Use of Video in the Educational Sector

My name is Ravijain. I'm the Senior Associate Director for Web Development and Digital Media at Boston College in the office of University Communications. And so that means we work with a lot of the different schools and entities within the university to leverage video and other multimedia technologies to help them tell their stories. At Boston College a lot of what we'll do is really it's marketing so if there's a program that a school wants to highlight, if there's some event going on, it runs the gamut but you've got to figure out like with any kind of marketing, okay who's my audience, what is it we're trying to tell them. With video especially that's going to impact how you physically make the video, like a video for an 18 year old, if it's with prospective students is going to be very different for an alumni audience where you're trying to maybe generate some donorship and some gifts. So there's just different natures of that storytelling but that always starts out on like who's the audience, what are we trying to say and then figuring out what's the best strategy for the video, is it one video, is it a series of videos. It's gotten even more complex now with one of the platforms, you know it used to be I make a video we put up on the YouTube channel and we post that on the site, well now there's working with our social media manager with the way that people are using YouTube differently now and so maybe we want to put this on Vimeo or maybe this is just an Instagram experience and so you know really this concept of liquid video that you make your content but you really have to be open to how that content is going to flow through all these different platforms. You never know where a user is going to intersect or your audience is going to intersect with your content and how that fits into the overall journey. You know I think a lot of how we think about things is still, we're thinking of here's the video, we want to make sure we drive the audience to whatever call to action, whatever destination it is but I'm not, I'm just thinking about like what leads people to that video, you know that's it's really all about partnerships so I think in the past a lot of times I would think okay we just got to make this, we make it, put it out there, put it up on YouTube there, okay great we're done but now starting to realize you really need to think strategically to work with okay who are the people that are going to generate the tips to your audience, who is it, social media person, is it the web team, is it the email marketing, like so there's a lot of ways now where you kind of lay the distribution strategy out before, you know that's part of the whole overall strategy before you can start producing the video. So I think for me it's a constant learning experience, like it used to be like okay we make the video, okay hey how can we promote this, where can we put this but now it's really like what's the whole integrated strategy where video is just one piece of this. One thing I'm really interested, I don't know if it's a trend but I'm really interested just in augmented reality, virtual reality, I'd say more AR with ways of integrating print media, like I'm still fascinated by print and like I always think like print gets a really short shrift but it's still very important, we have a full art department in our group and we produce a lot of print material, we've also got a very gifted set of video professionals, we've got a social media group, we've got marketing people, so I'm really interested in the ways that augmented reality could be utilized to say with a magazine if there's a story that then either through a phone or headset somehow then we could launch some other digital media content. That's an answer that's very different than say six months ago, this is like very new for me thinking instead of this kind of pie in the sky augmented reality really starting to see a way that it could benefit our audiences and utilize a lot of the expertise that we already have in house instead of like trying to start up some whole new arm. It's invigorating to think about ways to leverage video in all these different platforms because it's not just okay here's a video and I post it and I'm done but even things like is this going to be vertical video, is this going to be a square format, is this going to be the kind of thing where I really need to think about on screen text because it's going to be on a Facebook stream and people might be scrolling past or people aren't going to have the sound on or things like that. So that to me is it goes beyond this kind of like I got one shot and here's my video and it's going to be this two minute video because that's what I'm going to do but instead saying okay maybe I make that two minute version and that's going to go up on YouTube but I know that I'm going to work with social media manager and we're going to make some Instagram versions and these are going to be vertical and they're going to be 15 second or these are going to be on some other platform that I've never heard of but they tell me put it in this format and we want text because you know the kids are using that like so there's a lot of different ways of just kind of you know casting a wider net. We've created content that we have to show on the Jumbotron in the athletic stadium and the Jumbotron is a super wide format it's like 32 by 9 instead of 16 by 9 so it's like yeah you could just slice your video but that's kind of crude maybe the titles get cut off all that kind of stuff so that's a project where really you know from the storyboard stage you're thinking how to format that for something that's meant to be seen in this big arena and utilize a super you know you want people doing that kind of stuff versus