Gathered in a marketing creative planning session our team generated a mash-up of ideas for ASAE Annual.  We talked about what we wanted to promote this year, our message, latest and greatest features of Personify, etc. We knew we wanted to incorporate new videos and stay relevant in the association community.

Associations need software to meet not only their needs, but the needs of their members.  Our current advertising messaging speaks to this need.  The focus is on making your association “the place to be” for content, community and collaboration.

Paul Gannon, Vice President of Marketing, brought up a session he attended at the 2011 ASAE Membership and Marketing conference.  The session, led by Maddie Grant and Jamie Notter, featured four short videos of typical member behavior on social networking sites.  This member profiling and first-person narrative struck a chord with Paul and he wanted impact like that in our new campaign, “is your association the place to be?”

So what do members want from their association?

This concept coupled with the idea of videos filmed from the members’ perspective became the vision for a series of short videos.

The Video:

There is lots of research that suggests shorter videos are better than longer videos.  *ReelSEO stated in their article on YouTube traffic patterns and video length recommendations:

Videos with long term viability and popularity have durations well below the 10 minute maximum.

• 52.3% of videos in the all time most popular category were between 3-5 minutes long.
• Median length of video clips measured was 2 minutes.

We took this information and decided to create multiple short videos under a minute long.  We also developed a trailer or introduction video to serve as a commercial for our messaging.  We hired professional videographers and an editor (which I am happy to refer to anyone).  Our staff lent their talent and we cast nine employees to portray the members in our scripts.

Writing the scripts and capturing the needs of a member in a concise way was very important.  Through a partnership with ASAE and our close-knit users’ group community we have heard various comments from associations about what they need to satisfy the wants of their members.  We compiled a short list of the most current and popular feedback and incorporated that into the videos.

One big take-away from this project is that even the shortest videos take time to produce.   We spent fourteen hours shooting what ended up being five cumulative minutes of edited footage. This doesn’t include time for editing, graphics, and promotion. A detailed production schedule and pushing strict deadlines was extremely helpful (and necessary for sanity).

In the end the most important part of the production was having a series of applicable videos that were relatable. Knowing what members want and how to make your association the place to be is what TMA Resources strives for and we wanted to share this vision through these videos.

* http://www.reelseo.com/