How to Afford Quality Video Production Without Actually Having a Budget
You’ve seen the statistics. You know that video is the most effective marketing tool available. But your communication and marketing budget is only so big, and video seems like an investment that you just can’t make, or that certainly won’t get approved.
There is hope, I promise.
The real difficulty here is that most people don’t know how to track and report on the success of a video outreach. When people create a video, they don’t know if it has any real impact on their goals and mission.
But what if you did? What if you could concretely say that a fundraising video raised $100 dollars for every dollar invested? Or that a vocations video led five men to discern with your organization?
Budget or not, I bet you would get approval for your video production.
What you really need are measurable numbers, or checkpoints, that relate to your goals and can track how the video is performing. The marketing term for these are “KPIs” - Key Performance Indicators. KPIs are different from goals. Your goal may be to “inspire supporters to donate.” So a good KPI would be to have your video seen by 200 new potential donors. 200 new viewers is a measurable number, one that you can track - for free! - on any video hosting platform.
Your goal may be to “inspire vocations.” So a good KPI would be to gain 1,000 views among young men aged 15-30. Again, 1,000 views, along with the demographic of your audience, are measurable metrics that can be tracked on any hosting platform from Facebook to YouTube to LinkedIn. For a few dollars a day, you can even tell your platform to show your video to young men aged 15-30, and your platform will amp up its impressions among this audience. There are even tracking methods that will tell you if, after viewing a video, someone clicked on your website link and what pages they interacted with once they got there. With the right systems in place, you could definitely tell your president how many people filled out an inquiry form after watching your vocations video.
Now that you have some concrete numbers, there’s one more big question we have to answer. That is, whether or not your video was worth it. Did you ultimately receive or save more – in monetary value – than you actually spent on your video? The marketing term for this is ROI, “return on investment.” Now, I know, as religious people working in a Catholic organization this feels wrong. I mean, what monetary value can you place on someone’s salvation? Or what is it worth to inspire someone to join a service organization and therefore do infinite good in the lives of others?
You’re not putting a dollar amount on Jesus. Honestly. You are trying to track the return on investment for the sake of stewardship. Remember, even Jesus Himself said we have to be shrewd, and praised the servant who doubled their master’s coins – that’s a two times ROI, by the way. You have been entrusted with dollars, likely from donors, and you need to make sure that you’re investing them in the best way possible.
So, how do you know your video’s ROI; return on investment? This requires a little more number-crunching and digging into records. You have your KPI - now you need to calculate what that number is worth, monetarily-speaking.
So, for our fundraising example. Maybe you know from experience that one in twenty supporters actually donates to your organization, and that, on average, the lifetime donation amount is $500. Remember your KPI – for your video to be seen by 200 new potential donors. If 200 new people see your video, one in twenty, or a total of 10 of them, will actually donate. With your average lifetime donation amount of $500, you can safely say that your return on investment is $5,000 for that video.
If you spent $2,000 to create the video, that means you’ve raised $3,000 over what you spent. You’ve more than doubled your investment. Jesus would be proud. And your board will be too.
Now, for our vocations example. Again, we’re not putting a dollar amount on these young men. For this example, we are looking to save money and increase our reach. For any organization to survive, you have to make yourself known. You already have ways of doing that – maybe you’re using newspaper spots or putting ads in local bulletins. So an easy way to track ROI on a vocations video would be to compare it to other forms of outreach that you could use. This is a little tougher because there is a big difference between impressions and engagements. The newspaper will typically report how many impressions that they provide – how many eyes potentially glanced over your ad. Our KPI, a video view is known as an engagement, where you know that someone directly interacted with your content and is much more valuable. So maybe you paid $300 for the design and spot of an advertisement in a newspaper with 30,000 readers, 5,000 of which are young men in your target demographic. So, you paid 6 cents for each impression. Now, compare that to your video. If you hit your video KPI of 1,000 views, that is, 1,000 engagements, your impression rate is much higher. For this example, let’s say our platform tracking let us know that we had 50,000 impressions among our target demographic. If we invested $2,000 in our video, that means we paid 4 cents for each impression. That’s significantly cheaper than the 6 cents per impression we paid for the newspaper ad. If we use other tools to track the number of inquiries that resulted from our video, its value only increases.
Again, well done, good and faithful servant.
That’s stewardship. Tracking your KPIs and ROI will allow you to show the board that the investment of your valuable resources is indeed furthering your mission. It will also allow you to prove that, even without a budget, your video is already paying for itself.
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