How to brief a charity video production company

How to Brief a Charity Video Production Company

A good brief is the difference between a film that moves people to act and one that simply ticks a box. We’ve worked with charities for twenty years, and the projects that go best,  creatively, logistically, and in terms of real-world impact almost always start with a thoughtful, honest brief.

A good brief doesn’t have to be long. It doesn’t have to be a formal document. It just has to answer the right questions. So here’s our guide to briefing a charity video production company — drawn from our own experience working with organisations like Age UK, British Red Cross, the RSPCA, and many others.

Start with your audience, not your organisation. This is the single most common mistake we see in early briefs. The instinct is to lead with who you are, your history, your mission, your services. But your audience doesn’t start there. They start with themselves and the most effective charity films begin with a person, a situation, or an emotion that the viewer immediately recognises or responds to. That’s what earns their attention. The organisation comes second.

When we worked with Age UK on Florence & Roy, the brief wasn’t “tell people about our telephone befriending service.” It was rooted in a truth: 3.5 million older adults live alone. We spent time with Florence and Roy, two real people, and let their personal stories carry the weight of that statistic. The service became the answer to a problem the audience could already feel. So before you write anything else in your brief, ask: who is this film for, and what do we want them to feel?

Be clear about what you want people to do. Every charity film needs a job. Donate. Sign up. Share. Call. Visit. Change how they think about an issue. Be specific about this in your brief. “Raise awareness” isn’t a call to action, it’s a starting point and we aim to push further. Awareness of what, exactly? Among whom? Leading to what behaviour?

The clearest briefs we receive tell us not just what the film is about, but what success looks like. For Centrepoint’s Sponsor a Room DRTV campaign, the objective was unambiguous: inspire donations, at specific points in the fundraising calendar, from a clearly defined audience. That clarity shaped every creative decision: the casting, the narrative arc, the pacing, the music. And the result was year-on-year fundraising growth. A vague objective produces a vague film. A sharp objective produces a sharp film.

Tell us what you know about your audience. You know your supporters better than we do. Tell us about them. What motivates them to give? What have they responded to before? What puts them off? Are they long-term donors or people you’re trying to reach for the first time? For the RCN campaign, we spent real time understanding the target audience before a single frame was shot. What resonates with them had to be what they saw on screen, not what resonated with the communications team, or with us. That audience insight shaped everything from the filming process to the emotional register of the finished film. And a million people watched it in one weekend. The more you can share about your audience in the brief, the better equipped we are to make something that actually reaches them.

Share the story, not just the subject. There’s a difference between a subject and a story. Homelessness is a subject. John, who lost his livelihood during the pandemic, spent months in crisis, and found his way through with the help of Citizens Advice – that’s a story. A real person and a real experience. We spent time with John, understanding the key moments of his journey. We then built the film around those moments, shooting in documentary style in Liverpool, letting his experience speak for itself, and using colour grade in post-production to visually mark his journey from crisis to hope.

That film works because it’s rooted in a true story, told with care. If you have access to beneficiary stories, share them with your production company early. Even if the final film doesn’t feature that person directly, their story can shape the creative approach.

If you’re not sure which story to tell, that’s fine too. Finding the story is part of what we do. But give us the raw material to work with.

Be honest about your constraints. Budget. Timeline. Safeguarding requirements. Contributors who may be vulnerable or who need careful handling on camera. Locations that are difficult to access. Approvals processes that take time. All of these things affect what’s possible, and none of them are dealbreakers if we know about them upfront. We’ve most likely handled similar in our video work for other charities and healthcare organisations. We work sensitively with contributors in difficult circumstances as a matter of course, it’s a fundamental part of charity video production. But we need to know what we’re working with. Tell us early, and we’ll design a production approach that works within your requirements rather than running into them later.

Know the difference between live action and animation, and ask if you’re not sure. This is a question worth addressing in your brief, even if you’re not certain of the answer. Live action is powerful for stories that involve real people. It creates authenticity and emotional engagement. Animation is powerful for explaining complex issues, for topics where contributors can’t be shown on screen, or where you need to reach a broader or younger audience accessibly.

