Perspectives

A college video services department audit

Video production


Nationally, community college budgets are tight.  They are being called upon to do more with less. Most community colleges have never been particularly well-resourced by comparison to universities. One place where colleges may be able to get more bang for their buck is in how they are producing or procuring video. Video is an expensive medium and video services departments are often hard-pressed keeping up with the multiple demands they face.  

Fayetteville Technical Community College in North Carolina contracted Coherent Marketing to review operations. The brief was to produce a report that looked at several key areas, including:

 

  • Could the department produce regular, live video broadcasts?
  • How cost-effective are operations?
  • How do production choices contribute to the college's positioning and role in the community it serves?

 The college broadcasts on a 24-hour community channel, has a modern website, a green-screen studio, and staff with solid skills.  In addition to having a responsibility to its local community, it also serves a far-flung military community of students with a global deployment footprint.  

We were able to present a range of options to the college. The report included:

  • Changes to better meet college strategic needs
  • Equipment and personnel needs
  • Restructuring plans
  • Integration of content and operations for broadcasting and streaming channels
  • Parallel operations during transition
  • Risk
  • Options for more effective use of the channels it has
  • Use of video streaming to serve its global military students
  • Methods to aggregate  and stack content in different ways for re-use
  • Cost/minute calculations

The findings and recommendations were well received.

Colleges should regularly and comprehensively review the budgetary implications of staff, equipment, and space against its strategic communications plan in terms of cost/minute/viewer. More about the work Coherent Marketing has done in this are can be read in the blog posts at Projects.


Our capabilities

The principal at Coherent Marketing has started both national and local digital newsrooms; consulted to national morning TV in Germany; and led statewide community college initiatives, including federally-funded programs.  Workforce Development projects with which he has been involved have seen billions of dollars in economic development and thousands of new jobs.  Contact us to discuss how we can help your college or video services department operate more effectively.

Details
Category: Projects
Published:
Hits: 5713
Subscribe
Show comment form

From Our Blog

  • Skype's demise creates new method of spoofing and malware - malicious Microsoft Teams invites

    The demise of Skype and people switching to Microsoft Teams is producing a new wave of socially-engineered malicious activity using spoofed email meeting requests, some with attachments.

    Now that Skype has Skype has been retired by Microsoft, people who once used the voice and video platform for meetings have been told to switch to Microsoft Teams.  So instead of seeing a message notification in Skype, it is now much more common to see in your inbox a calendar notification email with time blocked out tentatively on your calendar.  Because meetings often require associated subject matter for the meeting, attachments and links are also quite typical. 

    It is both this increased frequency post-Skype, and the normality of having attachments for meetings that make them an ideal vector for malicious activity - something that is being exploited as the switchover from Skype happens. 

    Read more …

  • Ten years of working with the African Leadership Institute

    In this industry, clients often hire for a project, and when the project is done, that’s the end of the relationship. Projects can last a few weeks or months, and then it’s turned over. It’s seldom that clients develop the trust and a working relationship that lasts a decade, but it’s a milestone that’s been accomplished at Coherent Marketing.

    In 2013, the African Leadership Institute wanted to transition from a web 1.0 site to something that would better reflect the work they did in developing the next generation of world-class African leaders through their flagship programme, the Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellowship.

    Read more …

  • Falling foul of copyright ambulance chasers

    When selecting a vendor to provide website development or digital communications, make sure that they provide services that prevent your organisation from legal action due to possible copyright infringement. More importantly, your vendor should help your organisation put in place processes to ensure you manage images and music, understand digital rights and licenses, and save the licenses for images you use.  This is true for digital content used on your website or in social media posts.  Choosing a vendor just because they had a really, really low price to produce your website - but expose you to copyright claims - becomes a quick method to discover that you get what you pay for.

    Artificial Intelligence (AI) now makes it easier for copyright trolls to threaten organisations for use of an image they have used online. Here's how to avoid that.

    Read more …