Videos with a Purpose

Videos are becoming more popular on websites and social media every day. What about ministry sites?  How can we use videos to inspire, educate, invite our followers to grow in their faith, participate in activities, or share the story of our parish, diocese, religious community or organization? These are videos with a purpose and they take planning and a combination of a variety of skills and technology to create them.

I have been creating videos for parish social media clients and my religious community for about four years. Over that time, I have come to understand better what preparation helps me get the best results.  Here is what I try to start with:

• Who is the audience that I am addressing (There could be a secondary audience, but I need to know the primary one first.)
• What do I want the viewer to do as a result of this video? This is called the Call to Action.
• What does the viewer want and need to know or experience to be motivated to take the action? This means getting the facts from the client regarding the purpose of the video.
• Are there photos that we can use?
• Keep the videos under 2 minutes. (Maximum length on Twitter is 2 minutes and 20 seconds.)

Also, in this time period I have acquired a variety of video editing and creating software and sometimes I use more than one to get the final product that I want.

Here are two videos that I recently created:

I used Explaindio for the safety forces video (55 seconds) and the VideoMakerFX (62 seconds) for the Alpha video.  The music is from Audioblocks. These videos can be posted on their websites and their Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounts. Can you tell who the intended audiences are and what we want them to do?   How could I improve these?

If you have ministry based videos that you have created please share them below.  Please tell us the software that you used.