How UMBC Created Content In-House During Lockdown
How UMBC Created Content In-House During Lockdown
Gabrielle Skidmore:
Tell me a little bit about your role and what your team does.
Corey Jennings:
I’m the marketing producer for our video content. I also handle other pieces of content that aren’t standard photography or video; such as 360 photos and virtual tours. I work very closely with our Web Team to build out short animations or gif style videos for content on our websites. We also utilize some web-based services to produce simple animations based off our news stories. I manage the onboarding of those processes, while trying to produce a higher quantity of content, all with lower staff resources.
Corey Jennings:
The large majority of my role prior to the pandemic crisis was filming original pieces or interviews, and then putting them out for communications methods. We’re still doing some of that. We’ve been working with our events teams much more now to produce on campus events, while making sure the quality is all there. There’s less capability for filming, but we’re trying to utilize some more of the marketing resources that we have to better serve our internal customers.
Corey Jennings:
We’ve also been producing more marketing materials. As of now, trying to figure out what we will be doing next and what’s happening in six months, eight months, 10 months is a bit challenging; where in the past, we were able to plan ahead a little bit more. Our traditional marketing timeline starts in January – where we would produce a larger piece to be rolled out in March and then have that live for the year. Unfortunately, that isn’t happening this year. We may produce some smaller pieces in-house, which could be exciting, but in the past we’ve worked with outside people to get it done much faster, with a higher production value. Regardless, we utilize very high end equipment to ensure that our brand is the highest quality possible. However, the biggest challenge within any department is just time.
Corey Jennings:
So that’s where we are right now. We’ve transitioned away from filming and editing to just lots of editing. We do a lot more work now with given footage, and coaching individuals on how to film themselves – and then we will edit that.
Corey Jennings:
We are trying to figure out what messaging will work for both incoming and current students and staff. As a university, our brand, doesn’t just extend to the prospective students. It also is highly motivated by alumni and faculty and staff, so those messages are very important to us. It’s a little bit challenging to figure out what’s the right balance of trying to continue to communicate with them, but also, what are those communication methods and channels that they make sense for? Is it a direct email? Is it something that goes on social? Is it something that is put out a different way?
Corey Jennings:
I’d say that’s the biggest thing, and it’s really interesting because we’ve taken our marketing spend from print and have been slowly moving towards video. Within the next 12 months, we are hoping to have made a rather large shift to video.
Corey Jennings:
Our other challenges include international vs. in-person classes. We’re very much a traditional college where the majority of our classes are in-person, on-campus. Luckily, we’re within the university system of Maryland, so we have a sister college that handles the majority of online learning. In the past, the politics of our university system were such that we were the traditional college and the sister college would handle the online learning, and there was a clear separation so that everybody would be happy – but now it’s becoming a bit more blurry.
Corey Jennings:
I’m not involved in those conversations to be clear, but it is an interesting shift that speaks to what we can we provide as a university that’s different from the other universities, and how we take our community based aspects. We pride ourselves in being inclusive, understanding and helpful, and those across all departments. We need to translate that into classes and live events without also causing computer screen fatigue.
Cory Jennings:
It’s great to e-meet people, but it’s not the same as going out to get lunch; so we’re also trying to acknowledge that by doing shorter events. An event that may have been an hour before is now half an hour. How do we add pieces in to promote that kind of coffee beforehand stuff, but also recognizing that that’s hard to do? How do we put a message out to say that it’s okay to take time off? Those pieces are really coming into the forefront right now for us.
Gabrielle Skidmore:
How do you foresee yourself going about creating this? Is there a plan set in place? You said you’re going to try a half hour versus hour events. Do you have some kind of a calendar put in place or are you still waiting to see what’s going to happen?
Corey Jennings:
We’re working off of our traditional calendar of events. Some events have been moved or changed. In-person, larger weekends, such as homecoming, unfortunately had to be cancelled, but the more university-wide events focused on students from a larger staff or the president, are still happening. For those, we will be using a more relative calendar, whether it’s the same day or something different than last year, but it’s same relative week, time of the year, those pieces. So that’s really what we’re doing.
Corey Jennings:
My role is especially focused on giving people the understanding that there’s a huge difference between a live event and a virtual event. You need to be more concise with virtual events or pre-produced videos that will try to replicate an event. It’s very important to share all of that knowledge we gain from this across the university. We have to understand that there are other people working on campus, maybe student life focused, or faculty departments, and trying to share resources and share documentation and those kinds of procedures that we’ve built up and try and make sure everybody’s on a level playing field so we don’t have to recreate the wheel every single time we create one of these events.
Gabrielle Skidmore:
I remember earlier you mentioned you’re doing a lot of editing. Do you find yourself reusing a lot of content, maybe recycling from homecoming in the seventies or something like that, just trying to keep video flowing?
Corey Jennings:
Yes and no. Our current visuals are trying to acknowledge the situation. So we’re not trying to say that this doesn’t exist because again, there’s not a timeline for this, and we probably won’t be the same as we were previously – even if we get a vaccine that cures Covid. By acknowledging that our procedures will be different, we were able to brainstorm solutions and utilize some lower quality WebEx views, cell phone cameras etc.
Corey Jennings:
A challenge for us in the marketing department to say, “Okay, well, we’ll live with this piece of content that maybe doesn’t meet our previous visual or audio standards, but we’re going to take a lot of time on the back end and try to make it as good as it can be,” right? So taking audio and video and editing it, manipulating it as we can; but also acknowledging that this is what everybody’s seeing. This is the situation everybody’s in. Not everybody’s going to have a professional camera and it’s especially not safe for us to go into everybody’s home.
