Sharing Your History and Your Future

Your organization may want to use an event to commemorate a special occasion. Maybe it’s even a watershed anniversary like celebrating 50 or 100 years. With this opportunity you have a great chance to bring back longtime supporters, showcase the scope of your impact over the years and share your vision for the future. But honoring the past and setting the stage for the future can require a fine balance—especially when you have a long history and a lot of ground to cover. It can be tough to land on the right strategy to achieve the balance you’re looking for.

A great way to capture the scope of your work is with video. It might feel like video is an unnecessary expense or you’ll give up too much of the control you need to tell your story authentically. But with the right video partner, someone who recognizes that you ought to own the storytelling of your history, video can help you cover just the right amount of ground.

City Club of Portland, a civic membership organization, recently celebrated its centennial. And they had this conundrum: how do we honor the past as well as focus on the future? To do it, they worked with us in partnership with Portland Center for the Media Arts to produce a powerful organizational video that provided the bridge they were looking for.

Because City Club carries the intimate knowledge and strategic vision for how to best showcase their history, they did the work of setting up the history section. This included curating the photos and putting them in the correct order, writing the script and providing the voice over, which was recorded on the same day as the interviews of current supporters. By leveraging existing assets and being thoughtful of process, this added only minimal cost for maximum effect.

The video allowed City Club to strategically and impactfully frame the foundation of their organization to show how historical values inspire the values of the organization today. When you get this balance right, it can be just what your donors—who may be connected with you across a broad span of time and ideology—need in order to remember what inspired them to support you in the first place.