The gala is over. Someone filmed it. Now there's a folder with three hours of speeches, a band, a room full of people at round tables, and an auction that ran long. And somebody on the development team wants "a video for the email."
Most gala footage ends up as a recap: music, slow-motion clinking glasses, a logo at the end. It's nice. It also tends to raise nothing, because it's a video about a party. The people who weren't there don't care about the party. The people who were there already saw it.
A fundraising video built from the same footage has a different job. It has to make someone who wasn't in the room feel why the room was full.
Decide what the video is for first
Before anyone opens the footage, pick one use. The edit changes depending on the answer.
The thank-you email to people who came. This one can be a recap. They were there, so it's a memory. Faces, the big moment, the total raised if you're sharing it. Ninety seconds is plenty.
The appeal to people who didn't come. This is the fundraising video. Less party, more mission. The gala is the setting, but the story is the people the money is for.
Next year's invitation. Shows what the night felt like so people buy a table. The room, the energy, a couple of guests talking.
Grant applications and the board. Plainer and more factual. What the program does, who it serves, in the words of the people who run it.
You can get all four out of one night of footage. But each one is its own cut. One video that tries to do all four usually ends up doing the first one.
Where the story usually is
It's often not in the main speech. It's in the two minutes where someone the program helped gets up and talks. Or in the executive director's answer to a question off to the side, when they forget the camera is there. Or in a short interview recorded in the hallway before dinner.
If you're planning the shoot, this is the one thing worth asking for: ten minutes of short interviews with two or three people, away from the noise. A beneficiary, a longtime donor, someone who runs the program day to day. Those interviews are what the fundraising video gets built on. The gala footage goes on top as b-roll.
If nobody recorded interviews, the speeches have to carry it. That works too. It just takes more digging to find the forty seconds in a twelve-minute speech that say the thing plainly.
A two-minute shape that works
This isn't a formula, and every organization's story is different. But a fundraising cut from a gala often lands in roughly this order:
- Open on a person, not the room. A face and one sentence that makes you want the next one.
- The problem, in someone's own words. What the program exists to fix. Short.
- What the organization does about it. One or two specific things, with the people doing them on screen.
- The room. Now the gala footage earns its place: all these people showed up for this.
- The ask. One clear line on screen at the end. Where to give, and what a gift does.
Two minutes is long enough to tell that story and short enough that people finish it on a phone. If you need a version for social, it's a separate thirty to sixty second cut, vertical, with captions, because most people watch it with the sound off.
What one day of footage can turn into
For a New Jersey nonprofit, a single day of coverage at their golf tournament, with interviews, became a main promo video of one to two minutes, short cuts for social, a clip for the top of their website, and a version for grant materials. That's the full write-up on the case study.
I've also made gala, educational and promo videos for nonprofits including the American Cancer Society and the Center for Great Expectations.
Plan the cuts before the event, and one shoot can cover a year of asks.
If the gala already happened
You don't need a reshoot. Send what you have. Here's what helps me most:
- All the camera files, not a rough export someone made for the slideshow
- Separate audio from the soundboard or the speakers' mics, if anyone recorded it
- The run of show, so I know who's speaking when
- Names and titles of everyone who should appear on screen, spelled the way they want
- The one or two moments your team keeps talking about
- Where the video will live (email, YouTube, the website, a board meeting)
Old footage counts too. A lot of organizations have three years of gala video on a drive that nobody ever cut. Re-editing footage you already paid for is one of the cheapest ways to get a new video.
What it costs
I charge by time: $50 an hour, $400 for an eight-hour day, or $1,800 for a five-day week. How long a two-minute fundraising cut takes depends on how much footage there is and whether anyone recorded interviews.
I look at the footage and send an estimate before you commit to anything, so the budget conversation with your board can happen with a real number.
More on the work I do for nonprofits is on the nonprofit video editing page. All three rates are on pricing.