HavenHouse STL Fundraising Films

Here’s how Brooke Noecker, HavenHouse St. Louis’s Director of Development, summed up our work together.

“Same event structure, same flow, same marketing reach, same family-story format. The only thing that changed was the storyteller.”

Three years later, HavenHouse’s annual gala gross has nearly doubled. The paddle raise has more than quadrupled.

This is what that looked like.

Home away from the hospital

HavenHouse St. Louis provides free lodging and a community of support for patients and families who travel to St. Louis for medical care. Patients of all ages. Caregivers, too. The kind of care that pulls a family far from home in a hard season.

Every year, HavenHouse hosts HopeFest, their flagship fundraising gala. The featured family-story film is the emotional center of the night. It plays right before the paddle raise.

That’s the moment everything else builds toward.

Three years. Three stories.

We’ve worked with HavenHouse for three years running. Three different families. Three different films. Same approach each time. Real people, real conversations, no narration, no script.

Year one was Todd, a 19-year-old whose family had relied on HavenHouse through a long stretch of medical care.

Year two was Annie, a 4-year-old whose story hit so well we ended up making two films for that year’s campaign instead of one.

This year was Bentlee, a young patient who’s been receiving care at St. Louis Children’s Hospital since just after birth. Bentlee’s service dog Bear, a Bernese Mountain Dog roughly the size of a small couch, made the cut.

Three families. Three honest stories. One method we trust.

Why the same approach worked three times

Here’s the thing about fundraising galas. Every nonprofit leader in the country knows the moment matters. The pitch from the stage. The film. The paddle raise. They’re not new ideas. The mechanics aren’t the variable.

The variable is the truth in the room.

When a donor sees a film that feels stage-managed, even a little, they donate to the cause. When they see a film that feels real, they donate to the family. That’s a meaningful difference. The first one closes wallets. The second one earns them.

The HavenHouse films don’t use a narrator. They don’t follow a script. They aren’t built to make the audience cry, even though the audience often does. They’re built to let the family speak for themselves and to trust the audience to feel what they feel.

That’s the method. It’s not complicated. It just takes the right team, the right time, and a willingness to let the story lead.

It’s harder than it looks

Real interviews. Real conversations. No script. It sounds simple. Most things that are hard sound simple.

Conducting an interview that earns the truth from a stranger, and then building a faithful narrative from the footage, is a craft. Plenty of production companies try to emulate it. Plenty of nonprofits try to do it themselves to save a line item in the budget. The work either lands or it doesn’t. Most of the time, it doesn’t.

We’ve been at this for 13 years. We’ve studied the craft, trained for it, and practiced it across 23 states. We’re not new at this.

That’s the part that doesn’t show up on a quote. It’s also the part that determines whether your paddle raise quadruples or doesn’t.

The result

Here’s what Brooke sent us after this year’s HopeFest.

Before bringing Storyteller Studios on, the featured film at our fundraising gala had been made by another company. Same event structure, same flow, same marketing reach, same family-story format. The only thing that changed was the storyteller.

Three years later, our annual gross has nearly doubled, and the paddle raise moment that follows the video has more than quadrupled. The Storyteller team is world class.

Brooke Noecker, Director of Development, HavenHouse St. Louis

The reason this matters isn’t that better video equals more money. It’s that the story you tell at the highest-leverage moment of your fundraising year is the single biggest variable you can change.

Same room. Same donors. Same ask. Change the story, and the paddle raise quadruples.

That’s the return on investment of a real story, told well.

Investment, not expense

Here’s a pattern we see all the time at nonprofits. Video is treated like an act of faith. Money out the door. A nice-to-have that pulls dollars away from the mission. All up-front risk. All feels. No real return.

HavenHouse’s numbers say otherwise.

A film that helps quadruple a paddle raise isn’t a cost center. It’s a revenue line. It pays for itself many times over in a single night, and it keeps earning long after the gala lights come up: at the next ask, on the website, in donor cultivation, in board meetings.

A great fundraising film is one of the highest-leverage investments a nonprofit can make. The work isn’t free, and it shouldn’t be. But the math on it usually isn’t close.

More like this?

If you’re a nonprofit leader thinking about your next fundraising film, or your first one, we’d love to talk. We work with mission-driven teams across the Midwest, and we’re especially at home in St. Louis.

👉 See our St. Louis video production work

👉 Start a project

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