The folks at 1% for The Planet, to which we have belonged since we founded Take One, recently asked us to write something for their blog about who we donate money to and why (1% requires members to donate 1% of gross revenues to the environmental NGO of your choice). Hal wrote this piece, which went live today. We're delighted to be included in the 1% Pantheon!
Our client The BOMA Project tried their first crowdfunding project, We Believe in Mothers, earlier this month on WeDidIt. They set a goal of $15,000 and gave themselves 30 days to hit it. With 19 days remaining they've already raised $15,250 as of today.
We produced the scribed video that sits at the top of their campaign page (you can see it here). We're delighted to have helped such a great group hit their goal, and then some.
This is a great two-minute video from Questus about how companies must evolve their communications if they are going to connect and succeed with their clients:
So what does this mean for you? Courtesy of the always insightful Catie Foertsch at Yes! Mediaworks, here are some ideas about how we could help you think about ways to create emotionally effective media to connect you memorably to your clients and would-be clients:
Stop focusing exclusively on content – dry, informative content that while valuable, has absolutely nothing to do with emotions. Start including campaigns that focus on an emotional response as the desired outcome.
How do you do this? Here are some thoughts:
Guidestar, the nonprofit clearinghouse and data site, has a great interview with Tom Ahern, the author of Seeing Through a Donors Eyes, How to Write Fundraising Materials That Raise More Money and Raising More Money with Newsletters than You Ever Thought Possible. Ahern makes points that we've been making with clients whenever we can -- although he is pithier and more succinct. A few morsels:
-- "Messaging is not about what insiders think. Effective messaging is about what outsiders think of you."
-- "Charity prose tends to be dull. It doesn't tell stories well, either. Which is a fatal flaw."
-- "Donor communications are not about reading. Donor communications are about getting people to act on your behalf."
--"Your donors care about results. So lead with a quick, illustrative story."
Read the whole thing here.
Over the weekend our longtime client The BOMA Project launched their first crowdfunding campaign, a $15,000, 30-day effort. Two days in, they're at 36 percent of their goal, which is pretty cool. We are delighted to be part of the project; we created the three-minute scribed (hand-drawn whiteboard) video that leads off the campaign page. Check it out!
You're holding a big event. You want to capture it on video. But what does that mean? And how do you make the most of it -- not only tomorrow, but over the coming months?
Content Marketing Institute has put together a nice primer on how to think about getting powerful, effective video from your upcoming conference, annual meeting or other event that will extend and multiply its impact. You may read the full article here, or just let me summarize the key points for you:
1. Consciously make your content evergreen to extend its shelf life and value.
2. Capture your customers' or partners' stories (in other words, put them on camera, rather than yourself).
3. Create great stories by putting people together: for example, your staff or experts + your clients.
4. Produce video content for the event as well as from it. This can really set the tone effectively.
5. Do it well or don't do it at all. As I wrote here back on April 11, there's nothing worse than crappy content.
We love Mountainfilm in Telluride, and we're premiering our fourth short documentary in as many years there this Memorial Day Weekend (it's called Rock Wall Climbing). Apparently we're becoming fixtures there -- last month the Mountainfilm team asked us to write blog posts about what it is that keeps us coming back. And we will come back year after year, whether we screen films there or not. Mountainfilm is the most creative and inspiring event we have ever come across. It feeds us every year, filling us with motivation and exposing us to some of the best creativity in the documentary world. But that's not really why we go back. Here's what Hal had to say when he tried to describe his reasons for returning.
Catie Foertsch at Yes! Mediaworks is usually worth reading, and this week she came up with another great post. She has a thoughtful take on a scribed fundraising video sent into the blogosphere by a startup called Rippln. The video was eviscerated by TechCrunch -- but, as Foertsch notes, they completely missed the point. As she concludes, "...it doesn't matter if your video connects with you. You want it (and need it) to connect with your target audience. Why cares what you think? The only thing that matters is what your target audience thinks."
Back in 2011 we made this brand video about Barrington Coffee Roasting Company, which aimed to convey some of the story and people behind a very successful small roasters. So it was fun to come across this story on NPR, in which reporter Alison Aubrey concludes "roasters and cafes aren't just selling us a good cup of coffee. They're also selling us the story behind it."
This sort of behind-the-scenes storytelling isn't just essential for coffee producers trying to distinguish their product -- we believe it will be increasingly essential for a broad range of foods as the specialty food market grows ever more crowded. People always, always value the story behind the product.
It's the holy grail in the marketing world: the viral video. But it's also deeply mysterious. Why do some videos take off? Why do most languish in obscurity?
The folks at Econsultancy shared some insight from Unruly Media detailing 12 "triggers" that can push a video to into the stratosphere. They also included examples for each, which means that reading this post is a nice way to experience what they're describing. Briefly, the 12 triggers are: Funny, Sexy, Shocking, Awesome, Controversial, Geeky, Illuminating, Random, Zeitgeist, Soul, Uplifting and Moving. Looking at that list, you will see that many of the triggers are emotional -- and video, as much as anything, makes an emotional connection.
What's nice about knowing this list is being able to use it to evaluate a project, then to build on the inherent strengths of that project to optimize for one of those triggers if your goal is virality.
We've launched a project for the co-working space HUB Boulder called "60 Seconds of Change." This is an example of how we're doing video that is both cost effective and delivered in multiple free-standing pieces that (a) can be rolled out over time through social media (b) stand alone (c) work together (d) reinforce the client's brand and message. We developed this project precisely because we know that highly-produced video can appear cost-prohibitive in certain cases. This is designed to be both effective and cost-effective while still being professionally executed.
