A Screen Test for Charities

Documentary films gain favor as a way to raise public awareness

A Story of Healing, a documentary about a California charity’s trip to Vietnam to provide free reconstructive surgery to children there, won an Academy Award last year.

ALSO SEE:

Filmmaking Finds a Bigger Niche

Filmmakers Say the Search for Money May Be Harder Than Ever

New Fund at Andy Warhol Foundation to Benefit Struggling Artists

Numerous Organizations Help Filmmakers Deal With Financial Matters

It also won the charity its largest single gift ever — $1-million.

“We are not so jaded in our society that we can resist watching a good story,” says Susan W. Hayes, president of the California group, Interplast. “We can resist reading an annual report — we can throw it in the pile of yellowing papers — but there is something about a story on film that is powerfully engaging.”

Interplast is one of a growing number of charities that are making documentaries as a way to tell their stories to a mass audience. A few charities have long produced television programs — like All Bird TV, a series created by the National Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy for the cable station Animal Planet. And non-profit groups often rely on short videos to woo potential donors or publicize their work.

Now many charities are also producing documentaries, 30-to-90-minute films that explore the work of the organization or an issue of interest to it. Such documentaries have grown so popular that Suffolk University, in Boston, next fall plans to offer a new master’s program that will teach students how to make documentaries about philanthropic topics.

Among the charities that are using documentaries:

* Ducks Unlimited, a Memphis group dedicated to preserving waterfowl and wetlands, is negotiating with several cable-television stations to air its first-ever documentary after years of putting out news releases on video and co-producing a television series. The subject: threats to snow-goose populations.

* The Human Service Alliance, which takes care of terminally ill people in Winston-Salem, N.C., plans to produce a documentary about death and dying, using camera and editing equipment the charity bought with a foundation grant.

* The Breast Cancer Fund, in San Francisco, produced Climb Against the Odds, a documentary about a trip up Alaska’s Mount McKinley sponsored by the charity. The documentary is playing at film festivals around the country and is scheduled to appear on public-television stations this fall.

Andrea R. Martin, the charity’s executive director, says that the climb was intended primarily to offer an unusual physical challenge to breast-cancer survivors. But it was also meant, she says, to raise awareness of the disease and to publicize the work of the fund.

“We wouldn’t have even considered the climb without the film,” Ms. Martin says. “How can you get the word out if no one can come and watch the event? Since we can’t take all the people to the mountain, the documentary takes the mountain to the people.”

The breast-cancer fund and other charities are capitalizing on an expanding audience for documentaries. Cable channels like Discovery and A&E, and public-television series like The Visionaries, offer charities a way to reach new audiences — people who might give, become volunteers, or otherwise help a charitable cause — sometimes in unpredictable ways.

When A Story of Healing, the documentary about Interplast, won the Oscar, Ken Barun, president of Ronald McDonald House Charities, happened to be watching the Academy Awards presentation on television. He realized that the documentary had been sitting on his desk, unviewed, and the award prompted him to play it. The result: He decided that his organization should give the California charity $1-million, more than 30 times the amount that it had asked for in its grant application.

While the Interplast documentary ended up attracting a big donation, charities say films that are made exclusively with fund raising in mind probably won’t appeal to too many people.

Christopher N. Palmer, president of National Wildlife Productions, which was created five years ago by the National Wildlife Federation to focus exclusively on mass-media projects, says producing high-quality, entertaining shows is a key goal.

“Our priority is to produce shows that have popular appeal,” Mr. Palmer says. “There are other benefits — donor cultivation, membership interest — but if you can’t get the shows on TV, those points are moot.”

Unlike the films of most other charities, many National Wildlife productions are paid for by investors, or through partnerships with businesses, such as Turner Broadcasting System. National Wildlife Productions produces a variety of television shows — up to 50 hours of programming a year — and movies for giant-screen theaters worldwide. One such movie, Whales, which was released two years ago, has so far been seen by about six million people and has grossed $31-million.

For most charities interested in producing or commissioning documentaries, that kind of money, popular appeal, and distribution network are way out of reach. Still, say charity officials, even a single airing of a documentary on public television can introduce plenty of new people to a charity and help a fund-raising campaign along.

Laubach Literacy, in Syracuse, N.Y., made its first documentary in 1995, hoping that the footage from the film would help the charity evaluate its overseas programs to teach women to read and provide donors with a first-hand look at its work.

Since it could not find an outside organization to produce a 60-minute film for less than $175,000, Laubach decided to hire an independent camera operator and work with a local editing studio.

“We had in mind the possibility that it might be interesting to PBS, but we had no idea what quality it would be or if it would be picked up,” says Kirk Shisler, Laubach’s director of fund development.

But as soon as Hillary Clinton agreed to narrate part of the film and it was endorsed by PBS’s Adult Learning Service, the literacy group knew it had a winner. When PBS set up the satellite feed for stations around the country to pick up the documentary, Hope Is a Literate Woman, Laubach sent notices to more than 1,000 of its volunteer groups nationwide asking them to encourage their local stations to air the film. The group posted a toll-free telephone number at the end of the film so that viewers could contact Laubach, and it sent out surveys to donors asking them to evaluate the film.

Mr. Shisler says that the organization received about $5,000 in donations as a direct result of the documentary’s television broadcast. But, he says, the benefits of the film, which cost $45,000 to make, went well beyond that.

“The documentary reinforced Laubach Literacy as a leader in the field of adult literacy, and, in terms of our relations with our donors, it carried a lot of credibility,” he says. “It added credibility to our entire major-gifts campaign, which generated $5-million from 1991 to 1998.”

Two years ago, Laubach produced another documentary, Literacy Changes Lives — which was also picked up by PBS — and it is considering other projects in the future.

In the meantime, new filmmakers who are specially trained to highlight the kind of work done by Laubach and other charities may be emerging.

In September, 25 students are expected to enroll at Suffolk University for a brand-new master’s-degree program, called Philanthropy and Media. The program will be run with the help of the producers of a PBS series, The Visionaries, that profiles charities in 30-minute episodes.

Students in the one-year program will take courses on the technical aspects of filmmaking, as well as on such subjects as the non-profit world, grant-proposal writing, and the television industry. Students will also assist in the production of a Visionaries episode and produce their own short video about a non-profit organization.

Bill Mosher, creator of the PBS series, which is shown on as many as 180 stations nationwide, says he saw a need to teach filmmakers how to cover non-profit work because interest in charity profiles is overwhelming. He says about 4,000 organizations have applied to be included in The Visionaries, which has produced 49 episodes since 1995. And, he says, as more charities start making documentaries themselves, it will be helpful to have a trained pool of filmmakers who can do high-quality work.

“We can teach people so maybe in a few years most of what we see won’t have that “Wind Beneath My Wings,” nightly-news puff-piece feel,” Mr. Mosher says. “To be positive doesn’t have to be corny.”

Donna Dewey of Dewey-Obenchain Films, in Denver, who volunteered her services to direct A Story of Healing, the documentary on Interplast, agrees. “The key is that even though every cause is different, at its core comes out the story of the spirit of people,” she says. “If you just tell that story as it is, the feeling you want to convey is going to come out, too.”