We created a fundraising charity video and featured teenagers living in a foster home. We came up with a fundraising idea that is like the opposite of what a charity video of this kind usually looks like.
The campaign collected donations for a summer camp of kids living in foster homes. But instead of using the old pattern of charity videos, showing innocent and poor kids who deserve the help of the audience, we featured them as people of wisdom and energy.
I worked with DeepInsight Creative on this campaign, for the client nonprofit organization Academy of Experience.
After we have finished, the creative director Balazs Ver posted an article on Facebook about the future of civilization. Every now and then I read an article like this one which tells you that for example, the most crucial resources of our industrial civilization like phosphorus will be in scarcity within twenty years and this will make industrial agriculture collapse.
Meditating on the chaos and then going to the farmers’ market
I meditate often and try to face these predictions, and also try to look at the present day with this knowledge in mind. For example, conceiving everyday life as a routine for many of us to ignore the growing danger. Just like today, after the meditation I went to the farmer’s market. Civilization in Europe still seems to be more or less stable. You can get food.
But I noticed that when you contemplate on the possibility of a looming collapse then this experience alters your perception.
Because you start understanding why we all have got in trouble.
One prominent reason is that we feel detached from other humans or from certain groups of humans. And also from other beings like animals and all the losers who have gone extinct by now.
And this is a misunderstanding. A basic idea of our civilization is wrong. If you let others get in trouble this leads to our extinction as it seems right now. In other words we are connected.
When you understand this and donate to kids in foster homes, this act will make you feel connected just as much as those kids will feel so. Because you are experiencing what is common between us. This feeling of connection is the experience of giving.
Our fundraising idea for a charity video is based on this experience of connectedness that a campaign can offer to the target audience.
