June 21, 2010 | Read Time: 1 minute
Sometimes a little creativity is all it takes to get donors’ attention.
At Juniata College, in Huntingdon, Pa., a video called “I Give a Latté”—featuring the college’s president and its students—raised $29,000 for the college in just five days.
The video, shown above, relied on student actors and carried a simple message.
It won’t be confused with a big-budget television commercial, but it proved remarkably effective in connecting with donors, says Maria Di Mento, an assistant editor at The Chronicle, in an article about giving to education charities.
“In the video, Thomas R. Kepple Jr., Juniata’s president, is shown in his office crafting an e-mail appeal asking alumni to give the college the $5 they would normally spend to buy a cup of coffee,” Ms. Di Mento writes. “Viewers then see student actors playing people in cafes and coffee stands handing their tall, take-out cups of coffee, in drive-through-window fashion, to an increasingly caffeine-addled Mr. Kepple, who ends the clip looking slightly dazed and nearly buried in hundreds of cups of coffee.”
The video was posted to the college’s Web site and to its Facebook page. Alumni were alerted to the video through an e-mail blast.
Has your organization had similar results with a video campaign? If so, send me an e-mail with the embed code and some information about the results. We’ll post some readers’ submissions in Prospecting in the coming weeks.
