If you’ve been around for a while you’ll probably know we’ve worked with a lot of schools around Greater Manchester, one of them being Manchester High School for Girls. We’ve produced a fair amount of fundraising films for them over the years, but in 2024 we had a particularly busy year to help them mark their 150th birthday.
Manchester High was founded in 1874 with the aim of imparting to girls the very best education that can be given and to fit them for any future.
Manchester High School for Girls website
MHSG had a packed schedule of fundraising events, birthday parties and activities that they gave us video briefs for. The main one being a fundraising film to play at their 150th birthday celebration. MHSG has an ambitious vision to become completely ‘needs blind’, meaning all girls can access a Manchester High education based on merit, regardless of their background. Naturally, a lot of the bursary fund money comes from fundraising so they wanted a video to show the impact that donating to the bursary fund can have on a young girls life.
This charity film is a great example of how working with the same client for a long time can be really beneficial. It showcases our ability to apply a BBC-trained documentary filmmaking style to charity video content. We pulled together footage that we’ve shot across a few years to create an emotional fundraising video that really tells the story of MHSG’s history and the impact the bursary fund has had on the alumni. We just had to film and add in a few interviews and some snazzy animation work done by Ben to bring the film together.
With all the reminiscing about the past, MHSG also wanted to balance it out with some looking into the future! We produced a fun video asking the primary school children what they thought MHSG would look like in 50 years time. This was a really fun day of filming with a bunch of energetic children which always makes for a good video!
So the day of the birthday celebration arrives and of course we had to be there to capture that too! We covered the photography and videography of the event resulting in a lovely reminder of the evening.
We had worked with Studio 91 Media previously on some videos to raise the profile of our Bursary Fund, so we knew that asking them to produce specific content for our 150th Birthday was a good idea – they already knew our brand and understood exactly what we were after.
They created a fantastic suite of films around our fundraising goals for the year. A number of these featured powerful testimonies from former Bursary recipients, and were used as part of our Giving Tuesday mini-campaign on social media, generating almost £8,000 in donations in one day.Zabina Kosar-Ahmed, Director of Admissions, Development and Marketing, Manchester High School for Girls
These films were shown at many of our fundraising events throughout our 150th year, and were instrumental in demonstrating the possibilities new building projects offer, the power of a bursary and the value of an MHSG education. We will continue to use them going forward and will definitely work with Ben, Jamie and Natalie again!
We love our clients to get the most out of the content we get for them and this project was no exception. We used clips from these interviews as the core of the 150th video but we also made social cuts of each individual interview for MHSG to use throughout the year.
Thank you Manchester High School for Girls for including us in your birthday celebrations and a big happy 150th to you!