The folks at Yes! Mediaworks have another great blog post out to help us all think about what makes for good video content for business and nonprofits. Their main takeaway is rooted in a study showing that people make up their minds about the quality of webpage in 1/20th of a second. If that's true, do you really want them to see your organization portrayed with bad lighting, bad sound or poor editing?
On the other hand, professional video can be expensive. Yes! Mediaworks suggests an efficient approach that we endorse: develop a relationship with a video team you like; invest in having that team produce of a few key pieces that have to look good (for your landing page, for instance); ask that team to help your staff learn basic skills so the in-house video you produce doesn't suck; and work with that team strategically, so that they (we!) help at critical points like editing or storyboarding even on projects that we don't take on completely.
This approach can stretch your content dollars AND get you great looking video.
We're delighted to be working with Social Venture Partners of Boulder County to produce a series of short videos promoting SVP to potential partners. SVP brings a venture capital mindset to the nonprofit world, investing intensely with both money and expertise into local NGOs that have the potential to be significantly more effective. We'll finish the project up this month and post some samples soon!
This evidently is Video Data Week here at the TOC blog. Here's another post, this one from DigiDay, about the growing power and influence of video on the web, particularly in the consumer space. Some high points:
--89 million people in the U.S. will watch online video today
--76 percent of marketers plan to add video to their sites, seeing it as more important than integrating Facebook or Twitter
--52 percent of consumers say online video makes them more confident about a purchase.
Lots more inside the link.
A report from Forrester Research recently came across our desk with some eye-opening stats -- and those stats describe trends have almost certainly accelerated since the report was written in May 2012. Bottom line: Video is now consumers' preferred social medium; statistically, it's as engaging as display advertising; and it's growing rapidly in popularity. (Details in the screenshot below, from the report.)
The report goes on to note that one of the great attributes of video is that it can be repurposed into multiple media: website, YouTube or Vimeo Channel, Facebook, etc. This can make what seems like an expensive proposition up front demonstrably less so, given the ability to reconfigure the same material for different uses. Forrester also urges companies to "become a content creator ... identify content partner opportunities ... [and] engage audiences as a content catalyst."
That second idea is particularly interesting to us, since what Forrester is describing is essentially a branded documentary (that is, a commissioned documentary about a charitable undertaking or other event in which the brand is involved but not central). As Forrester writers, "Embedding the brand into the content, not just advertising in-stream, provides what Yahoo calls an 'engaging, immersive video experience' within the 'reach' layer of the [communications] ecosystem."
There's a great story here about the organizational psychologist Adam Grant, who makes a compelling case that altruism is incredibly effective not only at improving people's sense of happiness but also their productivity and commitment at work, too. One of his earliest studies involved students who worked at a call center. The call center helped students pay for college by raising scholarship funds, but it was a tough place to work. So Grant brought in a student who had benefitted from it, who took a mere 10 minutes to describe to those who worked in the call center what here scholarship had meant to her. The results were extraordinary:
"A month after the testimonial, the workers were spending 142 percent more time on the phone and bringing in 171 percent more revenue, even though they were using the same script. In a subsequent study, the revenues soared by more than 400 percent. Even simply showing the callers letters from grateful recipients was found to increase their fund-raising draws."
Grant's work ties tightly to an idea we often discuss with clients, especially those working in the nonprofit sector or in CSR: tell the story of the people you are helping. Better yet, let them tell the story. Making the connection between what you do -- either as a donor or employee -- and how someone benefits can be deeply motivating, often in ways you don't consciously understand.
There are a lot of great TED talks out there, but this one by activist Dan Pallota is one of the best we've seen in a while. Pallota, who has been wildly successful at raising money to fight AIDS and breast cancer, says the way our culture thinks about nonprofits condemns them to perpetual ineffectiveness. He outlines how the ways we evaluate nonprofits (for instance, rewarding those that keep overhead low as a percentage of income) cripples their ability to make a real difference on the most intractable issues (if overhead is low, there will be little investment in getting and retaining the best staff, investing in marketing and development, or doing any of the myriad other things we expect the for-profit world to do to succeed). Pallota's talk is one of those that I really hope shakes things up. It went up a few days ago and already has over 600,000 views. Take a few minutes and add your eyeballs.
We got a nice plug here from The Washington Post about the screening of PIcture The Leviathan this month at The National Academy of Sciences in D.C., as part of the Environmental Film Festival. If you're in the capital, check it out (it's happening the evening of March 15)—the subject of the film, James Prosek, will be speaking as part of the program.
Several years ago a Take One team went to Borneo on behalf of our client RARE. The result was People of the Forest, a powerful piece of documentary, character-based storytelling around the effects of rampant palm oil plantation development on the people who live on that Indonesian island. Palm oil, popular in many foods, cosmetics and industrial products, is often an environmental disaster. So we were delighted to see today that Dunkin' Donuts has agreed to source its palm oil from sustainable sources. This is the result of pressure for the state of New York, which happens to hold some Dunkin' stock in its pension portfolio.
It's nice to see change happen.
Here's a great post explaining, with video examples, precisely how Red Bull has become a ubiquitous brand through its intense focus on authentic, brand documentary video. Briefly, Red Bull executes all the following well:
It posts regular (weekly) relevant online video content
It does epic web video content (remember Felix Baumgartner?)
It posts videos that you want to share
It gives back to the community
It avoids overt marketing
It builds loyalty by doing all of the above
