Nonprofit Event Video Production
NMSS Dinner of Champions 2021 — 75 Years of MS Advocacy
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Transcript: NMSS Dinner of Champions 2021 — 75 Years of MS Advocacy
The MS Society and the field of MS is really a story of advocacy.
Speaker: 75 years ago, Sylvia Lowery wrote a letter to the New York Times, and which she pleaded for people to help her in fighting against MS, and in fighting a cure.
And although immediately there was nothing available, MS is really transformed by that small action on a part of one person.
**Speaker:** And really that action built and snowballed into what we see today, which is MS has gone over the last 30 years, really, from untreatable neurodegender condition that robbed people, of their independence, robbed people of their capacity, the care from themselves, into a disease that has 20 drugs that can help to change the arc of what happens to someone who's diagnosed with MS.
Speaker: In 1982, we had no treatments for MS, and the older generation was teaching that we shouldn't even try to develop treatments for MS.
It was too difficult to adopt. Fire in Waxman organized a national MS Society meeting in the Ups State New York. He wanted to bring together everybody from around the world who cared about treatments for people with MS.
There were 40 people at that meeting. It was an amazing meeting that stimulated so much of what happened in the subsequent 39 years. And so much of the progress that we've made can be ancestrally traced to BIRANS and the MS Society's meeting in 1982.
Speaker: When I grew up, my dad had primary progressive multiple scrocesses, so I really wanted to be part of the MS community after graduating from college. I'm absolutely thrilled that the MS Society supported me and I'm one of the Sylvia Lauri Fellows. Really the MS Society through its support is enabling me to follow the pathway to taking care of multiple scrocess patients and contributing to clinical research so that ultimately we can find a care for multiple scrocesses.
Speaker: As a postdoctoral fellow here at Stanford, I received a career transition award from the MS Society which really served as a golden ticket for me when I went around interviewing for faculty positions around the country.
So being able to have this money in the support saying that I actually had something to bring to start a lab. Now I get to work on a problem that I think is fundamentally interesting. How does my own form?
Why does my own get broken down and how come from a formation of regeneration of my own innovation? It's critically important that right now we continue to train the very best young scientists we can and to encourage them is they pursue careers in neuroscience.
Speaker: I'm especially grateful actually for funding at very early stages of some of our research projects where we might not have been able to attract funding otherwise.
If you don't fund the risky early stage research, it'll never get done and a lot of the best science might not get done.
Speaker: One of the earliest proposals that I met at the Society was to investigate the role of the got microbiome, got bacteria, might play in NS susceptibility.
And really this society was the first to be leaving that at crazy the other time and supported it which really launched a whole new research avenue for not only for my lab and really for the field.
Speaker: I think we've made a tremendous amount of progress in developing therapies that can prevent attacks, prevent new lesions on MRI but as we all learn there's more to MS than just those facets of the disease.
Speaker: We are making major inroads in two really fundamental important areas. One is people living with MS who already have damage in injury, how to restore function, how to recover function, how do we enable people to return to the activities that they use to engage in.
Speaker: And then on the other front in order for us to stop anyone from ever having to get a diagnosis of MS in the future, we need to figure out what's the cause and we need to work to arrest it and stop anyone from ever having to live with MS in the future.
About This Video
In the late 1940s, Sylvia Lowery wrote a letter to the New York Times asking for help fighting MS. That letter became the National MS Society — and seventy-five years later, there are twenty approved drugs that can change the arc of what happens to someone diagnosed with MS. The NMSS Dinner of Champions 2021 video traces that trajectory through the voices of researchers and Sylvia Lauri Fellows whose careers the Society funded. A 1982 meeting in Upstate New York — forty people, organized by Stephen Waxman — gets credited as the starting point for nearly everything that followed. Two research stories stand out. A Stanford postdoctoral fellow describes the Society's career transition award as "a golden ticket" that opened faculty positions across the country. A researcher who proposed studying gut microbiota and MS susceptibility — "when it was crazy at the time" — describes the Society as the first funder willing to back it. The video closes on two frontiers: how to restore function for people already living with MS damage, and how to prevent MS entirely. This is a <span class="strong">nonprofit fundraising video production</span> that does what the best donor content does — shows the return on investment already delivered, and points to where the work still needs to go.
How do you produce a nonprofit fundraising video that connects donor impact to research outcomes?
Show the specific things that wouldn't have happened without donor funding. The NMSS 2021 video doesn't say 'your donations fund important MS research.' It says: a Stanford postdoctoral fellow called the Society's career transition award a golden ticket that opened faculty positions across the country. A gut microbiome researcher says the Society funded it when no one else believed it was a real avenue. Those are specific outcomes — careers launched, research avenues opened — that a donor can trace back to their support. The more specific the outcome, the more the gift feels real.
What makes a medical research nonprofit video convincing to major donors?
Researchers speaking for themselves, not about themselves. In the NMSS 2021 video, the gut microbiome researcher doesn't say 'I'm grateful for the Society's support.' She describes the moment the research direction was dismissed by everyone else, and the Society funded it anyway. That specificity — the problem, the skepticism, the decision to fund it regardless — is what makes the argument. A donor watching that doesn't hear gratitude. They hear what their money actually did.
How do you tell a 75-year institutional story in a short video?
Don't try to tell all of it. The NMSS 2021 video covers 75 years through a single founding story (Sylvia Lowery's letter), a single inflection point (the 1982 Waxman meeting), and two individual researchers whose careers illustrate what funding actually changes. That's four data points across seven decades — enough to convey scale without becoming a timeline. The close is prospective: two frontiers still ahead. The structure is then (one letter) → now (twenty drugs, careers built) → next (two frontiers). That's a fundraising arc.
Why do the best nonprofit fundraising videos lead with specific research stories instead of mission statements?
Because mission statements describe what an organization wants to do. Research stories prove what it did. The NMSS 2021 video never says 'we are committed to finding a cure for MS.' It says a researcher's early-stage gut microbiome proposal — considered too risky for other funders — got funded by the Society, and that investment launched a whole new research avenue. That's proof of mission, not description of mission. Donors who've heard a lot of mission statements tend to respond better to proof.