For Cruelty Free International’s HEARTS Act campaign and Age UK’s End of Life film, animation was the right choice. It allowed sensitive, complex subjects to be communicated clearly and accessibly without putting vulnerable individuals on camera. For Citizens Advice and Age UK’s Florence & Roy campaign, real people and real places were essential to the emotional impact. If you’re not sure which approach is right for your film, just tell us what you’re trying to achieve and we can advise. It’s a creative decision, not just a budget one.

What a good brief actually looks like. You don’t need a 20-page document. A good brief covers:

The objective: what do you want people to do or feel after watching?
The audience: who are they, and what do you know about them?
The story: what’s the human story at the heart of this film? Do you have a contributor in mind?
The format: do you have a sense of length, style, or platform? (A social media cut and a TV ad have very different requirements.)
The timeline: when does this need to be ready, and are there fixed deadlines (a fundraising campaign launch, an event)?
The budget: even a ballpark figure helps us design a production approach that’s right for you.
The constraints: safeguarding requirements, approvals processes, anything we need to plan around.

That’s it. From there, the conversation can begin. Once you’ve got your brief together, the next step is the wider commissioning process, choosing who to approach, running a pitch, and managing the production through to delivery. We’ve covered that in detail in How to Commission a Charity Awareness Film →

What happens after you send your brief

A good brief gets you a proper conversation, not just a quote. Here’s what that conversation typically looks like once it lands with us.
We’ll usually start with a call, not a written response. Briefs raise questions that are quicker to talk through than to email back and forth about — particularly around story material, since the strongest contributor for your film often isn’t obvious from the brief alone. When we worked with Dravet Syndrome UK on a modest budget for a cause most people had never heard of, the brief told us the subject. The conversation told us where the story actually was.
From there, we’ll put together a creative treatment: our proposed approach to the story, the tone, the structure, and roughly how we’d shoot it. This isn’t a fully scripted film at this stage, it’s a direction, something for you to react to before either of us commits real time to it. Expect us to push back gently if something in the brief doesn’t quite add up, a length that doesn’t match the platform, an objective that doesn’t match the proposed audience. That’s not us being difficult. A brief is a starting point, not a fixed spec, and the best ones evolve once a production company asks the right questions.
Budget gets discussed honestly and early. If what you’ve described needs a bigger budget than you’ve indicated, we’ll tell you that upfront, along with what’s achievable at the level you’ve got. We’d rather have that conversation in week one than discover it mid-production.
From treatment to first day of filming is typically four to eight weeks for a straightforward beneficiary story or awareness film, longer for DRTV or a multi-language animation series.

The brief is just the beginning. The best projects we’ve worked on haven’t felt like a supplier-client transaction. They’ve felt like a genuine creative collaboration, where the charity brings the mission, the knowledge, and the access, and we bring the storytelling craft, the production expertise, and the creative vision. A good brief opens that conversation. It gives us enough to start asking the right questions, developing ideas, and finding the story that will make your film work.

Do I need to know which production company I want before writing a brief?

No, in fact it’s often better not to. A good brief describes the problem and the objective clearly enough that you can use it to approach two or three production companies and compare their creative thinking. If you’ve already decided who you’re hiring before the brief exists, you lose the chance to see how different companies would approach the same problem.

How long should a charity video brief be?

As long as it needs to be and no longer. Most of the strongest briefs we receive are one to two pages. What matters is covering the objective, audience, story material, budget, timeline and any constraints — not the length of the document itself.

What if we don’t have a story yet?

That’s completely normal, and it’s part of what a good production company helps with. Tell us about the people you work with, the situations you encounter, and the impact you’re trying to create — we’ll help find the right story from there.

Should the brief include a budget?

Yes, ideally an actual figure rather than a vague range. A production company that knows your real budget can tell you honestly what’s achievable and design something that works within it. Without that information, you risk wasting time on ideas that were never going to be affordable.

If you’re thinking about a charity video and you’re not sure where to start, just get in touch. We’re always happy to talk through a project before a brief is even written.

Call us: 020 7993 6205; Email: info@nutmegproductions.co.uk; Contact form

Or take a look at our charity video production work to see what’s possible.