Anatomy of a Good Advocacy Video

By | May 10th, 2012

At WITNESS, we rotate facilitators at our weekly staff meetings. If assigned as facilitator, the person is responsible for doing some research and sharing a current advocacy video of interest. My turn up, I screened the doGooder Nonprofit Video Award winner, “Protect Our Defenders.” The video addresses rape in the military.

Everyone seemed moved. It was obvious by their reaction why this video was a winner. So, I asked the room, “What moments in the video do you remember or stood out?” Answers: the statistics, the video included a male subject, the rape kit, the Congresswoman’s closing statement.

The Storytelling Arch of an Advocacy Video

Armed with this information, I revisited the 1:45-minute video. The WITNESS training materials collectively state that stories should have a beginning, middle and end (also see Aristotle’s Poetics).

Photo credit: http://ifp.12writing.com/2011/02/writing-conflict-freytags-pyramid-and.html

Using this information, I broke down the elements further, relating them to [...]

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Category: Good Examples, Video for Change | 6 comments | Donate

Kony 2012: Juggling Advocacy, Audience and Agency When Using #Video4Change

By | March 17th, 2012

“Kony 2012“ is now the most rapidly disseminated human rights video ever. In six days it reached an aggregate 100 million views – faster than other pop culture phenomena like Susan Boyle (9 days), Rebecca Black (45 days) and ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ (445 days).

Because of this enormous reach Kony 2012 (the video and associated campaign) has been a lightning rod for celebration and critique, both around dimensions that are specific to the video and campaign themselves, as well as viewing them as proxies for whole genres of contemporary activism. These debates range across: specific advocacy choices, finances, accuracy, slacktivism and clicktivism, organizing, communications strategy, the failings of traditional NGOS, and the ethics of representation and voice.

In this blog I will look at Kony 2012 through the prism of two core video advocacy principles that guide our work here at WITNESS (do also look at an earlier post by my colleagues Rose and Matisse with initial reactions [...]

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Category: In the News, Video for Change | 9 comments | Donate

Linking Women’s Personal Stories of Abuse to Policy Education in Nepal

By | November 30th, 2011

In commemoration of the global 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence Campaign, we are highlighting activists and organizations who are using the power of video in their campaigns to address gender-based violence through a series of guest posts. Read previous posts in this series.

By Amy Hill  Amy is the Co-Founder and current Director of Silence Speaks. She is a digital video instructor/producer and public health consultant whose twelve-year history of involvement with women’s health and violence prevention program and policy initiatives led her in 2000 to found the initiative.  She is currently finalizing the Voices for Justice digital stories. 

From the moment I met Bandana Rana in 2008, I sensed that we would work together. She runs SAATHI Nepal, which has for nearly twenty years been challenging violence and injustice against women at all levels of Nepalese society. We talked about the importance of bringing stories told by survivors into human rights dialogues, about [...]

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Category: Good Examples, Video for Change | 3 comments | Donate

Training Series: The Primary Audiences for the Toolkit (and How We Identified Them)

By | August 3rd, 2010

Hi.  Chris Michael here, the Video Advocacy Training Manager at WITNESS.  This is the second post in a series of training-related posts with an overview of what we’re up to with our new training initiatives.  All of the posts in this series will feature some behind the scenes work we’re doing – and we’re inviting you to collaborate with us by providing your feedback, suggestions and ideas to help us enhance our work.  (You can start by filling out this survey!)

In preparing for the Video Advocacy Planning Toolkit that we’re building (see my last post for an overview), we did a ‘persona’ exercise to help us narrow the primary audiences that we envision as key users.  We needed to go beyond ‘human rights activists that want to use video’ and get very specific – exploring questions such as their motivations, where they are located, what their budget is and what [...]

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Category: How-To & Toolkits | 12 comments | Donate

What We're Reading + Watching, July 1-7, 2010

By | July 8th, 2010

We are prodigious readers and watchers here at WITNESS. And whether we gain access to material via email newsletters and bulletins, Twitter, RSS feeds, or blogs and websites – our staff and interns are also sharing links to these items, often via Twitter. In what I hope to publish as a weekly feature, we’ll highlight a few of these myriad resources and hope you find them interesting, useful, and shareable.

From Twitter:

@witnessorg: The Internet has been nominated for the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize: http://www.google.com/internetforpeace. (Read more about how you can get involved.) @WITNESSchris Love @See3 & their new blog & this post -> “5 Ways to Evaluate Video ROI” http://ow.ly/26jf1 #nonprofit #nptech #npvideo #video4change (This is a great blog post especially for non-profit organizations wondering how to get the most out of their investment into video production) @ViKras UN women born!!! After 4 years of advocacy, new UN gender [...]

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