How Video Storytelling Can Drive Change in Nonprofits
In this episode of Notes from Video Village, host Dan Lichtenberg chats with nonprofit marketer Ling Woo Liu. Ling shares her journey from video journalist to nonprofit marketing director, exploring how video can be a powerful tool in all these spaces. She also recounts a personal story of how a video helped reconnect her son with his roots in China.
Note: This is a podcast transcript and is best experienced through the audio version above. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Intro
Ling: My name is Ling Woo Liu, and I'm the senior director of marketing and communications at the San Francisco Foundation.
I grew up in the Bay Area, child of Chinese American immigrants, and roughly the first half of my career, I spent as a multimedia journalist, working in the U.S. and in Asia. I did print, I did TV, I did documentary film, I worked at a wire service briefly, and then made a pivot to nonprofit communications when I joined the Asian Law Caucus, my first nonprofit. I still kind of consider it my nonprofit alma mater. I also consider myself very lucky that my first nonprofit job was at such an amazing, legacy, pillar organization here in the Bay Area. From there I have worked in philanthropy at a couple of different foundations, and as I said, I’m currently at the San Francisco Foundation, where I've been for more than seven years now.
Dan: It's cool because you have a background where you already understood the power of video, probably going into your more like marketing comms roles. So when you made the transition to the nonprofit world, what was the first time you remember making a video in the Asian Law Caucus role?
Ling: My position at the Asian Law Caucus was the first staff member of a brand new program that was just coming off the ground. That was called the Fred Korematsu Institute for Civil Rights and Education. Fred Korematsu was an American civil rights hero.
He was one of the four individuals who challenged the Japanese American incarceration – all the way up to the Supreme Court. And the Asian Law Caucus was very involved: 40 years after Korematsu was found guilty of betraying the incarceration order, Asian Law Caucus attorneys, and other young attorneys, jumped in and they were able to challenge that conviction and vacate the conviction.
Fast forward another couple of decades or so and the Caucus decided to create a new program that was all around Fred Korematsu's legacy and all that he represented, and really dive into the advocacy and education space. I hadn't worked at a nonprofit before, but I came in with a news and communications background.
And we did a lot of video work. I think one of the first things we did was a very grassroots PSA produced in the office that was about why the concept of a Fred Korematsu Day would be important.
We got a bunch of talent in and really it was a lot of staff from the Caucus, friends of those staffers, et cetera. We tried to get a pretty diverse bunch of folks to come in and show up on camera and talk about why it was an important legacy to remember. It was a lot of fun, and we did it on a very, very low budget.
What did you learn from a shoestring budget?
Ling: We were on a pretty shoestring video budget in my last news agency news organization as well. I was at TIME Magazine in Hong Kong, which was their Asia headquarters. But very often it was me and a camera and that was it. I mean, really, nothing more than that because the video was still being tested.
TIME, as you know, comes from a magazine background and so we were moving a lot more heavily into the digital space and we weren't resourced at all. So we probably had a better video budget when I got to the Asian Law Caucus. But I think when you have a good story, you don't necessarily need all the bells and whistles to produce a good video.
And what we had was a compelling story. We were advocating to get Fred Korematsu Day passed in the state of California, and we got it done in 2010 with a lot of community support. It was the first day named after an Asian American. And at this point in time 14 years later, this day is recognized in perpetuity in seven states. It has also been recognized in different municipalities, school districts, et cetera. We had a good story. We had something exciting that was newsworthy and it was based on a very, very compelling piece of history and an individual who a lot of people could identify with.
Fred Korematsu was a guy going about his own business who didn't think it was right for him to be incarcerated, and he stood up, used his voice and challenged the incarceration up to the highest court. And as compelling as the story was, we knew that the vast majority of Americans had never heard of it, much less the entire internment.
Dan: Why did that need to be a video in your mind? Why wasn't it just a press release or a newsletter or something like that?
Ling: The concept of a Fred Korematsu Day was brand new. We wanted to show that it wasn't something only relevant to Japanese Americans,or only relevant to Asian Americans.We wanted to show that it was relevant to any American because what he did was very American. He spoke out freely, he challenged a moment of injustice using our justice system. It didn't work out in his favor, but ultimately there was a day of reckoning when the case was reopened.
What other videos that you made that you felt like were really impactful or you learned really good lessons from making them?
Ling: So we're just coming off the heels of the San Francisco Foundation’s 75th anniversary. I'm still in recovery mode. In 2023 we took the opportunity, the whole year, to celebrate an organization that's been around for three-quarters of a century and really been involved in so many of the progressive movements in the Bay Area from civil rights in the 1950s, and soon after we became the biggest funder of LGBTQIA organizations in the seventies, before we had standalone foundations that were really target supporting those organizations, to our work on the AIDS epidemic, to our work on disability rights, to the work on housing and racial equity today. And so it was such a great story to be able to delve into as we prepared for the anniversary and also one where we felt strongly that there needed to be a video component because not everyone was going to read the book that we ultimately produced.
