Back in 2011, we were asked by the co-chair of “California Plan Your Giving” to create some PSAs.  CPYG is an initiative to get people to pledge money to their favorite charities upon their passing.  It was important that we didn’t play favorites or push people toward one charity.  The whole point was to get people to give. Period.

The idea was to create PSAs that resembled testimonials about giving, since we didn’t want to show one type of charity (e.g. homelessness).  We tried it with real donors first, and found it didn’t work out quite as we wanted.  In one case, the college aged child of parents who had made the pledge to give a portion of her inheritance to charity wanted to rewrite the script.  And what she wrote was fine if we wanted to promote her parents, but not if we wanted to ask other people to give money. Plus, she was a little stiff and not very compelling since she wasn’t used to being in front of the camera.  The second one we did worked much better.  But we knew going forward that if we wanted to create some memorable PSAs we would have to script them, and get people who are comfortable being in front of the camera — like, you know, actors. Luckily, I know a bunch of actors.  And in almost all cases, these actors are very committed to their communities in various charity endeavors. So it was a win-win situation.

Below are the PSAs we created. On the top left of the YouTube player there is a playlist icon that will display all the videos for you to choose from, or you can simply play the first one and they will play in order.

[embedyt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLR615SPD5A66RlnqB6pYoW3EKfWE1TpnP[/embedyt]