I did so much at work today! I’ve been really busy tracking down Big and Little sisters for the video for Women’s History Month, while on top of that posting Facebook/Google+ photos, working on an article about a partner program, and preparing for the BIG Celebration (our huge annual fundraiser) in May. So much stuff on my plate right now!
Tomorrow I am going to work earlier than usual to head to a site and do some interviews for the Women’s History Month video. I am excited, but nervous—I feel a lot of excitement and buzz around this video and it’s kind of a lot to live up to. I’m going to do a lot of videographic experimentation tomorrow; like handing off my camcorder (within my sight) to the Bigs and Littles and letting them record each other, having Littles and Bigs look directly into the camera and smile / laugh, try to get some low-angle shots of them in a Superwoman-esque style, etc. I really want to capture the strength, optimism, and agency BBBSCM enables women and girls to have. It will be a good challenge. I’m also less worried about getting tons of interview content, because it seems like I’ll be interviewing a ton of people, which means I won’t have the airtime for long stories. Here goes nothing!
It’s Monday, spring break is over, and today I felt the urgency of both academic and professional responsibilities.
I worked on a bunch of things today:
I created/updated a long excel list of media contacts (e.g. online local newspapers) and uploaded them into Constant Contact over break, so today I spent a good chunk of time adding the appropriate geographical information to each contact (Worcester, Sherborn, Shrewsbury, Dover, etc.). This will make it easier to select addresses when we have news particular to one geographic area.
I drafted interview questions for an upcoming article on one of our corporate partners.
I drafted interview questions for an upcoming video for National Women’s History Month.
I tried to plan site visits for footage for the video for National Women’s History Month.
I embellished and established our YouTube and Google+ pages.
The most exciting part of my work today was probably making preparations for the video. This video is going to be more creative than I’ve ever done, and so I was watching some videos by Mass Mentoring to get brainstorming. These are some of the cool things I noticed they did (and it’s important to note that they obviously have expensive video cameras, perhaps lighting, and definitely mics):
extreme closeups
photos
half of face crop
two different shots side-by-side (not sure if can in iMovie)
slow mo
black and white
walking b-roll
filming from behind walking
urban / POV footage
quick jump zoom on photos
logo full screen at end and beginning
look up straight into cam, smile
I definitely plan on incorporating the extreme closeups, quick jumps and crops, and I also liked some of the POV / walking footage they had, and their utilization of slow mo. One little idea I had, since this video is for National Women’s History Month, was to give my camcorder (a scary decision for me) temporarily to a Little and Big, and let them film each other, film “selfie”-style, film whatever they want, even fumble around with the camera while it’s rolling, as a means of visually showing female agency (and also their laughter and personality). I also liked when the interviewee looked directly into the camera and smiled, I think I may outright take this idea for my own video. This would be a nice way to show power, agency, and strength; direct “eye contact” (or camcorder contact) is always a signifier of such.
I’d also like to share some of the interview questions I’ve planned that correspond to National Women’s History Month. I aimed to formulate questions that focused on female mentoring and role models (for obvious reasons) and tried to come up with questions that could elicit a story, memory, or aspiration:
why do you think mentoring is important for young females?
to Bigs: did you have a female mentor or role model growing up?
what kinds of qualities does a female mentor/role model possess?
to Bigs: in what ways do you strive to/attempt to be a female role model to others [young females]?
to Littles: what do you want to be when you grow up?
Lastly, I wrapped up the day with some embellishment of our Google+ and YouTube pages. Both accounts were created in haste just to get last month’s Match Spotlight video up, and were lacking basically all other information. Today I added descriptions, addresses, contact info, social media links, cover photos, cover videos, playlist set-up, circles—the whole nine yards. The Google+ page desperately needs followers, so if you’re reading this, maybe you could create a circle in your Google+ account called “Best Nonprofits in the World” and add us. 🙂
I now present you to the second/final draft of the Match Spotlight: Colby & Wendy video! I spent basically all day fighting with technology. But after long last, it is here.
