See What’s Out There

In the past year we have gotten quite a few calls from existing and new clients asking to make a “girl effect” video. For those of you have yet to see “The Girl Effect” you can scroll below and see it.

This style of storytelling using simple graphics, sometime just words, together with a moving sound track (mostly piano) has be copied and knocked off so many times that even we at See3 were tempted and spoofed it in our last years holiday card.

Because it has been so overdone, we generally steer clients away from this approach towards something that will stand out from the crowd.

But last week, after yet another request to “girl effect,” I went back to watch the original and, even after all this time, I was impressed at its effectiveness. Let’s not forget that this clip has been seen by hundreds of thousands and generated tons of buzz and awareness about the issue—not to mention donations.

So what is it that I think makes this work?

Its frighteningly simple: It practices what it preaches. This is a video about the empowerment of girl and it makes the viewer feel empowered. So many nonprofit messages get mired in the weeds—in the complex issues, the sobering realities of our world or the organizational services. This is what the org wants the viewer to know. More important than what you want them to know is what you (the org) want the viewer to do. At See3, this what we focus on—moving the audience for passive viewer to active participant.

This is why the “girl effect” is so effective. In the first 13 seconds it tells us that the world is a mess and asks so what? It then pivots to the positive: “What if there is an unexpected solution?” and then spends the rest of the clip (2 minutes) visualizing what girls, if empowered, can do for themselves, their communities and for us, the viewer. By the end, we are moved by the solution (what they want us to know), but also moved to feel that our participation in the campaign can mean something (what they want us to do).

This is the effect that, as nonprofit communicators, we should learn from.

Girl Effect Video

Our Holiday Parody: The Regift Effect

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 at 8:55 am and is filed under Video, Nonprofits, see3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.