Bringing New Life to a Beloved, Global Nonprofit with a Powerful Brand Video

Across the nonprofit landscape, GivingTuesday is a milestone moment. Events, social media activations, and entire annual fundraising calendars are planned in anticipation of the most significant Tuesday of the year. While this one particular day has taken on a global level of impact since it began in New York City in 2012—leading to more than $13 billion total in funds raised through participation from nearly 100 countries—the organization behind it and the people who have participated have created a movement of generosity that lasts all year long.

While this spirit of generosity can be felt far and wide by anyone who has heard of GivingTuesday—in 2023, 34 million adults are estimated to have participated in the U.S. alone—not everyone knows about GivingTuesday, the organization. GivingTuesday is an independent nonprofit and a global movement that inspires hundreds of millions of people to give, collaborate, and celebrate generosity. While their brand is purposely flexible and accessible, lending itself to grassroots participation from generous people across six continents who have harnessed the GivingTuesday mission to meet the needs of their communities, GivingTuesday’s leadership knows that the more people who know about their work and understand their mission, the greater impact they can have in all places, all year long. 

Helping to raise awareness and spark inspiration through GivingTuesday’s mission to globally ritualize generosity was the catalyst for our partnership. Town Hall was formed to build and nurture passionate communities for nonprofits, so our team is deeply familiar with the incredible impact of GivingTuesday, the day and the movement. We were thrilled to collaborate with their communications team on a brand video that illustrates how every act of generosity, whether big or small, amounts to so much more when woven together with the actions of others. 

Our creative team set out to elevate the GivingTuesday brand while inspiring radical generosity year-round, not just on a single day. We approached this video not as a PSA but as a compelling piece of brand content, meant to engage and inspire viewers through storytelling. Each concept we created and considered was designed to support a narrative hook that would grab users’ attention and pull them into our story in the first, crucially-important seconds of the video (helping us to make an impression, even in a busy social feed). We knew our tone needed to go beyond just inviting users to action, but move them to act through a clear sense of their place in the GivingTuesday movement.

The creative direction we executed captures the concept of emergence in giving, or the idea that our collective generosity is greater than the sum of its parts and that it is special because it is something we do all together. Leveraging the incredible library of photos and videos of everyday people donating, volunteering, and connecting through generosity that GivingTuesday has built over the past eleven years, along with a powerful voiceover and compelling animations, we illustrated how individual generous moments link, intersect, and join together, creating an interconnected web of generosity. 

The final product demonstrates that the GivingTuesday brand really is a whole greater than the sum of its parts. By selecting footage and photography featuring a diverse array of people and countless ways to give, we created a unified narrative that embodies the organization’s vision of shared humanity and generosity. The video celebrates the hopeful, strong, joyful spirit of this movement and it set the tone for GivingTuesday in 2023 in email and press communications leading up to the big day. During their most visible day of the year, GivingTuesday showcased the new video on their social media channels to introduce themselves to newcomers and reinforce their year-round mission for longer-term participants.   

Even though we’re 11 months out from the next annual GivingTuesday, you can learn more about how to get involved and answer the question, “What if every Tuesday was GivingTuesday?” here.