Key edits in this video:
added title introduction
replaced “she was new” with “Wendy was new” in the beginning
ended the video sooner than before
Not too much to report! This is BBBSCM’s first Match Spotlight in the form of a video and it will be the first, main content in the e-newsletter that goes out tomorrow (Friday) so I cannot wait to see what kind of response it gets! Everyone is super excited about it!
*Note: there are some minor visual imperfections. This is just a draft, so it’s okay.
Today I spent my three hours working solely on the video. Unedited, all of the footage was about 16 minutes long. The first draft of this video is about two minutes long. I try to keep all promotional YouTube videos between a minute and two minutes, with 2:30 as the absolute maximum. Attention spans are short, and videos must be only a minute or two if the entire message is to get across without losing the viewer.
In this post I aim to explain why the clips were organized in the way they were.
First shot – “She was new..” with Colby/Wendy closeup b-roll:
Colby is answering “How and when did you meet Wendy?” as the viewer sees a close up of Colby and Wendy doing homework together
Colby’s dialogue serves as context for the viewer. Considering the video is about their close relationship, it’s important to know straight away how they met.
The close-up of Colby and Wendy is also context—everything that Colby and Wendy will say later directly to the camera will be about their relationship, so we seem them interacting in the title sequence.
Second shot – Colby talking to the camera, with caption
While I’m not thrilled about the caption style overlapping with the watermark, the caption is important because it relays basic information about Colby, again, providing context in the beginning of the video.
Third shot – Wendy talking to the camera, with caption
Again, we have the use of the caption to relay information about the Little, Wendy.
Wendy speaks about what she enjoys doing with Colby. This creates a nice narrative: first we find out how they met, then we find out what they do together.
Fourth shot – “She’s gotten the chance..” with a distant b-roll show of Colby and Wendy at the table
I chose this b-roll because Colby is talking about “a close-knit group of friends” making Wendy feel more comfortable. The footage shows Colby and Wendy at a table with three other girls, and Wendy even passes a pen to her friend across the table.
This also continues the narratively nicely: how they met, what they do, how it affects them
Fifth shot – Wendy talking to camera
Following Colby’s shot of saying how she thinks BBBS has affected Wendy, we get to hear Wendy say first hand how BBBS has made an impact: “it makes me happier” she says.
She then goes on to tell a story about how she saw a field hockey game of Colby’s and then got to hang out with her family. You can see on Wendy’s face how happy a memory this was; it reinforces that BBBS makes her “happier”
Sixth shot – Colby talking to camera
Colby continues talking about how being a part of BBBS has helped Wendy academically. This is essentially the message BBBSCM is trying to send—that there are tangible benefits to joining BBBS.
It was absolutely essential that I included the piece of Colby saying that Wendy wants to go to College of the Holy Cross. Since many of the kids we work with don’t see college in their future, we want to show them how big of an impact BBBS can have.
Seventh shot – mid (distance) b-roll of Wendy focusing intently on writing, with Colby’s help
This shot is shown as we hear Colby talking about effort Wendy can do to achieve her dreams. This shot is a nice visual representation of such “effort”.
Ending shots (Colby talking to camera / Wendy talking to camera / Colby again)
These shots broaden the scope of the video and have Colby and Wendy answer the question, “Would you recommend BBBS to others? What would you say to someone who was thinking about becoming a Big or Little?”
Both Colby and Wendy tell, from their unique perspectives, why being a part of BBBS is worthwhile.
In the end, our narrative is as follows: how they met, what they do, how it affects them, and how it could affect others.
In the end, we have to reconsider the message we decided upon in the first place: BBBSCM can change lives. I have to ask myself if this video is addressing this message. Considering the content I have from Colby and Wendy, I think I have successfully pieced together a video, two minutes in length, that sees multiple reasons why BBBSCM is more than just “friendship” and can be potentially life changing—Wendy wants to go to college, she’s doing better academically, she’s speaking English better, she’s more confident, and she’s happier. I’d say this video has done its job! Not too bad for a first draft.
These are the things I will be fixing:
some rocky jump cuts need to be smoothed by either a transition (overlap/fade effect) or a change in zoom.
some audio and visual imperfections need to be resolved by a careful video re-export
As I mentioned in my last post, today was all about VIDEO CONTENT for the upcoming e-newsletter!
