Is that a monkey on your back?

How to pick screencast topics that ease your workload,
simplify your life, and let you focus on more important things.

Not long ago, I had a client project with Monterey Peninsula College out in California. MPC had just received a grant to promote their cooperative work experience education program (or COOP), and their idea of building a promotional video series landed the ball squarely in my court.

My contact was Kathleen Clark. Kathleen had a problem. As the sole faculty member in the entire program, she was forced to wear an unbelievable number of hats. She had the long-term strategic task of growing the program, but at the same time, was saddled with the tactical day-to-day hustle of  recruiting both students and potential employers.

This split focus was naturally frustrating. When you’re responsible for both short- and long-term goals, it’s easy to get the nagging sense that you aren’t really doing either side justice. Perhaps you can relate.

MPC’s initial idea for me was to produce a few co-promotional pieces featuring some of their employers in specific industries (graphic arts, automotive tech, etc.) and their role in the program. A solid enough idea, albeit with a few potential flaws:

• By focusing on the most popular industries (and thereby the neglecting the less popular ones), they were potentially limiting the long-term growth of their program. By its very nature, this approach excludes those in newer industries who might never have thought of offering a COOP experience.
• Even within a particular industry, you worry about whether your audience will generalize the message. For example, if an employer views the successes of someone else’s program, there’s almost a natural inclination to say, “Well, yes, that worked for them, but our situation is different because blah blah blah…”
• For co-promotions to be a success, the partnering employer or industry needs to be as enthusiastic and dedicated to the task as you are.

After several false starts, Kathleen finally said to me, “You know what? Let’s scrap the current plan. I want to do something that makes my life easier.”  Good plan. We went back to the drawing board to pick a better set of screencast topics.

A bit part of Kathleen’s job was sitting down with students and employers to explain the benefits of the program. She eventually clued into the fact that there just weren’t enough hours in the day, and compiled a narrated PowerPoint presentation to walk students through the finer points of the program. I viewed it once, both to become familiar with the content and as a point of curiosity, just to see what I was replacing.

Longest twenty minutes of my life.

Okay, perhaps that’s an exaggeration. But it was a wordy, overly long meander which, while giving all the pertinent technical details, failed to front-load the material with tangible, real-world benefits. Y’know, the kind of thing that gets people psyched to find out more. Plus, the visual curb appeal was virtually non-existent. The presentation was an endless sea of bullet points.

In the end, we cut out the clutter, put the program’s Unique Selling Proposition front and center, and sexed it up with animations and great stock imagery. Take a look here:

Here’s what Kathleen had to say about the experience:

“In a nutshell” the videos Daniel produced are allowing me to get specific messages to target audiences.  The feedback I have received from students and employers has been fantastic.  My favorite comment was from a student with whom I spent a great deal of time before sending the link to my “Introduction to COOP” video.  He said, “You really didn’t need to spend all that time with me.  The video answered all the questions I had about your class.” 

In short, we figured out a few sweet-spot topics that helped to free up an appreciable bit of Kathleen’s day. And this is only one of four thoroughly kick-booty promotional pieces we did for MPC. Kathleen no longer needs to lose so much breath explaining every intricacy of the program to students and employers. She’s got an automated 24/7 recruitment team working for her. Now she can focus on the strategic aspects of growing her program, without having to deal quite so much with the daily grind.

What tasks can you put an autopilot with a screencast series today?

Have you had any major successes, where screencast planning and execution paid serious dividends in saved time and frustration? Leave a comment and tell us about it!

To your continued success,

Daniel