and giving is not an analytical decision. The effect has been debated and later studies are mixed, but the practical lesson holds: more information does not automatically produce more motivation.

So the numbers go after the feeling, not before it, and usually in the ask rather than the film. Prove the scale once the audience already cares. Do not use it to earn their attention.

5. Run the interview so people say something true

The interview is where the film is actually made. A person reading a prepared statement will produce a testimonial. A person who has forgotten the camera is there will produce a story.

Getting there takes time and a particular way of asking. Questions should be about specific moments rather than general feelings. “Tell me about the day you first walked in here” produces a story. “How has the organization helped you” produces a sentence off the website. The interviewer’s job is to keep the person in the moment they are describing until the true version of it comes out, and to be willing to sit in silence while that happens.

Subjects should also see the film before it is public, and know they can withdraw. That protects them, and it protects the organization’s reputation with the donors who will eventually meet them.

6. End on the peak, then hand off

A fundraising video should not end with a logo, a website address, or a list of ways to give. In a ballroom, nobody is going to visit a website. They are deciding whether to raise a paddle in the next ninety seconds.

End on the strongest emotional moment and cut. Let the person on stage, or the email copy underneath, make the ask while the feeling is still in the room. Gala films that do this well run two to three minutes. Longer films spend the emotion before the ask arrives.

7. Plan the shoot for the next twelve months

A production day is the expensive part. Once a crew is on location and a subject is comfortable, capturing a second and third story costs comparatively little. Most organizations do not plan for this, so they get one film and start over at full price when the year-end appeal comes around.

Plan the shoot against what the organization will need for the year: the gala film, a shorter social cut, a piece for the spring appeal, a thank-you for major donors. Shot with that in mind, one production keeps producing. We are still cutting new pieces from a gala film we made seven years ago because the extra material was captured deliberately on the original days.

8. Use it more than once

The gala is the first showing, not the last. The same film, or cuts from it, belongs in the follow-up email to attendees, on the donation page, in the year-end appeal, and in the packet that goes to prospective board members and grant funders. A special needs school in New Jersey was still showing the film we made for their 25th anniversary gala to prospective parents four years later, because it answered the question those parents actually had.

What this looks like in practice

Everything above is the method behind our nonprofit video production work. The story is settled and approved before the shoot, one production is planned to cover the year through Story Stacking, and the results are measured against what the organization needed: one client raised 74% more with their film than the year before.

If you would rather work through it yourself first, Stories That Move Mountains is our guide to nonprofit fundraising video. Pay what you can afford, including nothing.