When the charity Naomi House & Jacksplace came to us with some ideas for an animated Christmas e-card they wanted to send to their supporters, we couldn’t wait to get started!
Animations are definitely on the up and there’s a whole bunch of advantages to using them: they’re easy to understand, they generate increased levels of engagement and therefore lower bounce rates, plus they’re easy to edit and so can be a budget-friendly marketing platform.
Let’s not forget that video in general is a great conversion booster. In fact, Charity Comms found that 74% of charities say that video content provides a good return on investment, video animation is now more popular than ever.
We had previously worked with Naomi House & Jacksplace, who provide support to life limited and life threatened children and young adults, to produce their fundraising event material so we’d got a good understanding of their brand and their message.
As a children’s charity with quite a colourful brand, we wanted to keep the animation childlike with clean lines, simplistic imagery and bold colours. We decided to use a ‘reveal’ style, having trees parting across the screen to show a landscape where a twinkling light draws the eye across the hills to the two hospices (Naomi House & Jacksplace). The music was chosen for its feel-good Christmas film style.
Although the brief began as a 90 second animation, we worked with Naomi House to tailor it and refine the story, reducing it to 45 seconds. This brought it more in line with budgets and ensured it was fit for purpose; essentially to wish people a Happy Christmas. Any longer than that and we risked losing the viewer’s attention.
Even though Christmas is over, we are still getting a warm fuzzy feeling watching this animation. And it seems it had a positive reaction elsewhere too, receiving over 21,000 views on Facebook alone!
Animation can be a perfect way of getting your message across, no matter who your audience is. If you think animation might benefit your organisation then drop us a line and we’ll get our creative juices flowing!