The City of Louisville, Colorado reached out to Murdock Media Production while working to highlight their city, available jobs and the benefits of working for Louisville. The city was incredible to work with, collaborating on storyboarding, sourcing talent for interviews, and paving the way. The result was “Small Town | Big Talent,” a short that goes a long way to introduce you to the amenities of the city.
While working with the City of Boulder, Colorado as part of the Human Resources Department, we developed a series of employee profile videos. Part of the story of the City of Boulder is the unique group of individuals that come together every day to make the city what it is. One of our videos highlights the background of Janet Hollingsworth, who works in the ever popular MakerSpace.
Employee Profile – Janet Hollingsworth from City of Boulder on Vimeo.
How can video help your city or government agency?
Fundamentally, video allows you to reach a larger audience with your key message in the way people like to learn. Video allows you to get hands on with a task so audiences can see what you do on a day to day basis. Is your community court doing site visits with clients as part of parole, diversion or restorative justice programming? Tell it with video. Demonstrate what your department is doing to contribute to the community.
Video is narrative
Because the history of film and video comes out of traditions like narrative storytelling and journalism, audiences expect that your video will take them on a journey.
At Murdock Media Production we start with your idea – do you want to promote participation in a new program? Are you opening up public space or a new sports facility? From there we conduct interviews to draw out the themes from your top level story that connect to the bigger picture of your city, it’s goals and objectives, and its shared vision.
An example from the city of Boulder:
- The city wants to draw top talent to city jobs.
- Media often highlights the emergence of startup culture in the city of Boulder, especially organic and health food products.
- The city originated as a supply camp for miners.
- Miners were the entrepreneurs of their day, taking a risk to venture into the mountains seeking gold, silver and coal.
- Narrative theme: The City of Boulder began as a supply station for mining ventures that dotted the mountains and plains around the city. Today, the city provides a foundation for a vibrant startup culture, continuing to support a vibrant environment within which to take risk, flourish and grow.
From such a foundation a number of narrative stories and videos can be produced: historical figures that impacted the growth, change and innovation in the region; new startups emerging in boulder; opportunities to network with the business environment; city support for entrepreneurship; partnerships between the city, nonprofits and growing businesses; sustainability and innovation in business, and employees that work with, regulate and evaluate business practices and ethics.
Video distribution through social media and online:
Often cities don’t think about distributing their videos through social media and online. It can be a massive eye opener when a city or civic organization realizes that video based social media posts can significantly outperform views on a city or public television station.
When we track message reach after posting a well-produced video story we see three to five times more reach from that single post than other posts.
What is reach?
Reach is how far your video travelled. How many eyes saw your message. Each time someone logs in to a social platform, an algorithm determines what posts among the thousands and thousands of posts by your friends and friends-friends to “serve” to you, or to put into your feed. Your custom video, right now, is a privileged medium, being served before static posts and before the litany of memes your constituents may be posting or sharing.
With video your reach can be in the thousands with a simple post and just a couple of shares. When a video is added natively to a social media platform like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, the simple fact the video auto plays as a viewer scrolls down their feed causes more people to stop. You’ll get more reads of the text portion of your message, and video acts as a natural “thumb stopper” to capture viewer’s attention.
Beyond reach (the number of people your video was presented to) many social media platforms track views, or how many people watched your video, and how much of the video they watched. Often you can see views as tracked by seconds watched or percent watched.
Because of our story approach, we have been able to produce relatively long social videos (above the 2 minute mark) that meet or beat short (under 1 minute) videos posted by the same agency.
Can we tie video in to our regular constituent outreach?
Video is a great tool to engage your constituents. Find an area you are seeking input. Whether it is traffic control, water treatment, community policing, ordinance revision, open records, city budgets or new regulation, visually representing the areas in question along with interviews by leadership petitioning the public for comment, videos add a level of engagement and commitment that text only, blog posts or mailers can’t match. Adding video to your website and social media with a compelling call to action and a button to move viewers through to action can increase response rates, helping you gather the information you need.
Let Murdock Media Production help your city, county or government agency speak authentically through video.
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