We had to be able to offer it in digestible ways for different audiences. So, there was the print element, which is also online. We also did an interactive tour on our website. And then the video component, where we produced some more traditional videos, featuring interviews and oral histories, but we also tried our hand for the first time at animation. We produced a couple of cartoon animated videos, one about Fred Blackwell, our CEO, and his own personal story of how he was first exposed to issues of racial equity as a kid growing up in Oakland.
It's about Fred riding his bike through different neighborhoods in Oakland and observing the differences that he saw in communities and how his parents were able to explain to him those differences and how that ultimately led him to this intersection of place and race and community and leading this very influential organization today. It was a lot of fun, and definitely something we hadn't tried before.
What do you think ended up being really successful about that video in your mind?
Ling: I think it was just a different take at storytelling. We do a lot of communications, obviously, about our work, about our grantmaking, our partnerships, our work with donors, our events and what not, but telling the very, very personal story about our leader further humanizes him and I think it brings audiences closer to him. And when you tell a story literally from the street view, because he's on a bike in the video a mongoose, specifically, “with all the trimmings,” is how he describes it, you're brought down to the street view and able to see what he's seeing at a very impressionable age. And so I think that that's just much more relatable than another strategy that we might have tried to explain our work. Via the values of our leader, we helped explain who we are as an organization.
Ling’s Personal Video Project
Ling: I thought it might be fun to talk to you about a personal video that I made that has nothing to do with my professional career.
In 2018, my husband and I traveled to China to adopt our younger son, who was raised by a foster grandma in Wuhan, China. Most folks didn't know Wuhan before COVID but they know that name now.
Our son came to us when he was almost three years old, and the adoption process didn't allow us to be in contact with or to meet the foster grandmother or foster families. And so there was no way to contact them. We were certainly thankful when we picked him up, and we left them with a thank you note and gifts for having raised him.
And then so, with no way to contact them, we came back and suddenly we're living this crazy life with two young boys, trying to adjust to our new normal and and didn't give that topic much thought. And then COVID hits. Folks in Wuhan are getting very sick. They're stuck in these buildings, and I'm like, oh my gosh, is foster grandma okay?
And so the thought just kind of formed in my head that I needed to find her. And so I started contacting whoever I could and I got in touch with a journalist in Wuhan and she tells me, this is going to be easy. There's a little bit going on right now, but you know, maybe when our lockdown ends, I can help you publish a news story to help find her.
And of course we know what happened with the rest of the world and our own country with COVID. The journalist’s initial reaction was that this is going to be so easy because everyone in China is online and specifically on a certain platform called WeChat, which is the main social media network in China.
But a few months later, she says to me that maybe we need to hold off on this because tensions between our countries are not particularly good. And this is at a time when our then president was up there saying “Kung Flu,” “China Virus,” so she tells me, I can't even pursue this right now because you're based in the U.S. and even this is too sensitive. A couple more years go by, and relations are not getting any better, you know, some have described the current U.S.- China relationship as having hit an all time low since the Cultural Revolution and Mao. And so I go back to the journalist and ask, what can we do because China had very strict COVID restrictions for a couple of years and then about a year and a half ago, they suddenly did away with everything and people were getting sick again.
And she says why don't you try social media? What if you just make your own video? It doesn't have to go through the news media. So I made a little video with an ask: people in Wuhan please forward this video because our son, Longlong, wants to reunite with his foster grandma. He is grateful to her for raising him, and he is doing well. It was a 40-second little video with me stumbling through my Chinese, and I send it off to an embarrassingly short list of WeChat friends that I have in my network in China, like my cousin, the journalist friend, this other random friend, the lady who owns a Wuhan restaurant nearby me, and Dan, in a city of 11 million people, it took us 48 hours before we were on the phone with her. I mean, it was mind blowing because my son had asked me, Are we going to find her?” And I had said, “Look, we are going to try, but this is a pretty tough search that we've embarked on. It has 11 million people. That's just a midsize city in China. So I have no idea.” We had an image of her – a screenshot of her. And of course we had images of him. And that's it.
And then we had the 40-second video with me saying “Residents in Wuhan, help us find her.” We could not have found her without a video, plain and simple. It couldn't have been done. These little tiny reels that are being served up on social media, sometimes they're about a little boy trying to find, connect to his roots. We had our first phone call with her and it just felt like she was giving us everything from the before bookend. And we were giving her everything from the after bookend. Her story led up to a day where we picked him up, and our story started that day, right?
