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.
Posted on January 19, 2015
Producer/Director and Scriptwriter
Finally, you may find you need an internal producer/director and script writer. Generally, I recommend leaving the creative to the ad agencies, who actually do creative for a living. So many different kinds of video come into play when you’re developing a comprehensive video program for a corporation or organization.
You may find yourself producing education videos, training, profiles, interviews, or thought leadership pieces. Marketing video and agency-level advertisements are just one small piece of today’s corporate video ecosystem.
When you bring this competency in-house, it may mean that your ad agency is still doing video related to your brand and your advertising. For the work that you do bring in-house, depending on the amount and sophistication of scripting required, you may want to hire a scriptwriter or someone with a writing competency and the ability to draft scripts based on key messages to help formulate your scripts. You can plug those scripts into a teleprompter and then work with your talent to deliver them.
We’ll revisit this question in Part 5 of this series, which will focus on which elements of video production and publishing you may want to continue to outsource even after you’ve invested in and initiated video work in-house.
Investment
A key question that relates not just to staffing but to all aspects of implementing a video program is, how much are you going to spend on this? Typically, if you’re the person in the organization tasked with bringing in video, but also facing the kind of budgetary restrictions involved in any new internal undertaking, you’ll need to build a business case to your boss for bringing this competency in-house. You’ll need to put together a budget and demonstrate the ROI of doing this internally instead of only working with a video production company.
There are a lot of pieces in the investment puzzle. Let's start with staffing, which I’ve place on the left of the chart in Figure 1 (below), which shows the investment breakdown for establishing in-house video competency, and provides ranges of what you can expect to have to budget for each component.
Figure 1. The investment breakdown. Click the image to see it at full size.
Most readers have either worked as independent videographers or hired videographers in their market, so I’m sure most of you know what you’d pay for a videographer. Full-time equivalent salaries will vary by location, of course, but as I mentioned earlier, you probably want at least a videographer, an editor, and a production coordinator on your team.
Again, it depends at what stage you are in growing your in-house competency, and your staffing needs are going to grow with you. In our case, we've got 18 dedicated video people in-house, plus a field team of 500. How much you spend on staffing, technology, studio equipment, and media assets, as broken down in Figure 1, depends on how much content you produce.
We’ll go into more depth on technology and equipment in Part 3 of this series.
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