Charities and Not-for-profit Organisations have important and engaging stories to tell but often time and budget constraints can limit the production quality. Often the communications strategy and visual brand have been invested in but the day-to-day production costs of producing social media content is understandably not prioritised over an organisation’s impact driven work.
It’s a catch-22 situation because both campaigning and fundraising rely on regularly communicating the important work and success stories of an organisation and these stories need to be presented at an acceptable production standard that costs money.
The design platform Canva and the caption-based video platform Lumen5 are affordable, incredibly powerful and easy-to-use tools that can help generate fast and affordable branded content.
I’ll start with Lumen5 because every time I use this tool I’m blown away with it’s intelligence in creating video content. You can create a captioned, fully branded video with image slides in minutes. Copy and paste your latest supporter email or blog post and Lumen5 will use AI technology to produce a captioned video. It’ll pick out the key messages or sentences, insert relevant stock imagery from the Getty archive, highlight key words and add your brand end frame all with the click of a button. It’s a game changer! You can easily adjust the captions, upload you own images or search the Getty archive yourself to fine tune before exporting to social media. Seriously, every Charity should be using Lumen5. Why not add these videos to your next email or blog post to cater for supporters who would prefer to watch a video?
I made this video on Lumen5 in 5 minutes!
Canva is a more familiar design platform that many organisations use. Being a Designer, I was initially resistant and skeptical but since multiple staff and volunteers often communicate with supporters I’ve learned to love it. Commission a Designer to setup a range of templates based on your visual brand style and then have the confidence that anyone can create a social media graphic that’s on brand.
Both platforms offer monthly and annual subscription plans for Not-for-profits so you can stay on budget and start producing high quality branded content daily.
Happy creating!
PS. I’m not affiliated with either platform, I just want more Charities having the confidence to produce clear and engaging branded content.