I have been SO excited to make a video for BBBSCM because I’ve never made a video for anyone other than Clark University or myself! It will be a milestone for me to create video content that is used by a new organization. Also, when I started making videos for Clark University, I knew HOW to make videos because I didn’t really know how to make GOOD videos, I was an amateur and ended up learning a lot of skills on the job. Which is great, but what’s more exciting is being able to come to a new organization like BBBSCM and be able to say “I have experience making high quality, professional YouTube videos and have made around 50 for Clark University”.
Anyway, because I now have video content, I will blogging primarily about the construction of this video over here.
However, I can certainly talk about the experience here. For the video, Junior and I went back to Plumley Village—one of the sites I visited in my first week. The best part about this experience was not making the video, but the enthusiasm and friendliness the Littles had upon seeing me again. I didn’t do much except stand around, smiling, filming, and towards the end I worked with a girl on a valentine. But still, girls asked me: “Do you want to be a Big?”, “Will you be coming every Monday?” It was really sweet! I found myself much less awkward around them this time than the last.
As I mentioned, I worked on a valentine with one girl, it’s for the February e-newsletter; we want to have a sidebar section recognizing Valentine’s day. One thing Jeff and I talked about was making sure this section wasn’t just “fluff”, but connecting Valentine’s Day to BBBSCM in some way. What we settled on was using this holiday of love as a way of saying “thank you” to our sponsors. I thought this was a perfect solution—it took the theme of love from Valentine’s Day and repurposed it in a way that was actually important. When I was doing research on our social media strategy, a common thread I found was the importance of saying “thank you” to your customers/fans/likes/subscribers, etc., so I truly think this way of looking at Valentine’s Day is perfect. In the end, we’ll use a photo I took of the girl who crafted the valentine today and include a message of thanks to our sponsors—problem solved.
Today was a very exciting day! It was my first time: shooting a video for BBBSCM, interviewing a kid, and returning to the Plumley Village meeting site. In this blog post, I will be describing the process I’m currently at with creating a video: coming up with a concept, writing interview questions, conducting the interview, collecting b-roll, and wrapping up the shoot.
Concept Creation
Jeff and I knew we wanted more video content, and BBBSCM has a tradition of creating “Match Spotlights” but they are usually in the form of written blog posts or articles. These “Match Spotlights” highlight a certain Big and Little match that has been together for a while, shown significant growth since being paired, and/or has been successful in making both the Big and Little very happy. Since Jeff and I were brainstorming content for the main panel of our February newsletter and I had already spotted a match or two that would be good for a video, I suggested we embed a Match Spotlight video (not a written piece) into our e-newsletter. When trying to come up with a concept for a video, I would encourage people to think about 3 things: their audience, their message, and their purpose. For BBBSCM, our purpose is to gain brand awareness, which we will do by engaging our audience which is mostly online (video as a our preferred medium) and largely youth, and we aim to spread the message that BBBSCM can change lives. This Match Spotlight aims to spread this message by choosing interviewees that have had life changing experiences with BBBSCM.
Writing Interview Questions
Once you’ve figured out what your message is, you’ll want to 1. not solely think about questions to ask, but 2. write them down. I always ask questions that cover the basics but then probe about the most interesting parts of their experience that pertain to the message we want to send. So for example, basic questions could be: how did you first hear about x?, why did you decide to join x?, how long have you been doing x?, what do you like about x? Furthermore, probing questions are usually like: how has x impacted your life?, how did x compare to your initial expectations?, what was your best memory from x?, etc. The basic questions are necessary for getting the viewer acquainted with the interviewee, and the probing questions are essential for getting the intended message across.
Conducting the Interview
I always give a little spiel at the beginning of every interview that has three purposes: to make the interviewee comfortable, to orient the interviewee, and to teach the interviewee how to speak in the interview. You always need to make the interviewee comfortable—many interviewees have never been interviewed before, let alone on camera. Ask the interviewee how their day is going, make them laugh or smile, and essentially act like you’re two friends hanging out. Being interviewed on camera can be absolutely terrifying for some people, even if they signed up for it thinking it’d be a breeze. It’s important, as the interviewer, to set the tone of the interview and get the interviewee feeling as comfortable as possible. The more comfortable they are, the more they’ll talk, the more compelling things they’ll say, and the better footage you’ll get.