Corey Jennings:
For the larger university-wide communication pieces, we are doing some light interacting with the president and other key faculty. These pieces, however only come out once a month or once every other week at max, and are very specifically filmed with just one or two people in the piece. This is a big change, as we used to use a lot of people in our shoots. We’ve also found ourselves reusing B-roll clips, that had many students in them – so the library of clips has really been helpful. Everybody reuses footage for certain pieces of marketing, but we’re trying to acknowledge that the current time that we’re in while also being able to market what a university is, which is a huge challenge, visually, to be honest.
Megan Linebarger:
You said that you already had a mission to increase the amount of video that you were all producing well before this happened, so you were already doing that, but now that we’re in this situation where we have to communicate and everybody, and especially as a university, has to communicate with the student body, with faculty more virtually and so I would assume with using more video, but also production is going down, do you think that you will actually in effect have to be producing more video than you even had originally planned to be producing given that?
Corey Jennings:
It’s interesting. The number of projects that are on my computer for a given month have certainly increased, but the production level and detail has decreased. There’s not an overwhelming amount. It’s more increasingly one off messages, for example edit a WebEx video quickly by doing this simple piece to it. Prior to Covid, we would film for 1-2 days, then would craft a story, and put our marketing angle on the clips. We have not and will not pause any marketing. We have pieces in market and we’re doing what we can, but it is unclear what the future holds for us. We know six months from now we can’t be using the same band-aid fix, so we just need to get through what we can now, and will cross that bridge soon.
Corey Jennings:
While those projects have increased, our pre-production planning pieces have decreased. This is mainly because these pieces would have been a live event. We would have went and filmed and produced a highlight reel, or worked with our event filming staff. Now the difference is we are crafting the story of the piece from the beginning now, rather than after the fact creating a story from something.
Corey Jennings:
It can be challenging because my job is both marketing and content development. Besides recruitment, we focus on alumni communications, internal communications and community pieces. Not all of our content is a “We need to get more students,” video.
Gabrielle Skidmore:
Those are definitely challenges. What would you say your biggest challenge was and what was kind of a solution that maybe led into a success story around it?
Corey Jennings:
I don’t know that I have a good answer to that. I’d say the biggest challenge is trying to understand everyone’s different directions. The way we communicate is rapidly changing. We need to benchmark ourselves against other universities and brands in a positive way. There’s been lots of backlash from certain content that brands have risked to put out – but then there’s also been lots of positive feedback. I think this is highly based on the political climate and timing of that moment. Sometimes the brands were not great, but they put out some awesome content during the right time that generated positive feedback. It’s challenging put so much time and effort into a piece and be worried about any pushback that may come out of it.
Corey Jennings:
Something that has changed for us was the way we represented our brand. It was rare that we showed people in our brand visuals, but now we want to show people keeping their six foot distance. It has been challenging to fit both our old world model of what our visuals were to show community, but also represent this COVID time and ensuring that people are staying separate and safe. And what is it safe? Safe is relative in every single case and situation.
Gabrielle Skidmore:
Did this change the way you store video or how you share it with your team? Did you have to move everything to the cloud or are you working on a VPN system? Were there any challenges associated with that?
Corey Jennings:
Not really. I’m the sole person within our department, so I don’t have a large team that works with me. I was able to take home all of my equipment so I have everything from my office in my personal home right now. I’d say that’s a positive and a negative. I took home, our network and storage, and my computer monitors, everything, because at the time, we were unsure how long this was going to last. I had to upgrade my internet connection. I can look around at my colleagues and see that they will have to pay more money to work from home, because their video quality is terrible.
Corey Jennings:
I live in an area with Comcast, which is very challenging. I have very slow upload speeds but amazing download speeds. As a video producer, I need upload so I had to upgrade to the highest speed that I could get because of that challenge.
Corey Jennings:
We use Vimeo for our online reviews tools, and we’ve been pushing people over time to use it more efficiently. It’s already been very helpful as it makes it very easy to see what changes need to be done and ask questions based on them frame of those pieces.
Gabrielle Skidmore:
Were there any unexpected surprises?
Corey Jennings:
The amount of work, especially at the beginning! I was very pleased that I brought my office home, because I would not have been able to handle the amount of work that came my way in such a short period of time. We became involved with producing all of the commencement materials, including the announcement and build up to commencement. The week of commencement, I had three other videos that needed to be worked on, all while I was working on commencement, which is not normal. Normally we’re not even involved in the run of show for that, so that was a huge shift.
Corey Jennings:
When Covid first started, our photographer had no work because there was nothing happening on campus to photograph. It made us realize that video is such a storytelling medium, and that it would be in our best interests to use video to tell our story in a new way.
Corey Jennings:
The biggest challenge is nothing’s the same
Gabrielle Skidmore:
What were your video highlights and successes?
Corey Jennings:
There’s a lot of people who more open to video now. I’m seeing more staff willing to work with video whether it be filming it or being in front of the camera. We’re finding it easier to get projects done in a faster timeline now because there’s not as many barriers to entry. We have been responding to the moment where prior to this, we were relatively slow at getting approvals or writing scripts or getting things put together.
Corey Jennings:
There’s been a lot more freedom in the editing side because there’s not as much expectation. The lowered expectations allow for a bit more creativity for how you tell the story.
Gabrielle Skidmore:
Do you have any tips or tricks for anyone else that would be in your position or anything you’d like to share?
Corey Jennings:
Get used to the fact that cell phones are fantastic. There’s not much you can’t do on a cell phone these days – and that includes video. A lot of cell phone footage can look really great and people will still want to watch it.
Corey Jennings:
The quality coming out of an iPhone or a really great Android phone these days is amazing. And the biggest thing is just tell no one to use their computer, computers are terrible for video. We all look horrible right now. (referring to zoom video!)