REpurposing video content
Repurposing videos, photos, and graphics is one of the keys to working “smarter, not harder” in communications. This is particularly important for nonprofits with small communications teams (that’s you if you laughed when you read the word “team”) and tight budgets. Repurposing is a way to get more mileage out of content you spent time and funding on.
In my previous role as a consultant – and now in my staff role as Communications Manager – with the Child Health and Development Institute (CHDI), I’ve created a wide variety of videos to help raise awareness of their work to improve children’s behavioral health policy, systems, and practices.
When brainstorming marketing ideas for CHDI’s Trauma ScreenTIME online courses for schools and pediatricians, the lightbulbs started flashing overhead as soon as I heard that the ScreenTIME team already had loads of raw video footage taken as part of developing the course. Recorded by a professional videographer for use in the virtual course, and featuring experts in each field explaining the benefits of trauma screening with kids, this amazing footage was just sitting there waiting for someone to come along and repurpose it into promo videos for the courses.
Videos were also a great choice of marketing tactic for these courses, which have very specific, niche audiences and can be a bit tricky to describe concisely. Sharing the words of colleagues in the education and pediatric fields also acts as “social proof,” which basically means that hearing about something from a trusted colleague is often much more impactful than hearing about it from the organization that’s promoting it. The ScreenTIME project team also shared with us that staff in schools and pediatric offices often have many reservations about screening children for trauma, so we wanted to make sure the videos spoke directly to those concerns.
I sorted through the raw footage to identify the most compelling bits, then edited them into 2-3 minute promo videos using a combination of Adobe Premiere, Microsoft ClipChamp, and Canva. Check them out:
To take the repurposing idea one step further, we not only shared the videos to our social media accounts – we also shared them in our monthly e-newsletters and on CHDI’s website page dedicated to the Trauma ScreenTIME courses. And we continue to share them periodically across these channels!
The video for the Schools course was one of of the highest-engagement posts on our social media accounts in 2023, and has received thousands of views across platforms since being published. (The video for the Pediatrics course was just finished as of writing this post, in early 2024).
