Ministry conferences have always been an amazing time of having a group of people with like-minded goals and missions in life come together for a 2-6 day event centered around networking, celebrating, and individually growing. One of my favorite parts about the individual conferences I have attended (mostly youth ministry conferences) are the different conference videos that are used to promote the event before it starts, created to enhance a message during sessions, and the recap videos that are always a lot of fun.
Being apart of the Youth for Christ marketing team, I have the opportunity to be able to speak into the Youth for Christ triennial MidWinter conference where YFC staff from across the United States come together to learn, grow, and rest. It is an amazing time and this responsibility is something I take strongly. But what to do about the videos…
Pre-Produced
Five years ago, conference videos fell under one category, pre-produced. This kind of medium is amazing and hilarious when the right creative minds are behind it. The upside is that you have high value video that is put together long before the conference happens and so the work load is spread out. The production value is amazing with introductions, lower-thirds, graphics, great acting, and everything else. It is the perfect way to share information with conference attendants about local groups, breakout sessions, enhancing speaking points, and any other info you might want to share. Even better, because it is in video format, you can instantly share it on YouTube, Facebook, your website, and other online mediums that your conference attendees will be on.
The shortcomings of this format of videography is that it is only a one-way communication that does not necessarily promote engagement with the conference and also takes a significant amount of time and effort for production. The communication piece is you telling them information. The quality of the video is probably going to be amazing which takes a ton of time to make, but the payoff is only a message to people that might be accomplished in another way. At the same time, while you may have 11.5 months to put this project together, it is probably one of a laundry list of things to do that will quickly consume your entire 40 hours a week.
Crowdsourcing
With the invention of Vine and Instagram Video in 2012 and 2013, as well as the proliferation of YouTube as a social media and search engine giant, video uploading has become something that every person can do; and while the quality of video production has dropped rapidly and significantly, everyone can now communicate through this medium. This does not take away from the amazingly produced videos, in fact it might actually lift those videos to a new level of fame. Before, it was communicating with everyone at the conference with tweets and Facebook groups. Now you have the ability to use hashtags across numerous platforms and respond with a video.
One idea we have come up with as a possibility is to share with the conference attendees that we’d be making a daily conference video crowdsourced with their responses. We would give them a challenge or topic, maybe finding great YFC MidWinter moments, amazing places in Chicago, or YFC staff “celebrity spottings” and upload them to with the hashtag #midwinter2013video by a certain time to get their video added to the list. Another idea is to have them shoot a 6 or 15 second clip about what they are looking forward to MidWinter and put together a “Here We Come” video to show at the beginning of the conference and then have them send out via social media and blogs to their friends.
The video production of these conference videos would be low as the control of footage is out of your hands, but the level of engagement would be off the chart. People love to see themselves in videos. The downside is that all of the video production would need to be done that day in a short timespan making for a very long day of editing. That being said, the social part of this project is a huge pay off that has never been available before.
If you had the ability to speak into the social media and video productions of a conference, what would you add?
[Images via a.saliga via Compfight cc & marfis75 via Compfight cc]
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