Pets & People

Why CatVideoFest Won't Cut One Big Check: The Case for Hyperlocal Charity

Producer Will Braden could mail a lump sum to a national charity and be done. Instead every screening funds the shelter down the street. That stubborn choice is the whole business.

By James Okafor, Rescue & Advocacy Writer

July 29, 2024 · 6 min read

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There is an easier way to run CatVideoFest, and Will Braden knows exactly what it is. At the end of a national tour, you tally the charitable proceeds, write one big check to a household-name animal organization, snap a photo, and move on. It would save enormous effort. Braden refuses to do it. Every screening in every city funnels money to a cat shelter in that specific city instead. That refusal is easy to mistake for sentimentality. It is actually the strategy, and it explains why a compilation of internet cat clips has quietly turned into a self-sustaining charitable engine.

The choice most people would get wrong

Ask a management consultant how to maximize a touring festival’s donations and they would almost certainly say: consolidate. Pick one national partner, negotiate one relationship, cut one check, reduce overhead. Braden runs it the hard way on purpose.

“It’s absolutely essential that every time we’re in any city or town, we feel like we are here for this community,” he says. “We’re benefiting your local cat shelter, because they know what’s best to help cats. What we need to raise money for cats in Chicago is different from how to raise money for cats in Tucson or New York.”

That is a real claim about how animal welfare works, not a slogan. Needs are local. A Chicago rescue’s shortfall and a Tucson rescue’s shortfall are not the same shortfall, and a lump sum mailed to a national office cannot see the difference. By keeping the money where the screening happens, CatVideoFest funds the actual gap, and it gives every local shelter a reason to promote the show to their own supporters. The charity structure doubles as the marketing engine.

“The people who support their local indie theater, their local shelter, and something like this are the same people,” Braden notes. “It’s the Venn diagram of everyone who wants to back all three at once. That makes it very easy to sell to your friends.”

The compounding loop the model creates

Because the mission is stitched into each community, the festival grows in a way a one-off event cannot.

“People who see it tend to come back and see it again,” Braden says. “If you like something and you can be pretty sure it’s coming back a year from now at the same theater with all new cat videos, that’s built-in growth.”

Fans become evangelists. So do the shelters, which bring adoptable kittens to screenings for on-site adoption events, and the indie theaters, which get a reliable annual draw. Each screening seeds the next year’s audience while funding a local cause, a loop that turns a novelty into an institution. The results show it: the festival scaled from its 2019 theatrical launch to 250 theaters and a projected audience north of 129,000, more than double the initial theatrical crowd, and its cumulative charitable total climbed into the six figures.

The curation that earns the ticket

The community model only works if the film is worth leaving the house for, and this is where Braden’s other stubborn standard comes in. Anyone can watch cat videos on a phone for free. His job is to make 70-odd minutes in a dark theater feel like something a phone cannot give you.

He personally finds the clips, edits them, and even scores the film. “If I’m going to do a montage joking about orange cats having one brain cell, then I need music for that,” he laughs. He watches thousands of submissions and self-sourced videos, then cuts to roughly 200, sorting by drama, comedy, and action, chasing range over volume.

“I want it to feel really curated,” he says. “Some things that are funny, some that are weird, some animated, some music videos. I want people to feel like it was a worthwhile experience, not just going to the theater to see something they could see on their phone.”

The payoff is a rare kind of broad appeal. Setting aside a certain pop megastar’s concert film, few theatrical events land equally with a six-year-old and a sixty-year-old. CatVideoFest does, and that shared-room, all-ages quality is exactly what makes it work as a local fundraiser: it draws the whole family, and the whole family’s ticket helps the shelter down the road.

From one winning clip to a full-time job

The origin fits the ethos. In 2012, Braden submitted a video to the very first festival at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center and won its Golden Kitty Award. He kept making clips, and when the Walker moved on in 2015, he took the whole thing over. In 2019 the independent distributor Oscilloscope Laboratories began booking it into theaters nationwide, giving the operation credibility with independent cinemas. “To have them involved made it take off, because they had the pedigree to say, ‘Trust us, it’s fun,’” Braden says. With distribution handled, he could focus entirely on the film and the community model underneath it.

The favorite, from a man who has seen them all

After tens of thousands of cat videos a year, does the curator have a favorite? No hesitation. He points to a roughly decade-old clip, “My Crazy Cat Max”: an orange cat leaps into a cardboard soda sleeve and startles its owner. “It’s so pure, so silly. You could never have planned it,” he says. “This woman is just like, let me film my cat through a cardboard box, and all of a sudden it was comedy gold.” The best thing in the festival, in other words, is unplannable and homemade, which is a fair description of the festival itself.

Where it stands now

The model has kept compounding. Recent editions expanded well past their earlier footprint, reaching hundreds of independent theaters across the U.S. and Canada and, in the newest run, more than 330 screening locations, with a tightly cut program running around 70 minutes. The charitable haul has cleared seven figures: the festival now reports raising more than $1 million for cats in need since 2019, still routed to local shelters and welfare groups in each city it visits. The hard way, it turns out, scaled better than the easy one would have.

CatVideoFest tours theaters throughout the year. Check the festival’s website for a screening near you.