Another helpful SlideDeck preso from See3 Communications, this time focusing on how to develop your nonprofit video strategy. Lots of good examples, illustrating a range of video approaches.
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I suppose if you were given the task of shooting a promotional video about the college library, you could do long shots of the book-filled stacks with vaguely uplifting music playing in the background, students studying, uh, studiously at those big oak library tables, maybe throw in some professorial type voiceovering about the laser-sharp focus you achieve studying in the library vs. your distraction-filled dorm room.
Or you could do this.
There are no rules I’m aware of that say you can’t have a little fun in promoting your cause. I’m just sayin’…
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Annie Leonard’s “The Story of Stuff” series makes great use of simple video animation to create concise little stories around issues like the environmental impacts of bottled water. Here’s eight minutes that should clarify why buying bottled water is a boneheaded idea on many levels.
You can check out other videos in the series including Leonard’s latest, “The Story of Cosmetics,” here.
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photo by darwin bell
When is it better to do nothing? I find myself having this conversation (argument, really) more and more these days. The flip answer, of course, is when you don’t kow what the hell you’re doing.
The refrain I hear all the time: “We’ve got to do SOMETHING!” Just do it—run that ad, produce that brochure, put out that newsletter. Doing something’s GOT TO BE BETTER THAN DOING NOTHING.
Please forgive me for disagreeing.
Run that ad? Not if you have no clue what you’re saying or who you’re trying to reach. Worse, not if all past evidence tells you it won’t generate a response.
Produce that brochure? Not if it serves no purpose other than to add to your local landfill.
Put out that newsletter? Not if you’re pushing out a message your audience has no interest in, that adds no value to their lives or the conversation you’re having.
The problem today is that we’re beyond up to our eyeballs in communication. We’re drowning in friggin’ communication. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting someone’s idea of communication. Everyone’s throwing everything against the wall, hoping something will stick. (In case I’m being obtuse, you’re the wall.)
You may not agree with this, but personally I think it’s better to figure out the right way to communicate before you start, you know, communicating. Contrary to what some believe, bad communication is not better than no communication at all. Stuff that doesn’t stick frequently has the opposite effect … it repels. Of course, if repellent is what you’re going for, by all means have at it.
Figure out your communication goals. Choose objectives that meet your goals. Create a strategy that best serves those objectives. Develop tactics that execute on your strategy. Measure the results. Tweak and repeat.
Feel free to have this tattooed on your forehead in case the powers that be aren’t clear where you’re coming from.
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In January I posted an incredibly moving public service announcement about seatbelt safety that really resonated with most everyone who saw it. Here’s a short piece CNN did on the video, with an interview with the director.
You may want to watch it here first to get the full impact, then come back and watch the CNN story.
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This should be required viewing for nonprofit communicators and fund raisers. It’s nearly impossible to overestimate the role empathy plays in motivating people to take action in support of a cause.
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photo by toastyken
I hate to break this to you, but we’re living in the End Times of privacy as you once knew it. 2012 was on the horizon long before the advent of social media. When Don Peppers and Martha Rogers wrote about how technology would make it possible for Business to “personalize” the consumer experience, you knew that meant exchanging peeks into your soul for better deals on goods, right?
If you define yourself by what you do, what you buy, who you know, where you go and what you do when you get there, then you’re standing naked by the freeway and everyone’s snapping pics as they whiz by.
Technology affords you two choices: make yourself transparent and reap the benefits of personalization, or disconnect and live off the grid. I honestly don’t see the in-between. Your data may not all be accessible, but it’s all out there. And it’s only a matter of time before systems get better at mining it all.
Gina Trapani suggests that you can achieve some level of online privacy by (1) being “vigilant about what you publish online” and (2) “be willing to roll up your sleeves and dig into the settings area of the tools and services you use to do so.”
It’s a nice thought, but (1) you’re “publishing” something about yourself with every action you take online, and (2) have you looked at what’s involved in rolling up your sleeves even at one service? Do you honestly believe that more than a tiny fraction of the population has the intestinal fortitude to do the work necessary to cap the gusher of data that’s flowing into the gulf?
Last year I wrote about how the proliferation of social media options were overwhelming us with too much choice. What I failed to mention is how, every time we choose another tool, it’s another shovel to dump more data into the virtual maw.
Privacy as you know it is going the way of the buggy whip. Writers of science fiction have been telling you this for decades. You just weren’t paying attention.
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Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.
I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web–the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.
Webfather Tim Berners-Lee first envisioned this so-called “semantic web” more than a decade ago. Given the astonishing speed at which we’ve seen the internet evolve over the last several years, you’d think we would have arrived by now.
Unfortunately, “our ability to create information has far exceeded our ability to manage it,” according to BBN Technologies’ John Hebeler, just one of the many scary-smart people interviewed by NYU student Kate Ray for her fascinating new documentary on Web 3.0.
With the billions (and soon trillions) of pages now available to us, a thinking, analytical web that understands and fulfills our requests for information while minimizing the need for human intervention—and thinking, for that matter—may be as far removed from Google as the search engine is from the card catalog. This doc is a pointed reminder that we really have no clue what’s coming next. Exciting and scary as hell, right?
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