Like any other business, marketing is an essential tool for exhibiting your service, and for charities, exhibiting your service is essential for survival.   These messages are how they tell their story, advertise to their participant base, attract new donors to contribute to their cause, and shout out to the existing ones to let them know how cherished they are. Marketing is essential, but must adapt to survive if the cuts come.

So herein lies the challenge: How can you get big results from little cost?

Skip the traditionally expensive TV advertising and go digital.

With a plethora of social channels available to broadcast your advert or campaign on these days, you have the potential to extend your message globally, and at a fraction of the cost.   Going online also comes with a natural advantage; metric data tracking. Where is your content going? Who’s seeing it? How long are they watching for?  Indulge in your analytics and work out who is and isn’t watching, and develop more targeted marketing campaigns.

The next step is deciding what the campaign is all about (We wrote a blog about how you can start thinking about this). There are a few questions, but tackle these one at a time and your campaign will be off to a strong start before we even… well, start.   But, what kind of videos can a charity make?  Well, let’s take a look.

Tell a story

No-one knows your charity better than your service users. Telling a real-life story told from someone’s point of view can really make your audience empathise with the narrative and project themselves into it, as if they or someone they know may have been affected in a similar way. It’s effective at demonstrating how a service user found their way to the cause and how the charity was able to help them.

Who are you

The people behind the charity. An approach used to showcase the organization’s purpose and core beliefs. Perhaps meeting the founder and learning how they became committed to this cause, and ultimately why the charity was created. This helps viewers get a feel for your charity’s ethos and goals.

What do you do

Show off and educate the audience on the scope of the problem you are helping to tackle, and what the opportunities there are from the impact of the work and donations.

Humour

A charity’s mission is often serious, but that doesn’t mean your campaign has to be.  There are plenty of examples online of this, such as the Rainforest Alliance’s ‘Follow the Frog’. Audiences can be more receptive to an informal and humanising approach.

Call to Action

Any video you produce should have a call to action at the end, whether it’s a link to donate or an invitation to help or host a fundraiser. Make sure the opportunity for viewers is there to act on your message.

Distribution

Youtube run a non-profit website where charities and third sector companies can upload content. This site includes specialised features, such as ‘click to donate’ buttons and CTA overlays (if you use their service you will also receive promo tips from the overarching google non-profit program!). Using this tool will mean that everywhere your campaign broadcasts to, people can take action instantly.

Sometimes more is better. Often budget will be saved up for this all singing and all dancing feature length video, that tries to tackle everything! However, a video trying to appeal to everyone, ends up appealing to no one. Think about breaking your video content down into shorter social pieces. Having regular, consistent video will help engage your audience in bitesize snippets. It will allow you to put out quality content on a regular basis, which will be much effective than a one-off video than you keep pushing in front of your audience.

The question isn’t whether or not you should have video content, that’s a given – (maybe a link on how video has driven marketing in companies?) but rather which approach would work best for your needs?   Whatever it is that you want to raise awareness on, call up your local video production company and ask to discuss which approach is going to work best for you, there’s a lot more to video than you might think.

How charities can utilise video marketing