6-Second Fundraising: How to Charm Online Donors With Digital Storytelling

To be successful with this audience on social media, you need to give potential donors what they want the most: stories that are told visually.

How do super-short stories work?

The Instagram and Vine mobile apps are free video blogging services. They do one thing. They feature videos that are short - really short. Instagram's maximum is 15 seconds, and Vine's weigh in at six seconds. The apps for both services are for your smartphone. They make it very easy to create videos since they provide everything you need to shoot, edit and upload your footage. Shooting super-short videos requires no video experience. It only takes a few minutes to download the apps to your phone and try them out. They're surprisingly easy to use.

Once you've made your video, both apps allow you to share your videos on Twitter and Facebook, or add them to your organization's website. You can also add links for your videos in your emails and embed them in e-newsletters or your blog.

What I find most astonishing about super-short videos is how much they can convey in just seconds.

The 3 types of super-short videos charities are having success with

Aaron Bramley of Lights. Camera. Help. is one of the gurus in this field. In his experience, there are three basic types of super-short videos that charities tend to use for fundraising. Here are some that I like from the Chronicle of Philanthropy: Six-Second Appeal Challenge.

1. Fundraising videos

United Way Of Greater Atlanta:

https://vine.co/v/ht0K5WQw9Fd

2. Thank-you videos

Diabetes UK:

https://vine.co/v/b5tnVIVjt2M

3. Mission-execution videos

Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption:

https://vine.co/v/htvbl9lUu9m

Ways to use super-short videos for fundraising

Hundreds of people who work at charities attended our recent TechSoup webinar on super-short videos to see what this new media is all about. In doing a quick poll, we found that most of them haven't yet tried doing short videos. And most of them had no budget for doing any kind of video.