High Impact, Low-Cost Videos for Charities
With things like national insurance contributions going up and the broader cost of living crisis, people are really struggling. Businesses are feeling the pinch, and charities are being asked to do more and more with less and less.
Sometimes, the first thing to go is marketing, which kind of makes sense, but limiting your reach hurts you in the long run, even if it helps cash flow in the short term.
We’ve put our heads together and come up with some lower-cost videos that still make an impact.
Stripped-back case studies
A case study video is particularly effective when it’s full of b-roll, but it doesn’t have to be. A heartfelt and personal interview can have just as much of an impact and they can be created at scale.
If you work with a video production company, you can maintain a degree of production value without breaking the bank.
Animated shorts
You could take a fact, statistic or testimonial and turn it into a short (5–10 second) animated loop.
If you make a bunch of these you can have a suite of assets that can be used in lots of different ways and for a long time to come.
Explainer animations
Explainer animations should be short anyway, so they can be a cost-effective way to reach your audience.
You could also speak with your video production agency about pulling out assets so you have even more to work with.
Values videos
It’s always more cost-effective to shoot as much as you can in one day. Talking head style videos about your charity, told from the perspective of your team, are a cost-effective way to communicate who you are and what you stand for.
Top tip here – if you can settle on a few different topics, you can limit how much budget goes into production and shift more of the budget into post-production, which means you essentially get more for your money.
FAQ videos / What you wish people knew videos
This is a type of video that solves a problem for you, helps your audience and is relatively cheap to create.
As with values videos, settling on plenty of topics ahead of time and creating as many as you can in bulk will help bring down costs and maximise value.
Thank you videos
Showing gratitude might not win new donors, but it could certainly keep hold of existing ones.
You can create more general ones and more specific ones (for regular donors or sponsors) to maximise when and where you can use them.
The point of these videos isn’t to be the absolute showstopper for your video marketing, they’re more about consistency and always having something you can post. They allow you to build out a strategy, rather than having a single video that gets wheeled out again and again.
These are also all videos that can be made with a production company, rather than having to handle everything in-house. That means you can still get a good level of production value without having to break the bank.
The best advice we can give is to speak to your production company about what can be achieved. Be honest about your need for lower-cost videos – a good production company isn’t going to judge. They’ll want to put together something that actually works for you. The earlier you have that conversation, the more you can plan around it and make the most of your time, your stories and your budget.
