Simple stories are what strikes home
I've been involved with creating some small-scale storytelling projects for non-journalistic ends in the last few years. All of them have had two things in common - zero budget and, as a result, forced simplicity. If you have budget, good for you. Spend it wisely, and you have the luxury of options. But if times are tight, fear not. Simplicity can be your best friend. Simplicity means focus.
Once you figure out the true purpose of what you're trying to communicate, the most direct route to that message is often the most effective. Take, for example, our recent promo video for Storyful. We wanted to communicate that there were great people behind what we do. Storyful is a journalism-as-a-service kind of business, we are largely b2b and thus don't typically provide our staff with exposure via bylines, but they are the heartbeat of our organisation. Our business is inherently human.
We produced an in-house movie, scripted by myself and Mark, to highlight the human factor of Storyful. It was shot on my own gear - the same equipment that I used to film this short doco for the Red Cross back in 2010 - against a white wall in the breakout room. Canon 7d, Zoom H4n, and, quite literally, the shiny backside of a whiteboard as a reflector to even out the shadows cast by downlighters in the Storyful breakout room. We knew what we wanted, we had Ed Rice cut in some video from material used over the past two years, and hey presto.
Likewise, when we needed to post a job opening last week, we knew that we'd want something that would get traction pretty widely with the right readership, but which wouldn't cost us anything, ideally. I wrote up the job description on a Google Doc and made it public.
We're hiring! goo.gl/Klmxq#jobfairy#journalism
— Storyful (@Storyful) March 7, 2013
The job posting has since had more than 3,600 views, and we have had nearly 200 responses - but it was also a fantastic bit of PR for us, due in large part to a little kicker at the end of the job posting:
Applications to Storyful’s Head of Content. Yes, their email address is omitted on purpose. Finding news is all about finding the right person to talk to. It starts …. now.UPDATE: 4.30pm GMT: If you’re calling the office to ask for our Head of Content’s name, we’ll be asking for your name and why you can’t work Google. =)
Putting a little related challenge into the job posting got people chatting, and even though it was only a tiny barrier for anyone who was remotely qualified, it served to weed out the candidates. We didn't need to run any paid-for ads, we didn't need to promote the ad anywhere, the twist in the application process did the legwork for us. It's a scaled-down version of what Pizza Hut are doing at SXSW, where they're asking candidates to pitch themselves in 140 characters - only we didn't have to pay to produce an animated YouTube video, or hire any space in the Hilton for the interviews. For us, in relative terms, the return on investment was just as good.
Irish website Broadsheet.ie picked it up instantly and ran it as a story in itself, and the ad even got some international attention:
Brilliant @storyful job ad for social media verifier forces candidates to use Google to figure out who to send CV to goo.gl/Klmxq— Robert Mackey (@RobertMackey) March 7, 2013
Back when I was recording in Kenya for the Red Cross, I also did some training with a Kenya-based, but Irish-founded NGO called Moving Mountains. The goal was to teach the team how to tell their own video stories in a simple way using Kodak Zi8 cameras, and leave them with some good introductory videos for the project in Nairobi and around. The key barrier to break was that the team had to relax, allow their true personalities to come out and be a bit creative with how they illustrated themselves on video. It was a fun process, with the results in a playlist below. The key message that unifies all these examples is this: Don't stress about production values or the equipment you have. Worry about the purpose of the content you're creating, and the simplicity of your message. Get that right, and it'll all work out fine.
