Objective

Every day, men and women in uniform step up to defend our freedoms – willingly sacrificing comfort, safety, and sometimes their lives. Many of us never stepped into those boots. You don’t need to have worn the uniform to serve now. At The PenFed Foundation, we ensure our veterans have the tools, resources, and opportunities they deserve. Whether it’s support during their transition, mentorship, or emergency assistance after a natural disaster - donations to The PenFed Foundation helps those who once shouldered the burden for us. 

To help spread this message, we worked with talented songwriters to create “The Least We Can Do,” and produced a behind-the-scenes video to showcase its creation. Our objective was to humanize the song and its message by giving our audience an inside look at the emotional process behind its production. Through this content, we aimed to connect with our supporters on a deeper level, engage new audiences, and inspire action to support veterans and their families. By revealing the story behind the song, we sought to elevate The PenFed Foundation’s mission and drive support to give back to those who have given so much.

Strategy

The strategic approach behind the video was to create an experience that blended storytelling with advocacy, offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the song’s creation. We began by working closely with two incredible songwriters who share passion for giving back to the veteran community, ensuring it would resonate authentically with our target audience. The behind-the-scenes video was designed to amplify this creative process, capturing raw moments of collaboration, emotion, and storytelling.

To bring our vision to life, we planned in three phases:

1. Pre-production – Our team worked with The PenFed Foundation President Andrea McCarren and took the often-unspoken feeling of guilt for not serving our country and brainstormed key themes tied to this feeling. The Foundation teamed up with Johnny and Heidi, the inspiring songwriters, and invited them to bring their own experiences to the song composition.
2. Filming – We captured intimate moments from the songwriting sessions and interviews with the songwriters as they shared their own feelings around wanting to serve our veterans. We included Johnny’s personal experience with being surrounded by veterans, but never having served himself. We used his story to share this common feeling of guilt and to show there are other ways to serve our country.
3. Post-production – In the editing phase, we focused on creating a compelling narrative that highlighted the human aspect of the song’s creation. This wasn’t just about showing how the song was made; it was about why it mattered and how deeply is connected to The PenFed Foundation’s mission.

One of the key challenges we faced was ensuring that the video felt authentic and not purely promotional. It’s an intimate and inspiring look into the work we do and more importantly, why we do it. By blending the emotional song with the storytelling of the behind-the-scenes look, we created an experience that leaves viewers ready to make a difference in the lives of our veterans.

Results

The release of “The Least We Can Do” Behind the Scenes had a significant impact in raising awareness with our audience. Once the video was posted to social media, it quickly gained attention and had nearly 62,000 views over the course of just 5 days. The video maintained the audience’s attention which can be seen by the sharp increase in our 3-second views and 1-minute views during the month. Our 3-second views increased by 270% and our 1-minute views increased by 549%. We successfully shared our mission with a broader audience and inspired them to take action and support our military community.

Our content resonated with the large audience we reached too. The release of the video kicked off our End of Year Giving campaign that ultimately brought in nearly $5,000 in donations. We had a peak in content interactions in the following days after posting, leading to a 25% increase in total content interactions during that month.

Ultimately, the behind-the-scenes video achieved its objective by creating a strong emotional connection with our audience, increasing engagement, and driving both support and awareness for our mission. This reinforced the power of creative storytelling and its ability to bring people together around a shared cause. We consider this effort a smashing success because it didn’t just promote a song – it ignited action towards supporting a community who has sacrificed so much.

Media