People connect with stories, and they remember stories. A well-made charity video with a good story can be a powerful way to bring emotion, raise awareness about your cause and inspire people to take positive action for your charity or non-profit organisation.
Whether filmed or animated, a good story in your video production can help viewers connect with the people your charity works with on a personal level. They can show them the impact of your work and how their support can make a difference.
When it comes to charity videos, effective storytelling can be the difference between a video people watch just part of passively and one that moves them to donate, volunteer, share, or get involved.
Here’s how you can create a persuasive and heartfelt story for your organisation’s charity video production:
Focus on the Benefit
The heart of your story should be the person/people or group your charity or organisation works with. Feature their struggles, their triumphs, and their hopes for the future.
When filming, it can help to feature a diverse range of people in your video, diversity and inclusivity is important. This can include individuals from different backgrounds, age groups, and experiences. By showcasing a variety of faces, you can create a more powerful and relatable narrative that resonates with a broader audience.
We often recommend mini 3-4 people for a filmed case study charity video, including someone who works there, to give a quick, broad idea of the organisation and wider situation, plus the personal stories of clients or service users. This kind of format can works whether you work with young people, education, mental health, or any other kind of service. This will provide an all-around story covering a few angles. With more filmed content, you can also usually make alternative mini-edits for social media in addition to the main charity video.
Compose a Narrative Arc
This kind of arc for a video is a solid start to creating an emotional journey with the audience. We can create this kind of story device through a script with voiceover, or a well-thought-out questionnaire used in filmed interviews. This is not the only way to do it, but this kind of story arc formula is tried and tested.
1 Set the Scene: Briefly introduce the situation and the issues your charity addresses – just a quick sentence – what do you do and why?
2 Introduce the struggles: Showcase the challenges faced by the people, which can be on a personal, regional, or global scale, as well as the impact of the problem.
3 Introduce Hope: Show how your organisation works together to provide help and offer a path forward. This can include some numbers, but keep it emotional and less statistical.
4 The Resolution (with a Call to Action): Show the positive impact of your work and how life has improved. End with a clear call to action, urging viewers to be part of the solution.
Emotion is Key
People don’t just donate, they donate their time or money because they care. So, use visuals and music to evoke emotions—hope, gratitude, determination—to create a lasting impact.
When filming people, this is down to the director’s question technique, having a heartfelt and non-pressuring interview with the people, being friendly and personable, asking open questions, and engaging in active listening.
In animation, a video production studio can create emotion with a heartfelt script, soulful voiceover (not too corporate sounding), music, sfx, and strong visuals such as characters, colours, shapes and flow to drive the emotion and feelings. We often use real-life voiceovers instead of hiring professionals for our charity animations to give the video a more real touch.
Be Authentic
Authenticity is vital in storytelling. Focus on capturing genuine moments, heartfelt interactions, and the real struggles and triumphs of the people involved. Sometimes, this may mean asking more sensitive questions of your interviewees, so keeping them feeling comfortable during the chat itself and showing them the edit before release is very important. Authentic sound bites are like gold; this approach builds trust and credibility with your audience, making your video more impactful and effective.
Show, Don’t Tell
Let your visuals do the talking. Powerful imagery of the challenges faced and the positive change your charity brings can resonate more than narration alone.
When filming, use B-Roll to show day-to-day activities and caring environments, allowing your audience to experience the story visually and emotionally. In animation, you can use creative visuals to visually represent the issues faced and how your charity works to overcome any.
Keep it Real
Avoid portraying people as helpless victims. Instead, we often aim to showcase their resilience, strength, and any fight they put up before becoming aware of your organisation and how they’ve worked to help themselves. Their strength and journey will be palpable and genuine. This comes down to the questions you ask people and the script.
Be Transparent
Don’t shy away from your organisation’s challenges and any challenges the service users or clients face. Honesty builds trust and allows viewers to see the impact.
Storytelling in Charity Video can be Filmed Or Animated
You can choose whether to use filmed video or animation—both work well and are effective in creating an impactful video that stirs up emotion.
We’ve spoken a lot about live action video production here, and they can be so impactful as filmed video captures real-life stories and emotions. But it’s not the only way, and one the risks are if the subject moves on from the organisation or is just one story, which may only resonate with some.
Animation is not just an explainer video. This word is used a lot, but animated video production, especially for charities, is much more versatile. Animated video safeguards vulnerable people. For example, for organisations that work with children and young people, we have often used animation to give anonymity. We are inspired by and sharing the young people’s personal stories, but without a face, giving them safety and security.
Removing people visually from the video and using a more anonymous story can also give a sense that anyone could be affected by the challenges shown, and anyone could need extra support – making the appeal broader.
Animation can also be used to add a conceptual feeling to the storytelling. You can have much more fun with the visuals, telling a story with dynamic illustrations and animation instead of filmed faces.
Using these storytelling techniques, you can create a charity video that goes beyond raising awareness—it can create a connection, inspire action, and make a real difference in the world. If you’re like to create an impactful charity video production that tells your story well, please get in touch
