Age UK Shropshire Telford & Wrekin needed an powerful and poignant charity appeal video to kick off their anniversary campaign

When you’re launching a crucial fundraising campaign, one of the best ways to grab supporters’ attention and highlight the importance of your campaign is through a charity appeal video.

That’s why, about a year before the charity’s 75th anniversary, Age UK Shropshire Telford & Wrekin got in touch.

They support older people in the county, and had decided that they wanted to run an appeal around the theme of loneliness, in order to boost donations and volunteer numbers – and they wanted video to be at the heart of that campaign.

What was the pre-production process like?

Initially I had a series of conversations with Chief Executive Heather Osborne, and Head of Income Generation Ange Goodman.

The first conversations looked more at what they wanted to achieve through the campaign, and the messaging they wanted to convey.

Once that was ironed out, we looked at what videos would work best as part of their appeal, as well as the timelines of the project.

With a year-long anniversary campaign, you need video at key moments: obviously the launch, but you also want regular content throughout the campaign to maintain interest.

We decided on:

• A main charity appeal video featuring case study interviews with their service users, members of staff, and volunteers
• Six social media clips from that video to support the launch
• A highlight video from the launch event
• A corporate sponsor video

After that, Heather and Ange went away to start contacting people they wanted to feature in the video.

What was the filming process like?

We captured the main charity appeal video across two filming sessions in Shropshire.

The first filming session was across two locations – the houses of the two charity service users who we were featuring in the video.

At these sessions, I worked hard to make sure they felt comfortable with the process, and knew what was happening the whole time.

After recording the conversational style interviews and gathering some really impactful quotes, I then filmed supplementary footage, or ‘b-roll’, to help bring the interviews to life.

This was footage such as Marjorie walking round the garden with her befriender; or David playing with his dog in the garden.

The second filming session was to record three interviews with members of staff at the Age UK office, who could help explain why the issue of loneliness is so important to tackle, and how you could support the charity as part of the campaign.

This means that the service user interviews pull at the heartstrings, and the staff interviews outline the facts.

What was the editing process like?

By the time we got to editing, we’d gathered seven interviews which could feature in the video – and we actually had another four in the archive from previous shoots with the charity.

That’s a lot of amazing quotes to sort through! The first step is always cutting down to the best quotes from each person, but that still left us with about an hour of footage for a three minute video.

With a charity appeal video, you want to grab people’s attention. You need high impact quotes, straight out of the gate.

So we decided to open with a clip of service user Marjorie sharing what it really feels like to be lonely – which led brilliantly onto Heather sharing how prevalent the issue is in Shropshire, and what Age UK Shropshire Telford & Wrekin are doing about it.

A video like this isn’t just one quote after another. The people drive the narrative, but it’s a story about a problem, and how you can help to solve it.

It’s not just a video you watch; it’s a video that you act upon at the end of it.

Finally, because this video would be played to a crowd at the launch event, we created a version with branded subtitles burned in to make sure everyone could understand the message, regardless of any disabilities or speaker quality.

And yes – in an era where most people watch videos on their phones, it was a huge kick getting to see our work played on the big screen!

Looking for videos to use as part of your charity appeal? Get in touch for a free video marketing review and we can explore what video content would be most effective for your campaign.