Case Study: Senior Gleaners, Inc.

Non-profit organizations rely heavily on volunteers, and one of their challenges is consistency of the message shared by those volunteers. A motion-media presentation helps to tell the organization's story consistently to outside groups, like service clubs, and to internal groups, like new volunteer workers. A story that is carefully captured once can be viewed repeatedly as membership churns, while communication remains intentional and consistent. Increasingly, videos can be viewed online spreading passion about your organization to the web visitors you have already achieved through other means. This award-winning production was completed for one of the largest food banks in the United States.

Visualizing the Story Consistently

While the organization did not have a formal graphical style sheet, we noticed that a prominent feature of their logo and other communications was three women gleaning in a field, illustrated appropriately with earth tones. We built the image on the right into the project, including the original painting in one interview set's background. In designing the production, we kept the graphics simple and matched them to the existing collateral. This image and color scheme helps to capture the very earthy nature of the Senior Gleaners story.

The Production Process

The organization has both warehouse and office environments and is run entirely by volunteers. Two of the client's priorities were that we not disrupt operations and that we allow people to choose not be filmed. Having the hundreds of volunteers sign releases would have interfered with operations. Instead, we prepared notices that were distributed weeks in advance and posted a large sign at the security gate which explained how people could avoid being filmed, if that was their wish.

Distribution Plan

In this case our client wanted to use their video broadly in their communication efforts. They wanted to use it to recruit volunteers, to raise funds, and to strengthen their public relations package. One of their challenges was choosing a distribution channel. Because of their budget and the demographic of their volunteers, they chose CD-ROM and VHS. Their media can later be repurposed for online distribution or incorporated into a DVD.