People support nonprofits (through donations and volunteerism) because they have an emotional connection to the cause or organization. As you market your organization (I know, “yuck.” But it’s a necessary evil.), you’ll get better results by leaning into the emotional stories surrounding your organization and telling these stories with video.
Nonprofits Have the Best Stories
No one has heart-string pulling stories like nonprofits. Your work changes lives. You improve our communities. You serve the underserved. Too often nonprofits use statistics to show impact and descriptions of services to court donations and volunteers. You should lean into your emotional stories.
Examples of stories you can use in your marketing and fundraising:
– Use Your WHY: the reasons behind your mission
– Success and impact stories
– Testimonials by volunteers and those you’ve helped
– And don’t forget to show how donations are used
Most Decisions Are Based on Emotion
There is an abundance of research that suggests most decisions (some say up to 90-95%!) are based on emotion. One study found that purely emotional marketing campaigns are nearly twice as effective as campaigns that solely use logic (31% to 16%).
Video Stimulates Emotions
As Shootsa.com succinctly put it: video is extremely effective at evoking emotions. There are oodles and oodles of statistics regarding the efficacy of the use of video in electronic and social marketing campaigns. This means that video is not only the most effective marketing medium, its strength is tapping into our emotions.
What’s the mean to you as a nonprofit? Some 79% of donors surveyed reported that online video ads were the most useful online media marketing they were exposed to. According to End, 39% of people who watch a video look up the accompanying organization within 24 hours of viewing. An impressive 57% of people who watch a video for a nonprofit go on to make a donation.
Video Dominates Our Attention Online
There’s even more research showing the upward trend of videos becoming the medium of choice online. Seriously, do any kind of Google search on the topic and try not to get buried in data. More and more people want to receive their information in video form. Why read a story when you can watch it?!
Where Do I Start?
Put these together, and it’s pretty clear you should be using video in your marketing and fundraising because emotion is the key to getting a “yes” from volunteers and donors and video is the best way to ask.
The components for successful marketing and fundraising videos include having your objective and target audience properly defined, a compelling and concise story planned out, production values that feel authentic and won’t hurt your credibility and the editing tools to help you prepare your videos for the channels you want to use for broadcast. For more detail, watch our blog video What Makes a Good Marketing Video.
But if you’re simply looking to add DIY videos to your social media feed, think of it like pizza: even when it’s bad it’s still good. Just start shooting and posting video that focuses on making emotions connections and see what resonates with your followers.
Sources
Filament Protip
All of our service area leaders have dozens of years of experience. These are protips they’ve picked up along the way that you can use right now to solve common issues.