And we started this relationship. We were able to visit her six months later, but after that first call, I asked “Longlong, How do you feel? You just talked to your foster grandma.” He was seven at the time and we were washing dishes together. He wasn't looking at me andI wasn't looking at him. And he just said, “I feel more home.” I could not have asked him to describe that more powerfully. He didn't have all the words, but I think what it gave him was grounding.
So that wasn’t my professional work. That was my personal work, but it was a video that cost me nothing. It was a video that didn't take a ton of time to produce, but it was a clear call to action. It doesn't always work, but this one worked. I still pinch myself because I didn't know that that was a project that we could ever check off.
Dan: That's so cool. Yeah, and it's funny because like so much of video content now is just somebody talking into a phone. And you can see how powerful it can be in your personal life and your networks and your reach and for all kinds of reasons and also even, a lot of companies now just do that type of video, too.
Ling: Right. That search was something that should never have been complicated, but it was complicated by so many different things: the restrictions around adoption at the time, and geopolitics somehow made something as innocuous as this something political. It should not have been difficult, but then you turn to this medium and the good will of the people. And it's not just geopolitics between the US and China but relationships between so many other countries where we're prevented from making these connections on a very human level.
Dan: Congrats to you and your son for making that happen.
Ling: About six months after we reconnected with her, we got to go visit her last fall.
Dan: That's such an interesting story that you just told because the smallest, most basic, most unproduced video can have such a huge impact.
When you look back at your career, how have you seen video changed?
Ling: Well, I think technology has to be the biggest change. I started out with news crews and documentary crews. This is certainly still how very good filmmaking is made, but it's a lot of equipment. It's very expensive. It has to be maintained, or it has to be replaced. And the fact that strong videos can now be made with a cell phone and an external mic–that’s a pretty dramatic time savings and cost savings. And that isn't to say that one should not make highly produced videos, because we still do that, but I think technology has to be one of the biggest changes that’s made video a lot more accessible, especially for the nonprofit sector that now has the ability to get in there and to share content and to push out campaigns in a way that was not accessible to organizations on a budget in the past. And I think that it will continue to change and you can probably tell me more than I could ever tell you about what is happening with AI and how that's going to impact all of us, but we're right here at the start of it.
Dan: There was definitely like a two to four week period there where like, OpenAI and all these other were making these announcements around that stuff. It was just, like, so scary. And for all kinds of reasons. One is like, the possibilities of deception and fake news and all that stuff. And then also it's like, wow, is this going to replace me? I'm still in the phase of like, just being intimidated and trying to learn as much as I can about it.
What I'm seeing is these sort of generative tools that make stuff from scratch are really, really bad and rudimentary and maybe they'll get better and better, but I'm seeing there's more and more tools that are trying to be smart about empowering creators.
So it's more like a tool than it is like a total replacement. So it's like a tool to master, like some of the things we already do just applying AI to it to speed things up. Whether it's like a green screen turning into a background really quickly, or it's like cleaning up audio really quickly, or it's transcribing interviews really quickly with AI.
So we have a tool now that we use regularly. That's just like, it takes, you know, the zoom, it'll take the zoom feed and just turn into text. And with, you know, 80 to 90 percent accuracy maybe not as good as a human, but it's one of those things that actually will really benefit a lot of, a lot of workflows a lot of creators.
I think it's hard to know what's going to happen, but we're definitely paying attention to all this stuff.
Ling: I think for those of us who are content creators, there's a lot more apprehension. It is our trade that might be used willy nilly. I mean, there was a case in the news about someone who sued their employer based on a set of racist recordings using the boss's voice, but generating false recordings.
Dan: You've probably been in this situation before where you like go and you get an interview and then let's say the subject says something a little wrong or like not the most concisely, and you're like, I wish they had just said it like this certain way.
There are now tools where you can actually try to generate those like little pieces of the soundbites to make it more seamless and more concise. And it's like, well, okay, we can do that. But should we do that? As journalists or filmmakers or marketers, like, is that ethical? So I think, yeah, there's going to be a whole slew of ethical questions that are super tricky.
Ling: Cause if you can add a word to preface a statement, you can add the whole statement.
Dan: And then it's like, well, it's on video. And then your comms team is going to take that soundbite and then put it into a press release and all of a sudden it's like something that this person said, even though they never said it, and it could be reflective of their general thoughts and opinions, but it could not.
Ling: Yeah, there's a lot to absorb. Technology is ever changing.
How are nonprofits using video? What do you think are going to be big sea change kinds of things in the future?
We've actually spent a fair amount of time over the last couple of years building our TikTok audience. We had a specific strategy around it where we were wanting to grow our younger followers. We produced videos that were based on a virtual tour of racial equity history in the Bay Area, and we partnered with local community leaders who knew the sites very well.