Secondly, it’s important to orient the interviewee. Tell them who you are, tell them a bit of your background, tell them why you’re interviewing them and what’s going to happen to the footage. This builds trust between the interviewer and interviewee, and it gives the interviewee a better idea of what kinds of content you’re looking for.
Thirdly, there are certain things people who are getting interviewed need to know. I always ask or tell the following things:
“Have you ever been interviewed before? Were you filmed?”
If they have, they may already know the following. If not, the following is important.
“I’m going to set the camera here, but let’s just pretend we’re having a casual conversation and you can look right at me.”
This eases them (“casual conversation”) but also tells them that they don’t need to look right into the camera lens.
“I’m going to ask you questions, but when I edit this, I’m going to completely edit myself out, so the viewer will only see your answers. That means, when you answer, please try to answer the question by repeating the prompt”
I usually give an example: “If I ask you what your favorite color is, don’t just say ‘blue’, because the viewer won’t know what you’re talking about. It’s better to say ,’My favorite color is blue’.
I also always say: “Sometime I may ask you a question, and you will suddenly forget to repeat the prompt. If that happens, don’t worry, it happens all the time, I’ll just interrupt you and ask you to answer again, no worries”
“Also, remember to speak more loudly and clearly than usual. Some people trail off in volume when they’re talking, and that’s totally normal, but if that happens while we’re filming I may ask you to repeat your answer.”
I’m including the raw footage from today’s interview to show how a nine minute interview will get condensed into two minutes for the final product. Some things to note in this interview:
Colby is an amazing interviewee—articulate, well spoken, and remembers to repeat prompts.
I don’t interrupt or interject my interviewee unless it’s absolutely necessary.
I listen and respond to her answers, saying “awesome” or “that’s great” after every answer. Luckily, Colby was very thorough and I never had to probe her further. But sometimes you’ll get an interviewee that will say something like “I had the pleasure of working with Professor So-and-So on my research project in Brazil and it was absolutely amazing,” and you need to be paying attention to then ask them, “why was it amazing?”, “what exactly are you researching?”
You can’t see in the video, but I’m maintaining eye contact with her, nodding my head, and smiling when she speaks. I’m reinforcing that we’re having a conversation, and that she isn’t at a podium in a daunting auditorium.
At the end of the interview I ask: “Is there anything you want to add? Something I didn’t ask about?” I always, always ask this because sometimes the interviewee will remember something about their experience while answering another question, and won’t get the chance to elaborate on it unless I give them the floor.
This isn’t pictured, but always thank your interviewee when you’re done. I also always have my interviewees write down their name for me “as they want it captioned”, because you may get their name from a roster when they actually prefer to be called something else.
This is raw footage from the same interview, but this time with the Little, Wendy, as the interviewee. ALL of the things I’ve mentioned before are the same in this video, however, you’ll notice that I did have to interrupt Wendy a few times to remind her to repeat the prompt. Eventually, she remembered, and she did an awesome job. Another important thing is to read your interviewee. After Wendy proved to be a bit, well, concise in her answers, I decided not to probe her too, too much. I think Wendy would have lost her enthusiasm if I pushed her to give me “more thoughtful” responses. You’ll also notice that when I asked Wendy questions, I elaborated a bit more: “How has being a little impacted your life—have you become happier, healthier, more confident maybe??” This is important; a younger person is not going to be able to think profoundly about that question without a bit more to go on. At the end of the video, I realized I didn’t get much content from Wendy, and I asked her if there was a specific memory she had. I was thrilled that Wendy was able to share a time they went to one of Colby’s field hockey games.
