Shooting Impactful Videos on Your College Campus
Video is one of the best tools for university marketing, fundraising, recruiting, and showcasing student life on campus, but how can communications and admissions teams leverage this powerful tool for maximum impact?
Production Tips for Multipurpose Marketing Videos
Marketing videos are designed to engage with prospective students, donors, and other university stakeholders. While these target audiences all have different needs, there are some key strategies you can employ to extend your video’s longevity.
- Be Authentic: Capture real stories of current students, faculty, and alumni to add credibility and authenticity to your story. This is a great way to showcase standout members of your community and highlight how their individual experience connects to your college’s values.
- Enhance with B-Roll and Music: Pair beautiful visuals of your campus with a great soundtrack to set the mood.
- Keep It Short: The most impactful videos are concise and efficient. College films don’t need to be feature-length to get the message across. If you have a more complex story to tell, you might even create a series of short videos that all work together.
Capture Hearts with Fundraising Videos
Rallying alumni and other members of your community to donate is never an easy task. Video can do the heavy lifting of answering the “Why?” for potential donors.
Donors appreciate seeing the impact that their funds can make. With video, you can highlight stories from students who have benefited from scholarships. Or walk your audience through the new projects that past donations have supported. These testimonials will increase the credibility of your message. And when donors trust that their money is going to make a real difference, they’ll be more motivated to act.
Video is also an incredibly powerful way to thank donors after their gifts have been put into action. A personal message from the recipients establishes a much stronger connection than a generic thank you mailer.
Tribe created a fundraising thank you video for Reed College. This film demonstrated to alumni how their alma mater is continuing to transform to meet the changing educational needs of the College’s future, with the help of their donations.
Reconnect Alumni with Video
After a few years, alumni may feel distant from their alma mater. But nobody understands the real student experience like graduates, whether recent or from decades ago.
You can remind inactive alumni of their positive experiences while also getting them to buy into a vision for the future. You may have new programs to show off, or you may want to celebrate exemplary members of your community. Whether they have been a past donor or haven’t yet given to your university, video is a great invitation—whether that’s giving their time, money, mentorship, or professional skills to benefit your school.
Recruiting Videos Attract the Best
Prospective students are eager to learn about all your university has to offer. Give prospective students a glimpse into what their lives will look like while attending your school with a student life video.
Most importantly, applicants want to know what it feels like to be a student on your campus. The unique experience of being part of your school’s community is difficult to capture in words. And virtual tours often fail to make a genuine, emotional connection with the viewer. Video is the best medium for translating what makes your college so unique and special.