Producing Online Promo Video for Schools, Part 2: Building Out the Program

Establishing the Value of Video

One idea Wales emphasizes in building a relationship with a school or any other organization with whom you want to work on an ongoing basis is essentially teaching them the role that video should play in their overall promotional and positioning efforts as an everyday thing, which may involve re-purposing or re-packaging work that you do for them. If they’re new to video, chances are that concepts that we take for granted--like video in ordinary blog posts, or as commonplace elements of events at the school--haven’t even occurred to them.

So while you may be directly promoting the value of video to them, you’re only indirectly promoting your own services--or their increased use of your services--and building trust and the understanding that for you, too, it’s not just about the sale.

“One of the great things about video is that you can create the core of your video and then develop it and add to it without having to recreate it,” Wales says. “If you're doing a lot of interviews, point out, ‘You know what, I had this great interview with this English teacher that I think could be a great blog piece for you, and here it is.’ That's another way to support the school and to point out that the mining that you're doing for content on a particular project is also going to spin out and provide utility and value for you in additional ways that you might not have considered when you originally started out with the project.”

Budgeting and Balancing

There’s a familiar axiom in sales that you should never try to balance your client’s checkbook, but the truth is that whenever you do the familiar “budget dance” that happens in one form or another in any sort of contracted video project, you’re doing precisely that as you try to intuit how much more they can spend than they’re initially saying they can, and arguing that more that they’ve initially offered be allocated to video.

Of course, schools and other academic institutions--and most non-profits--are the last place you want to be that crass about monetary matters and budget issues, but the difference isn’t so much whether the negotiations take place as how subtle you need to be about them.

So, much as working with a school to help promote it through video means understanding its mission and culture, prevailing ethos--not to mention its academic and athletic calendars--you should also know how its budget cycles work, and when the milestone dates occur. Wales acknowledges that projects don’t always grow and multiply as quickly as DigiNovations’ involvement with Middlesex has; many schools aren’t as well-funded, don’t have as large an endowment, and can’t necessary re-direct the kind of resources toward that Middlesex has in the relatively short time that DigiNovations has been working with them.

That means that when you’re working with a more cash-strapped or tuition-driven institution, you need to be even more cognizant of their budgeting mechanics and flexibility (or lack thereof). And if what’s necessary to build and extend the relationship is to work around their budget cycle stops and starts, and do the work on the schedule that matches the academic/athletic calendar and sometimes defer payment to match the budget cycle, you’ll only benefit from anticipating those possibilities and being willing to adapt to them.

“I think it's important to understand what the budget cycle for most schools is,” Wales says. “The budget cycle typically goes from July 1st to June 30th, and there have been times when I've said to schools, ‘You know, we're happy to work around that if it's helpful to you.’ For example, a school might want to have filming done in the spring, and come to you and sat, ‘We would like to have you start to film in the fall and have a video that will be ready to showcase in January--or even in November--for our admissions cycle.’ And they’re talking to you in April and you might say, ‘Well, you know what? You're missing this whole chunk of beautiful weather and part of the school year that you know will be important in representing and communicating what that experience is about. We're happy to film, but we understand you're not going to have budget because your money is all spent until July 1. We're happy to film in April, and wait to be paid July 1 if that will help you to get this footage in play.’

“It's important to be aware of some of the tensions and some of the deadlines with which funds are being allocated, because obviously that affects you. And if you aren't aware of that and aren't aware of how you can negotiate or massage that,” Wales concludes, “you're not fishing upstream. You're not casting your line as far upstream as you like to have it come down and serve you.”