Collecting B-roll
“B-roll” is secondary footage, it’s background footage, miscellaneous footage, extra stuff. B-roll is great to have because it adds more visuals and content to a video, it can pose as transitional footage when you need to cut a piece of audio abruptly, and much more. I try to get a mix of b-roll media: photos and videos. Here are three sections of b-roll from today’s interview. You’ll notice that they are from varying angles and varying distances.
Wrapping up the Shoot
Before you go, don’t forget to thank your interviewees again. If possible, shake their hand and tell them that you’ll contact them when the video is finished. Tell them again that they did an awesome job today.
Want to see the finished video? Well you better follow me then!
At my internship today I got to work on content creation and the layout/compiling of BBBSCM’s February e-Newsletter in Constant Contact that will go out next Friday (last day of the month!). While I’ve worked in Constant Contact before, I mostly used the tool for holding distribution lists and for sending out company holiday cards—not e-newsletters.
However, I was largely in charge of the e-newsletter for the I&E program at Clark; I would create content as well as design the newsletter and customize it’s HTML—it’s part of how I started learning HTML, actually.
Back to BBBSCM! We’re working with a layout where there are 3 consecutive narrow sidebar blocks, and 2 consecutive “main” blocks. Here’s what we brainstormed for content today, all pertaining to February of course:
Black History Month – tie into the national organization’s programs for African Americans
Valentine’s Day – get a Little to craft a holiday card that we can photograph
written content – the blog post I just posted the other day on BBBSCM’s blog
video content – a video highlighting a notable match
events – a preview/promo for our annual event in May
sponsors – two sidebar blocks about sponsors and new community partners
Two other big things from today: I made an OFFICIAL BBBSCM YouTube channel, which also meant creating a Google+ page, and I set up a video interview with a match for Monday! I will link to the YouTube and Google+ accounts once they’re all set-up — I didn’t have time to add cover photos, company information, syncing accounts, etc., so once I do that I will be able to promote them more. And part of why I made this YouTube channel is in preparation for a video, and hopefully series of videos, on Big & Little matches (“Match Spotlights”) as well as other promotional material as part of BBBSCM’s new video content strategy (and our overall social media strategy).
Videography is one of my areas of expertise; when I was a videographer for the Marketing & Communications Department for nearly 4 years I would interview and film students about various subjects and then edit the footage and b-roll down to about 1-2 minute clips that would go on YouTube and into other admissions materials. So naturally, I’m very excited about our video content strategy. I have my own Kodak camcorder and associated software to make high quality videos for BBBSCM, and it gives me more real-world experience in videography as well as interviewing skills with children. I’ve never interviewed children before, but I am good at connecting with people (why do you think I’m a communications major?!) so I’m excited instead of nervous about it.
Did you know Monday was President’s Day? Because I sure didn’t! Oh well, I got a coffee out of my trip down Main Street.
Today I had my first direct connection with BBBS’s followers—I posted a blog post on BBBSCM’s WordPress, Facebook, and Twitter that I edited and reviewed! The blog post is by Katie Roy, a new Interview Match Specialist, and she explains how powerful it is to see the positive impact of mentoring and BBBS just in her first week on the job.
As I’ve mentioned in past posts, I had to review her writing for clarity as an outsider; as someone who may not be familiar with BBBS or their terminology. The key changes I made were: changing “sites” to “meeting sites” and capitalizing “littles” and “bigs” to “Littles” and “Bigs” to make it clear they are BBBS jargon.
The next step was to add hyperlinks wherever possible. At one point, Katie mentioned “statistical evidence” that proves BBBS has a tangible, positive impact on Littles. Here, I hyperlinked “statistical evidence” to a page on the national BBBS site showing statistical data from a study that was done recently. Another key area for hyperlinkage was where Katie noted that some matches had been together for “twenty years”. In this text, I hyperlinked to an article posted not too long ago from the national BBBS site profiling a Big and Little who had actually remained friends for about 40 years! Impressive!