this you know experience of someone kind of watching on this or something like that so to me it's mindfulness it's being mindful of how your user your audience is engaging with your content on their journey but it's also just it's invigorating because it keeps it fresh you know it keeps it fresh from the content producer and I think that's you know if you're enthusiastic about your work it's more likely that enthusiasm will get passed on to your audience like I've always said that if you feel like oh we're just doing this and we're spitting this content out we did this last year let's do it again if there's like a humdrumness to what you're doing like that's going to carry through and like I would I would venture to say then you're going oh why is our wire numbers lagging that's because you know there's a humdrumness that's coming through in terms of analytics and reporting with video this is probably the the main point I always say it helps to build partnerships and work with your colleagues because this was definitely not my forte I really was like okay I've got this great idea boom we're going to make it happen there it's done and at that point I was like well yeah I hope a lot of people I hope it gets a lot of views but that's it but now working with some colleagues to start understanding and start learning some of the nuances about what you can get from analytics and metrics one of the key ones I think with YouTube is just that audience retention of where you can see you can literally see where you get drop-off and a great example is if you you know one thing I think some creators are guilty of is trying to do too much in a story try to tell too much and if suddenly in a three-minute video like two and a half minutes in there's like a fourth person this fourth talking head comes up you can see in this audience retention if suddenly there's a drop-off at that exact moment like okay that you went too far with this so it's a really useful tool because it's not just this binary like is someone clicking to watch this or not but it's showing how your audience like where you're losing them and I think that's that to me you know if you can hold them if you're it ties more into kind of storytelling and story hooks if you can hold that story and hold that viewer that's gonna be a really valuable metric to be aware of so I think from the key elements that we use in our videos it's really people focused stories are based on people so even if it's an event and this thing happened okay who's organizing this event who's attending that what's their reaction to this what's their point of view like like people talk to people because people find other people interesting and what makes people interesting are their own points of view their own biases their senses of humor that any anything that makes someone an individual and so I think we really try to tap into that in our videos so that it's not just kind of it's not like anonymous but that there's a personality that that supports whatever the messaging arc whatever if it's supporting the mission of the university if it's supporting some sort of initiative by a certain school there's going to be some sort of person or people behind those messages and we want to make sure that comes through and the best way that comes through is by getting as many of those voices in there now again it's balancing that with not trying to cram all that into one video so this might be an example where it aligns perfectly with an episodic structure where you have a different voice in each video that collectively as you watch all of these you get these kind of multifaceted points of view much of our much of our video content has a call to action inherent in it in terms of what what the hope is that the viewer will do in terms of explicit kind of like go to such and such that's really in a case-by-case basis like definitely they'll be in the like we we rarely just think about the video as existing in a bubble so if it's on a web page if it's presented in an email even if it's in the description if it's on YouTube that's where really there'll be the explicit call to action but there have been times where there will be like you know find out more at and you know you've got this kind of on-screen call to action I would say when we've worked with our advancement group sometimes we've had to make modifications to make that a little more in kind of outright call to action within the video but really it's kind of on a case-to-case basis but they'll always be some sort of it's always going to fit into some sort of call to action and even if it's here we're trying to get prospective excited you know the call to action is you want these kids to apply but that can be part of more of a broader strategy beyond watching a video saying click here to apply you know and any any people we have in our videos if they're there they're there for a reason so if it's a Dean of a school if it's organized a certain program if it's a student leader and that even goes so you have those kind of planned they say ambassadors but then you'll also maybe get some more kind of you know just trying to get student perspective that's not as planned but everyone's gonna have some sort of perspective that they're offering so it's not just kind of random like we're gonna throw this person in this video like you also want to think about having a diversification in terms of who's in the video representing the diversity of the university and reflecting that upon our audience but and you also want to make sure you're mindful of the person's comfort level so someone might be on paper the best person to talk about something but they may not want to talk about on video they meant name that might not be their thing so you think about other ways to kind of work around that