This video is number NINE in a series of 16 or so on how film can support your charity fundraising. Today’s subject is deciding which stories to tell.

TRANSCRIPT

I’m asserting that the way charities can get — can solicit donations without having to rely on pity, desperation, need, poverty porn is through a longer game taking a longer view and it starts with getting people behind the cause, getting people to believe in the vision that your charity has, the big question that you exist to answer, the drive that motivates your CEO, the drive that motivates your face to face fundraisers, the drive that motivates you all internally on your best days at work, communicating that to as broad a base as possible so that people who identify with that will be open to hearing about opportunities to give.

Then the second phase is creating that opportunity to give and creating for them that wonderful feeling that we all get when we’ve done something good, like when we feel we’ve made a difference in somebody else’s life, when we feel that we’ve done something significant — after all how often do we get the opportunity to do that — and then the next step we obviously hope to take is to turn those first-time supporters into long-term supporters and we do that by thanking them over and over and over again, demonstrating their impact over and over and over again, and maybe never asking them for another gift, but making it incredibly easy to give if they choose to, which they will, because why wouldn’t they? Because every communication they receive from you reminds them, gives them again another taste of how good it felt to help.