Lastly, I searched through the company server to find photos to add to the post. Jeff and I managed to find one of Katie (placed at the top of the article) and two other photos: one of a Big Brother and Little Brother candidly embracing and another of a group of Big Sisters and Little Sisters from one of Katie’s sites (actually both were from Katie’s sites). I made it a point to select photos that were 1. recent (anything more than say, three years old was off the table), and 2. relevant. In terms of relevancy, I wanted the photos to be from Katie’s sites (every Interview Match Specialist regularly visits specific meeting sites where the Bigs and Littles meet up). This meant searching through many, many albums of photos to find ones that were from Katie’s sites. Also, I used the photo of two boys embracing inside Katie’s paragraph where she mentions a Little that welcomed her—literally—with open arms. This only seemed natural. The group photo of the female Littles and Bigs was chosen and placed in a paragraph that spoke about the importance of mentors, and how they create great bonds with mentees. This context seemed fitting for a group shot.
Lastly, posting the blog post meant: using BBBSCM’s WordPress blog for the first time, using BBBSCM’s Twitter account for the first time, using BBBSCM’s Facebook account for the first time, and figuring out how to properly embed and resize captioned photos into a WordPress blog ten minutes before I had to go catch a bus back to Clark. These were no easy tasks, but luckily I have experience using all of those networks and utilized Bit.ly to keep my posts succinct.
Today I worked from home because it is a snowy, winter wonderland out there!
I continued work on the social media strategy for BBBSCM. When I wrote up the strategy yesterday, I liked how thorough it was, but something was off about it. It was too scattered. I had it broken up like this:
Objectives
Audience
Content Strategy
Networks
Timing
Staff
Interaction
Moderation
Measurement
Basically, dividing it up this way meant that under every section I had subsections of every single social media platform. This wasn’t working because it made the document appear scattered, all over the place, hard to read clearly. So today I focused on utilizing all this data I gathered and restructuring it. Here’s what I came up with:
Key Objectives
Microblogging
Social Networking
Blogging
Photo blogging
Video blogging
This system works well for a number of reasons. Firstly, starting with microblogging and ending with video blogging visually and clearly lets the reader know we are starting at the most concise form of media to the least concise. Also, under each heading, all the information is unified about each social media platform, i.e., Microblogging>Twitter>Tools, Schedule, Audience, Content Strategy, Audience Interaction Strategy, and Metrics. “Microblogging” serves as the umbrella under which ALL the relevant information is unified. In the first method, everything the reader wants to know about Twitter usage is disconnected under multiple headings. In this model, each major heading is constructed in the same format: Social Networking>Facebook>Schedule, Audience, Content Strategy, Audience Interaction Strategy, Metrics, etc. This consistency helps the social media strategy to be understood easily.
Lastly, I made a Microsoft Excel sheet for tracking the metrics for all of our social media. I divided the sheet up into blocks of 30 days (months) and set columns for things like: Date, Page Likes, Post Likes, Page Posts by Others, Comments, and Shares (Facebook). This will be used as a template to evaluate whether or not our social media strategy is making a difference in brand awareness (our key objective) and engagement.
Today I got acquainted with BBBSCM’s social media accounts, such as; their WordPress blog. I learned about the kinds of things they blog about, what every blog post gets checked for before it’s posted, and I even prepared a blog post for posting.
Obviously, blogging is a passion of mine, so this was a breeze.
Then, I went with Match Support Specialist Junior to two meeting sites: Great Brook Valley and Plumley Village. I shadowed Junior at these sites, meeting the site-specific coordinators and getting a feel for what exactly the relationship is like between Bigs and Littles. It was amazing to see how enthusiastic the Littles are to see their Bigs, to see Junior, and to get matched with a Big if they haven’t already. I saw so many smiling faces today, it was awesome. Junior also introduced me to one or two matches that had been together for a number of years. These matches will make for great interviewees for a match profile on our blog or a video on our YouTube page (a strategy I am developing as well).
I have a better understanding now of why BBBSCM has the impact that it does. When you see how excited and happy these Littles are, you know right then and there BBBSCM is making a difference, even if all it does is bring them a bit more happiness (fortunately, the benefits of BBBSCM far exceed just happiness!). I cannot wait to start my first story on a match. I think I will bring strong skills in videography and writing to BBBSCM and tell these stories in a powerful, persuasive way.
I'M A MKTG INTERN! 