Baptist Children's Home

The Client: The Alabama Free Will Baptist Children’s Home, a foster home serving children in the most desperate need.

The Challenge: Encourage donations to a most worthy cause with a video that stands out from all the other heartfelt appeals.

The Solution: Two priorities couldn’t have been more clear from the beginning: We weren’t going to produce just another video telling sad stories, and we absolutely were not going to re-traumatize the kids in pursuit of a tear-jerking funding appeal. We did both by focusing not on the trauma but on the hope. Interviewing the kids, we asked what they did to help newer children adjust, which allowed them to talk about the children’s’ hard lives and emotional needs from a place of strength, without having to re-live their own trauma. The adults did talk more about the trauma some of their kids had endured, but always in the context of support and health and little wins. The result is a video that doesn’t need to make you sad to gain your support — it makes you want to be a part of something that makes so much difference for kids in the most desperate need. (You can do so on their website.)

The Credit: Agency: Uptick Marketing; producer: Dawn Taylor; director/cinematographer: Mateo Zarate