Year-end appeal · FCA Philadelphia
“Your gift turns into 14 huddles across the city.”
An FCA project · produced as Regional Marketing Director, FCA Mid-Atlantic
The problem
Every fall, Kasey Docherty at FCA Philadelphia calls me in September, because the year-end appeal is the season that funds the mission, and a good appeal is built on stories, not asks. The challenge is real: gather a year's worth of donor-ready stories, on one theme, and shoot all of them in a single day, then hand her segment pieces her donors will actually respond to.
The approach
Plan it in the fall
This is planned, not improvised, and that is the whole point. We choose the theme together in the fall, decide whose stories carry it, and who needs to be interviewed.
Do the pre-work
The upgrade this past year was the pre-work: I interviewed people ahead of time, learned their stories, and wrote each of them a script, so on shoot day they could read their own words back on camera. I told every person the same thing before we rolled: this has to be your complete story, not something I made up.
Shoot it in one day
One long day in, a full set of themed donor films out. With the words already handled, we could spend our energy getting the b-roll that made each story feel like theirs.
14
huddles across the city, the vision a donor's gift is asked to sustain.
$40K
The goal, every year
3
Years running
10+
Stories captured
1
Long shoot day each
The result
Kasey liked them and her board loved them. I will be honest as the craftsman here: I would push these less cookie-cutter next time. But they did the job they exist for, they gave a real appeal something to stand on.
This is the closest thing I have to the donor communication system Mila runs now: recurring, planned in advance, theme-driven, and built to fund a year.Braden · on the Philly appeal
What we delivered
A themed set of donor-story films (upwards of ten stories captured across the campaigns), cut into donor segments, shot in a single day each year.
Have a year-end appeal that deserves better than another email?
Every film needs somewhere to land. The Storytelling System is the part that makes sure it does.