Nonprofit day-in-the-life reel from staff clips, for GivingTuesday

Cut your staff's phone clips into one vertical reel: trim six moments with video trim, join them with Timeline 1.0, and burn short captions on top. The cost is $0.02 per trim plus $0.10 for a reel up to one minute, so six clips and one reel come to $0.22, before captions. GivingTuesday is on December 1, 2026, which is 59 days after this post's date.

What does GivingTuesday ask nonprofits to post?

The organization's toolkit says to post photos and videos that tell your story, not graphics. It points nonprofits to Stories, Reels and TikTok to reach new followers, and warns that when everyone posts the same graphics, the algorithms throttle that content down. It asks for real stories: what a day looks like at your organization, success stories and community testimonials, rather than pre-made templates.

That is a brief for footage you already have. Sume does not film anything. What it does is cut and sequence what your team shot, which is the work that usually stalls a small team in the week before the campaign.

How do the pieces fit together?

One reel needs trimmed clips, a spine, and text. This is the plan with each price from the docs.

How do I cut and join them?

Trim each clip, then send the trimmed URLs to one Timeline render. Use audio.mode: "silence" if you will add music in the platform's own editor, or audio.url for a bed you have rights to. Declare the spine length as the sum of slot durations, since slots may trail the spine by at most half a second.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-trim \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: gt-trim-01" \
  -d '{"video_url":"https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_s1/morning.mp4","start":4,"duration":5}'

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/timeline-1.0/render \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: gt-reel-001" \
  -d '{"audio":{"mode":"silence","duration_seconds":10},
       "video":[
         {"source_url":"https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_t1/trim1.mp4","start":0,"duration":5},
         {"source_url":"https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_t2/trim2.mp4","start":5,"duration":5,
          "transition":{"type":"fade","duration":0.25}}]}'

How do I add the story in words?

A silent reel needs text. Because the clips carry no narration, use video captions with cues: each cue is text, start and end, and Sume burns that copy as written. A caption of 6 to 8 words per beat ("7:40 am: the van is loaded") keeps the day-in-the-life promise without a voice. Speech-to-text on a silent file fails with caption_no_speech, so cues are the right path here.

What should I check before posting?

Get consent from every person on screen, particularly clients and minors. Keep real names and locations out of captions unless people agreed. Avoid claims about outcomes that you cannot document, and keep the donation link in the post copy, not baked into the video where it can go stale. The toolkit's own advice is to be original, so do not wrap your footage in a template look.