Skip to main content

About Impact Film Lab

We're not here to make you a film. We're here to make you a case for giving.

For 20 years, we've believed the right story, told the right way, doesn't just document a mission — it moves people to fund it. We're a fundraising partner who happens to use film, not a production company who happens to work with nonprofits.

$10M+In donations
$5.9MRaised in a single gala
20 YrsFaith-based nonprofit focus
Billy Scanlan, Founder and Creative Director of Impact Film Lab, on location in Savoonga, Alaska

On location in Savoonga, Alaska — filming for Voice of the Elders

Founder & Creative Director

Billy Scanlan

Billy founded Impact Film Lab after two decades working alongside faith-based nonprofits — close enough to see exactly what moves a donor to give. Every project starts by reverse-engineering that outcome: identifying the stories inside your mission that will actually move your audience, then building the film around them.

Seven Years Inside a Fundraising Organization

Billy spent seven years on the team at Agape International Missions — and watched the mission more than double.

Before founding Impact Film Lab, Billy spent seven years on staff at Agape International Missions (AIM), one of the largest anti-trafficking nonprofits in the country. He wasn't a vendor looking in — he was inside the development operation, building the films and campaigns that helped more than double AIM's annual revenue, from $5.2 million in contributions when he started (FY2017) to over $12 million by the most recent filing (FY2024), per AIM's public IRS Form 990 filings.

That time changed how he thinks about fundraising film. When you've sat in the donor room, watched a gala committee agonize over the ask, and seen a year-end campaign come down to a matching-gift deadline, you stop making films that win awards and start making films that move money. Every project Billy takes on now starts the same way it did at AIM — reverse-engineered from the fundraising goal it has to help hit.

How We Work

Strategy first, camera second

We write, produce, and deliver story-driven films that give development teams, gala committees, and mission leaders something they can put in front of donors and trust it will work. Every project is built backward from the fundraising goal it needs to hit.

Built for Every Audience, From One Project

One story, engineered for every room it needs to move

A gala audience, a capital campaign board, a major donor sitting across the table, a congregation on a Sunday morning, a scroll-past social feed — each needs the story told differently, with its own pacing and its own call to action. We build deliverables custom-cut for each of these audiences from a single production, so one project doesn't just serve your gala night — it works across your entire fundraising calendar, maximizing the return on every shoot day.