You’re not trying to sell a product. You’re trying to move someone to do something — donate, volunteer, show up, tell a friend. That’s a different job than corporate video, and it takes a different kind of storytelling.
We’ve spent the last 8 years learning that job alongside some of the Bay Area’s most effective nonprofits. If you’re a communications director, ED, or development lead trying to figure out whether video is worth the investment — or which production company can actually deliver on the story you’re trying to tell — here’s what we know, and here’s our track record.
Nonprofit video has one job corporate video doesn’t: it has to make someone feel something specific enough that they act on it. A beautiful film that doesn’t move donors, board members, or partners to do anything isn’t a win — it’s an expensive video.
That’s the lens we bring to every nonprofit project. Before we’re thinking about b-roll or interview setups, we’re thinking about what the video needs to do for you — raise money, recruit volunteers, win a grant, shift a narrative, build trust with a new community. Everything else gets built around that.
Over the past 8 years, we’ve produced the majority of Eat. Learn. Play.’s video content — helping tell the story of their work reimagining Oakland’s schoolyards and tackling the region’s literacy crisis, from 20-minute mini-documentaries down to social trailers.
That work hasn’t stayed inside a nonprofit’s newsletter. It’s been featured on Good Morning America, at the ESPYs, and on PBS. One of our films, From Struggle to Strength, won a Silver Telly Award. More importantly to the people who fund the work: the videos we’ve produced with Eat. Learn. Play. have directly helped the organization raise over $10 million.
That’s the number that matters most in this category. Not views, not awards — dollars raised because the story landed.
Healing Waters — We produced a film highlighting two of Healing Waters’ clients and their journeys navigating an HIV diagnosis and finding community through the organization’s support. It’s the kind of story that only works if the people on camera trust you enough to be honest — which is where documentary experience and a genuine, patient approach to interviewing matters more than any piece of gear.
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative — 10 Years of Giving — We produced CZI’s retrospective film celebrating a decade of giving to grantees across San Mateo County, weaving together the organization’s philanthropic impact into a single cohesive story spanning numerous partner organizations and community initiatives.
Most of our nonprofit work leans observational and character-driven — real students, real clients, real staff, not actors reading a script.
Health diagnoses, trauma, systemic inequity — we've built real experience helping subjects feel safe enough on camera to tell the truth.
Grantees, funders, board members, program participants — we know how to build a narrative that serves all of them without diluting the story.
A 20-minute documentary is only part of the deliverable. We cut trailers, social edits, and campaign-specific versions so the story works everywhere it needs to.
Nonprofit budgets are real, and we don't pretend otherwise. Every project is scoped around what you're trying to achieve and what you have to work with — see our pricing page for real budget ranges pulled from past productions, so you're not guessing before you even reach out.
It depends on scope — a single interview-style testimonial and a 20-minute mini-documentary with a full production crew are very different budgets. Most of our nonprofit clients land somewhere between a lean, single-day shoot and a multi-day documentary production like the ones we did for Eat. Learn. Play. Check our pricing page for real ranges pulled from past budgets, so you have a number in mind before we talk.
That’s the whole point of doing it well. We’ve seen it firsthand — the videos we’ve produced for Eat. Learn. Play. have directly helped them raise over $10 million. Video works for fundraising when it makes a donor feel connected to a specific person or outcome, not just the mission in the abstract. That’s why we lean documentary and character-driven instead of montage-and-stats.
Often, yes. You don’t need a 20-minute documentary to make an impact — a single well-told testimonial or a short campaign piece can outperform a bigger, more polished video that doesn’t have a real story at its center. We’ll tell you honestly if your budget fits your goals, and if it doesn’t, we’ll tell you what would need to change.
Carefully, and with time. Our approach for stories like the one we told with Healing Waters starts well before cameras roll — building trust with the people we’re interviewing so what they share on camera is honest, not performed. We never push a subject further than they’re comfortable going, and we always give people a chance to see how their story is being told.
You do. Once a project is complete and paid for, the final deliverables are yours to use across your channels, campaigns, and reporting for as long as you’d like.
Yes, that’s a lot of our recent work. CZI’s 10 Years of Giving film pulled together a decade of impact across numerous grantees in San Mateo County into one cohesive story. We’re used to balancing multiple voices and priorities without losing the throughline.
No. A lot of nonprofit projects start as a longer documentary and get cut down into trailers, social versions, and campaign-specific edits — that’s standard practice for us, not an upsell. We build the shoot with all of those outputs in mind from the start.
It varies with scope. A single testimonial-style shoot can turn around in a few weeks. A documentary on the scale of what we did for Eat. Learn. Play. — with pre-interviews, multi-day production, and a full post schedule — typically runs a few months from kickoff to final delivery.
If you’re a nonprofit trying to figure out whether a documentary, campaign video, or donor film is the right move — or you already know it is and you’re vetting production partners — we’re happy to talk through what that could look like, budget included, before you commit to anything.
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