In June, we launched our JustTextGiving video competition inviting you to send us a video of innovative and fun ways to fundraise with your JustTextGiving code. The video with the most views by Tuesday 23rd August gets a whopping £500 donation to their page! Plus, two runners up (who will be decided by a panel of judges) will each get a £200 donation.
Today’s video comes from the team at the Civil Service Benevolent Fund. Since the charity signed up for JustTextGiving they have been thinking of ways to raise money with their text code, and the video competition offered them the perfect opportunity… to throw flans in their boss’s face! Few charities have had the courage to step out of the mould and get involved in cheeky digital initiatives, and it looks like they had a great laugh making their video, so our full respect goes to this forward-thinking charity! Way to put the FUN into fundraising (so sorry…that was terrible!)
Watch their Charlie Chaplin-esque production, and if you want to help them win the competition and receive a £500 donation, simply share it with your friends, family, fans and followers to get it more views! Of course, you can also make an SMS donation to The Fund by sending a text to FLAN86 £5 (or £1 £2, £3, £4, or £10) to 70070.
We caught up with The Fund’s e-Communications Project Manager Jamie Hill, who took charge and got the ball rolling with the video!
There was a team of three working on the video creation – myself, Natalie Wong, and Victoria Black. We’re all part of the Fund’s e-Hub, which is basically a group of people who work in different parts of the charity but who come together to make our e-communications as good as we can. As E-Communications Manager, I run the hub, while Natalie works in the Volunteer Support Team and Victoria is part of our HR department.
We also heavily relied on the goodwill of a fair few people to make appearances in the video – Zoe and Sandra were both kind enough to agree to have a speaking part, although we didn’t struggle particularly to find volunteers to shoot the outdoor scene!
I was already committed to organising an event for our 125th anniversary appeal, after being persuaded by our Fundraising and Volunteer teams that a bit of flan throwing was just what we needed! Equally, we’d signed up for JustTextGiving in the summer, and I’d grabbed a text code for my page as I knew it would be useful to have, and had started to promote that to people who wanted to sponsor me. I’d kept tabs on the video competition but hadn’t really thought too much about it.
But although we’d started to promote it, we’d not made too much headway until a meeting myself and Victoria attended, and text donating emerged as a topic. Victoria had already used the text service and before I realised it, I’d muttered something about there being a video competition in which you could win £500…
Within 2 days we had Natalie on board, a script, and had worked out how to get hold of a video camera and the props we needed. We just wanted to make a video that was fun, encouraged people to use JustTextGiving, and helped promote our fundraising event. And it definitely helped we were all prepared to make fools of ourselves!
Excluding the weekend, it took 4 days to get everything together, and we shot the video in our lunchbreak, except for the main group scene towards the end. We were very conscious to cause as little disruption as possible so we commandeered a meeting room to film many of the scenes. Getting it altogether to edit took the longest time – mainly because we were squeezing it around our work.
We’ve advertised the video on our Facebook page and Twitter feed, have written an article for our website, and promoted it to the 15,000 subscribers of our monthly eNewsletter. I suspect it may get several mentions on those platforms before the 23rd August! Equally, we’re using the video to try and encourage more people at the Fund to embrace social networking, so we’ve asked everyone who was in it to put it on their Facebook page if they have one, and to share it with all of their friends.
Finally, it did finally get us to plan the day of the actual fundraising event! So on 31 August we’re having Flan Day at Fund House, where myself, Natalie and Victoria are being sponsored to be flanned, and if enough money is raised, gunged. Without the video the event we’re holding would definitely have been on a much smaller scale – we’ve now added lots of activities for people to do beyond pie throwing. It’s almost turned itself into the first-ever Fund House fete!
Have fun when making it! If you don’t enjoy making the video, the chances are it will come across in the finished article. Secondly, don’t critique your film too much once it’s complete – we ended up looking at our video thinking “we should have re-shot this, and done that differently”, but ultimately we’re enormously proud of our finished article.
It is easy to do and you’ll be surprised at how enthusiastic people might be if you say you’re actually going to make it. So if you’ve got an idea, just get some friends together and do it!
And because we’ve done this video, making the next one will be a lot easier – we’re already thinking of the sequel!
Fancy showing off your camera skills? Do you have a cool way of promoting your JustTextGiving code? There’s still time to enter. You could win an extra £500 for your charity!
The competition is open until Tuesday 23rd August. Click here to find out exactly how to enter.
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Tags: Civil Service Benevolent Fund, flan, Fundraising, justtextgiving, justtextgiving competition, sms, YouTube