@sanfranciscofoundation Kicking off AAPI Heritage Month with Warriors Hypeman @francofinn taking us back in Bay Area history to the International Hotel where activists fought to protect SF’s Filipino community in Manilatown from gentrification. Learn more at sff.org/MappingChange. #AAPIHeritageMonth #AAPIHM #SanFrancisco #KearnyStreet #MappingChange #SFF75 #BayArea #InternationalHotel #Manilatown #CCDC #Warriors ♬ Sunshine - WIRA
So as an example we are in downtown San Francisco, and our office is very close to Kearny Street, which used to be the heart of Little Manila, and there is a building there now that's called the International Hotel, the I Hotel for short, which was the site of an incredibly traumatic and significant moment in housing history, equitable housing history in San Francisco, where in the 70s it had mainly been inhabited by older Filipino male workers, the Manongs who after a decade long multiracial fight to try to protect that housing, these men were evicted in a very traumatizing moment. But the building continues to be a very significant historic site, and after many years, it was actually brought back as affordable housing, in partnership with Chinatown Community Development Center. So its gleaming new version of itself continues to represent affordable housing. There are pieces of the original building that are now in their lobby in a beautiful museum.
But what we decided to do to connect a younger TikTok audience to a historic site, was partner with a San Franciscan named Franco Finn, who happens to be Filipino American. He's also the hype man for the Warriors. So anyone who goes to a Warriors game, they know that Franco is their longtime guy, making all the announcements at Chase Center. And so we had him standing in front of the site and giving us a little tour of the I Hotel and sharing a little Filipino American history and housing history in San Francisco. And so we repeated that concept at sites throughout the Bay Area and in different counties because we want folks to also realize that there is racial equity and social justice history all around us. It's not only Oakland and San Francisco where people know a lot more about that history, but it's everywhere and in every county. And so that was a little strategy where we produced these little TikTok videos and ultimately, within about a year or so, we went from zero followers because we just opened our account, to roughly 5,000 which is where we're at now. So it's been fun. It's been a good challenge for us to figure out how we meet a target audience where they are, in a format that they can engage with.
Dan: So that's a really interesting campaign that you did. And I think other nonprofits will be super interested in that. It sounds like a lot of the organizing aspects took a lot of time and maybe resources, but the actual production itself probably didn't take much resources. It’s probably just a phone with a guy, right?
Ling: I walked into the I Hotel, the International Hotel, which is housing, but it's also a nonprofit space. And I walked in and the lovely executive director said, “Oh, we've made some room for when your crew gets here.” And I said, “I'm very sorry to disappoint you, but myself and my iPhone will be the crew.” I was probably there for an hour or so, getting a little b-roll, getting Franco doing a little clip on the street. And it's been similar types of shoots where there's a newish mural depicting the women of the Black Panther Party in Oakland, and we partnered with a former member of the Black Panther Party who's a woman, and she was able to stand in front of the mural and tell us the significance of the mural. Having a Black Panther, and a local community leader who lived the history and knows it on a personal level is far better than having someone from the foundation describe the history, because we didn't live it.
Dan: And it probably felt a lot more authentic because it was just a phone and you don't feel like there's any buffer or filter between your audience and these people's authentic stories. So it's probably a really smart way to approach making a TikTok video.
Ling: This may not be the audience that is going to watch the documentary that came out a couple years ago about the Black Panther Party, or the documentary about the International Hotel, or even read any type of long form content online.
Dan: Or maybe they will watch the documentary, but maybe after they watch your TikTok reel, and maybe a few years later, after it resonates with them, it becomes something that they're interested in that mural. And they get a poster of the mural for their bedroom.
And then finally they go and watch the documentary.
Ling: If it earned us followers who can see our brand and see our organization as one that continues to share content and help inform them about the Bay, racial equity, about housing, about policies that they should be aware of,that population followers gets older, and there may be ways that their behaviors change and the ways that they engage change, right?
Dan: That's so cool. I'm glad this came up in our conversation cause I think there are probably so many other nonprofits thinking, how can I engage with TikTok or just be super intimidated, or maybe they just dismiss it, right?
And I think that's a good lesson especially when something becomes a platform where a lot of people get their news. You can't just dismiss the platform.
I appreciate you taking the time and all the insights, especially for our nonprofit audience. It is going to be great.
Thanks for reading this episode transcript of Notes From Video Village!
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On a film set, a “Video Village” is more than just a corner of the set where clients watch their vision come to life—it’s a space where ideas spark and partnerships flourish. Over the years, it’s also become an unexpected hub for video marketing insights, especially for B2B. Inspired by these conversations, we’ve launched Notes from Video Village, our first-ever podcast.
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