My son has been a Cub Scout for five years, and I’ve been his assistant den leader and we’ve had a ton of fun and lots of great experiences in Scouts. Our pack only runs one fundraiser a year, we sell Christmas wreaths and holiday greenery in our local area to pay for all our Pack activities throughout the coming year. Normally we sell door-to-door, but we couldn’t this year because of COVID. Taking a cue from a local Boy Scout troop we set up a pop-up Shopify Site to sell our wreaths. My company was happy to set up and manage the Shopify site. We documented insights and tips for other nonprofits wanting to the same in this article.
Once the site was up and running, we had to get the word out about our products and generate traffic to the site. The same issues all web sites have. We created some joyful and humorous videos that showed Cub Scout and Holiday spirit to get the word out.
This article covers how we approached making the videos, the equipment we used, and decisions we made along the way hoping this can provide some insight or inspiration for helping other nonprofits create videos for their fundraisers.
Challenges
There are challenges in any video content project, but this one had a few exceptional ones, the biggest two being COVID and COPPA. With COVID numbers getting worse, kids out of school, and in-person discontinued by Scouting, we couldn’t use the kids from our Pack for talent. Normally the boys and girls of our pack are delighted to put on a performance for almost anyone who will watch. We also knew we would have to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA) by getting signed releases from any parent whose child would appear in the video. While both of our issues could be addressed, it would be difficult to do so due to our third challenge, time. We only have a three week selling window before our wreath orders had to be submitted in order to get merchandise by Thanksgiving. This is when all the Scout Packs and Troops sell, so the timing isn’t negotiable. With all of those challenges, and primarily to respect COVID restrictions, I decided to keep the talent to myself, and my son.
Keeping the Message Generic
Since the Scouts have a friendly competition to see who sold the most, we wanted to keep things fair, and create videos any Scout could use. We did this by keeping the messaging generic; having the graphics and script reflect our Pack in general, and reminding viewers that they should select the Scout that helped them during the checkout process. This way, the videos were general enough for any Scout parent to share with family, friends, and on their personal social media profiles.
Making the Videos Less Professional
Like most video projects, we did some test runs beforehand, and those test runs lead us to an odd video design decision. After looking at videos created with our best equipment, we felt they looked too good. We wanted to use green screens and backgrounds to provide cool environments when coupled with costumes, but we also wanted the videos to look, for lack of a better term, “Scouty.” Like something Scouts would create. As they were, the videos looked like professional videos that had Scouts in them. It was a subtle difference that stood out clearly to me.
To address this we experimented with some options and decided to do the following:
We used a webcam for filming, a good web cam, but not a professional camera.
We filmed all the videos in my home office, this was a big factor in making them look homemade. It also saved a lot of time finding off-site locations, and dealing with weather.
We throttled back our green-screening. To get green screening right, the screens have to be pulled tight, and the lighting has to be right. While I’m still on the fence about this, we left some wrinkles in the green screen, and chose not to use umbrella lights. That generated some visual artifacts that definitely made the videos look more homemade.
Equipment Used
In the end the equipment we used was:
Logitech Brio 4K Ultra HD webcam: Having decided to make all the video in the home office, we went with a very good webcam rather than a full DSLR or HD Video camera.
Lighting: Ring light behind the camera and a 3x5 LED stand light to illuminate the green screen. Some lighting was needed to make the green screen effective, we found that the 3x5 light worked well and still gave us the “home made” feel to the videos.
Greenscreen: Stand up fabric green screen.
Home office studio.
Types of Videos
We wanted to keep the videos short, heartfelt and humorous. We wrote some small scripts, and, in true Scout fashion, did minimal rehearsal. The videos are listed here:
Scout Wreath Dance
Selling Wreaths to Great Grandpa on Zoom
Wreathman
Wreath Kingdom
The Grinch Who Stole the Wreaths
Putting The Videos to Work
To put the videos to work, we shared them with other Scout families via a shared Google Drive and wrote up suggestions for sharing them and adding videos and messages of their own.
We shared the videos in the following places:
Personal Facebook feeds so friends and family can see them. If you’re doing this, tag the people who you want to be sure will see it.
Facebook Groups. Our elementary school and Scout Pack both have Facebook groups so we posted videos there.
We posted videos on personal Instagram feeds.
We posted videos on Nextdoor.
We spaced out the video publication, posting a new video every day for about a week. After that, we reposted videos to make sure they kept getting traction. We also encouraged other Scout families to keep posting videos.
Tip: When you’re creating the videos, remember platform specific video requirements as each platform is a little different.
Facebook: Aspect ratios 16:9 or 9:16, MP4 or MOV files up to 4GB files size, 240 minutes long, and a max of 30fps.
Instagram: Aspect ratios 1:1, 16:9, 9:16, or 4:5, MP4 or MOV files up to 30MB, 2 minutes long, and a max of 30fps.
Nextdoor: You can embed videos hosted on YouTube or other video sites.
If you’re using social media management tools to post the videos, be aware that those tools may have different posting limitations.
This was a fun project for a great cause, and we were glad to help out the Pack. Video is a great way to have some fun and raise some spirits while raising some money.