A charity leader in Seattle has assembled a short video laying out the impact of the nonprofit world, a film that he believes can help other nonprofit executives spread the word about philanthropy’s economic value.

The three-minute, 40-second video, “Know Your Sector,” has been posted on YouTube. Among the nuggets of information it contains: the fact that about one in 10 American workers is a nonprofit employee (compared with the one in 57 workers who waits tables).

“My hope is that it will be a free resource, for donors, for board members, for nonprofit employees, and volunteers to understand the power of our sector,” says Ben Klasky, executive director of IslandWood, a nonprofit outdoor learning center on Bainbridge Island, Wash., who created the video for a class he teaches on nonprofit management “My hope is that it’ll go viral and that people will realize that, because so many people are involved with nonprofits, it’s a powerful part of our economy, and it’s doing a lot of important work.”

Over his five years as an instructor at the University of Washington, Mr. Klasky says he’s been surprised at how little his graduate students know about the very field they’re studying.

“They’re just surprised to hear of the scale” of the nonprofit world, he says. “Like many people in society, they think that nonprofits tend to be these small, almost Ma and Pa operations that are taking care of critical needs at a local level and forget that the sector includes very large institutions and is actually a huge part of our economy.”

Students also tend not to comprehend how diverse nonprofit organizations are, he says, another message he tried to convey in “Know Your Sector,” which points out that groups that promote and oppose legalized abortion, for instance, coexist under the nonprofit umbrella.

For the video, Mr. Klasky—who once advised Fortune 500 companies while working at Deloitte Consulting—gathered statistics from such sources as Independent Sector, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the annual private-philanthropy tally “Giving USA.” (Among the most eye-opening: that the $1.1-trillion charities take in annually from donations and revenue is more than the entire economies of Saudi Arabia and Sweden combined.)

A consultant helped Mr. Klasky present the data by assembling photography, graphics, rapidly moving text, and a stately but thumping electronic-music score.

One potential audience for the feature, Mr. Klasky suggests, is charity boards. As an executive director who is deeply involved in fund raising, he says, “I’m constantly educating my board about where money comes from and where it goes. I think most people believe, for example, that most money comes from foundations and corporations, when the reality is that the majority comes from individuals”—83 percent of it, in fact, reports “Know Your Sector.”

Mr. Klasky adds, “It’s not uncommon for a board member to say, ‘Oh, we really need to be focusing more on foundations; we could raise a lot more money from foundations’ when probably your best bet is to start focusing more on individuals in fund raising.”