By Le’a Gleason
SNA Communications and Community Engagement Director

A hand raises amongst a sea of interested faces. Everybody turns to hear the mystery person make their comment or ask their question, and all of sudden something profound is said. The audience smiles or nods, and everybody is inspired by what was said. Moments like this happen for nonprofits all the time. Maybe you’re at a meeting where the audience is participating and the ideas are just flying back and forth. There are some really great ones, but how do you capture them to share with people who weren’t there? Or maybe, you have a fundraiser or event coming up and you want to show people the kind of work you do, but a flyer or a photo just isn’t enough…

Enter the world of video. I’ve been lucky enough to work in nonprofit communications for over 10 years and super lucky to have the creative flexibility to promote ideas to the community through video. In today’s world, studies show that visual communications are 40 times more effective than just text. Among those, communications that are videos or reels (short videos) perform the best. But performance and engagement rates aren’t why I love video.

If you work for a nonprofit, community organization, or own your own business, here’s some reasons why using video is easy and awesome:

• Communicate more ideas than just a photo in a consumable way that doesn’t require a caption or explanation
• Show people in action doing something, as an easy way to explain a project or program
• Show a variety of projects all at once by piecing together video clips, in an easier way to consume than flipping through a slideshow
• If you have a cell phone of almost any kind, you can make a video just as quickly as taking a photo, but it communicates more information!
• Video narration, which you can hear while watching, is easier to understand than seeing a photo and reading text below it.

In a recent presentation for SNA’s Member Group ogranizations, I shared tips and tricks to keep in mind when producing video content. You can check it all out in the full video posted on our YouTube!