Nonprofit year-end impact recap from five photos for Giving Tuesday

A nonprofit can make a 50-second year-end impact recap from five photos it already has, for $0.4678 on Sume: one voice-over of about 900 characters at $0.04275, one music bed at $0.125, one Timeline render at $0.10 and one caption job at $0.20. No video generation is involved, so the figure does not grow with length until the render passes a minute.

Giving Tuesday 2026 falls on 1 December, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, so the recap has to be ready in the week before. This post covers what to put in the five slots and what each step costs. It does not state a donation outcome, because no source in this post supports one.

Five photos, five sentences

Write one sentence per photo, about 180 characters each, 900 in all. Use numbers only from your own records: meals served, trees planted, students tutored. Spoken digits are more error-prone than words, so write them as words in the script. TTS 1.0 prices at $0.0475 per 1,000 characters with spaces and punctuation counted, so 900 characters is $0.04275, and a job may run up to 20,000 characters (models overview).

Stills as slots

Timeline treats a still as a static hold, and slots are ordered with a start and duration, with video[0].start equal to 0. Give each photo a 10-second slot with a fade or dissolve transition from the second slot on. Use fit: cover for photos that match the vertical frame and blur for landscape photos you do not want cropped. Motion on a still is accepted and ignored, with a soft warning (Timeline).

Music under the voice

Generate one instrumental through the Music Router at $0.125 per generation and add it as the soundtrack. With a real voice spine, duck_db of 0 to 20 lowers the bed under speech, and fade_out_seconds up to 10 closes the piece (Music Router). Keep the bed low enough that the numbers in the script stay clear.

Captions and the total

Burn captions from script_text so your wording, including the organisation name, is not guessed by speech recognition: $0.20 per job (video captions).

Reusing the build

A second cut for donors who gave more than once only changes the script and one or two photos: about $0.35 after the music is reused. Run the Timeline plan endpoint first: it is unbilled and returns duration and estimated cost before you commit.