How to Develop In-House Video Competency, Part 2: Staffing and Investment

In this second segment of our 5-part series on best practices for developing an in-house video operation at your organization, we’ll look at staffing needs and the level of investment you should anticipate as you build your video program.

One general approach to staffing that we take at videoBIO is that we love to hire people who are multi-disciplinary. If you're hiring new people as you bring video competency in-house, I recommend looking for millennials that are coming out of school that can do everything. Ideally, you want video staff who can shoot, light, edit, create graphics, content-curate--the whole bit.

When we post ads to attract new people onto our team, those are things we're looking for. The fact that new potential hires are graduating with all those skills allows us to get more skills out of one individual and lower our overall cost of hire.

Videographer

As for specific skills, on your team, you want to have certainly a videographer. “Videographer” is a term that was coined about 15 years ago to describe a video person that can do it all: They can capture and shoot with equal facility on the street or in a studio.

Videographers can do more than point a camera, up to and including the overall producing role. This is the kind of multitalented cameraperson you want on your team.

Graphics Editor

You also want to hire an editor with graphic expertise, including the ability to work in Adobe After Effects and with motion graphics in general. Most people can do motion graphics, but not everyone can work in After Effects, which is more along the lines of animated video. It's a lot more affordable to create motion graphic videos than it is animated videos.

For most projects, you’ll want to work from some kind of storyboard. And the graphics or design department of your organization has probably generated branding guidelines and templates that you can apply in the videos you’ll produce. You need to hire editors who understand this: the top, the tail, the branding, the style guide, the color palettes. Some of that requires pure illustration, and some of it can be done with just software. You may want them to create vector art, or other elements like color-blocking with motion that they can turn into a video from beginning to end.

Content Curator

Ideally, the editors you hire will also be able to content-curate. That means that they can help you build your asset library and work with a lot of the elements that you're going to be using as the content and assets of your video.

Production Coordinator

You’ll also need a team member that can serve as a production coordinator. A production coordinator is the person that the bookends of this whole process. The production coordinator deals with the actual media files, conversions, and the publishing, posting, distribution, and internal archiving of the video you produce.
After you start generating content on a regular basis, you’ll find you have a lot of elements to manage, and will need someone focused exclusively on coordinating video production.