Finalize Your Video Advocacy Plan

The WITNESS Video Action Plan (VAP) is a questionnaire designed to assist our partners in developing a comprehensive plan to integrate video into their human rights advocacy.  We provide two versions here, one formatted for use by our partners, which is a more in-depth plan, and another version for more general usage.

Download the Video Action Plan:
VAP for WITNESS Partners
VAP for Non-Partners

What Next? Choosing Your Equipment

Plan Your Video

[note: this and the outline are a bit of the same, need to find optimal path for users on this]

Step 1:  Write a ‘guiding paragraph’

Take time to write a description of the story and what viewers will see in your video.  This should not be a summary of the video’s message or an analysis, but a description of how you visualize the story unfolding.  This can also incorporate the style and feel of the video – for example, If you are looking for a fast MTV-like feel or a more slow-paced story, or a series of stark images interspersed with title-cards.  An example below is a description of a story on internally displaced people in Burma.

Think visually and verbally – every word should describe something you see in the video.  If you are producing a series of video, discuss with your facilitator how to consider how elements of your story will be conveyed through the series of videos.

{SAMPLE GUIDING PARAGRAPH}

Step 2:  Finalize Your Messages

List out the most important messages for your audience and put them in order of importance.  Remember, this should be a list of messages that you will be able to convey in your video with interviews, testimony and b-roll images and audio.  Think big, but be realistic.

Step 3:  Choose Your Messengers

Among the messages you identified that will best move your audience to the action you want, who can tell your story most compellingly for your audience?

Remember that compelling and memorable individual, personal stories are part of most powerful videos and stories, and that an “expert” interview may give credibility and help elaborate nuanced legal or policy obligations.  You may consider how you would tell “both sides of the story” or explain why this is infeasible or ill advised.   Consider that ‘who’ tells the story can also include the narrator – you can read more about narration here.

Step 4:  Choose Your Audiovisual Content

What are the video, images and audio that can best support your video to move your audience to action?  Write a create a wish-list of content and prioritize it, accounting for what you may already have or have access to easily, what content you’ll have to shoot yourself and what archival content you may want to find.

Step 5:  Create a Video Outline

Setting SMART Objectives

A helpful way to think about your campaign and the added value of video is to see whether your goals and objectives are SMART – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound.  It’s also essential to think about your audience in the same way – be as focused and specific as you can about who they are, and work out if, when and how you can reach them.

SMART objectives should be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Time-bound

Here are examples of some non-SMART objectives and how to make them ‘SMART-er

• NOT Specific Empower students to do environmental accountability research in Brazil
• Specific Provide technological support to Brazilian film students to help     document corporate violations of environmental laws in south and southeast Brazil and place this evidence before national stakeholders including …

• NOT Measurable: The video screening should evoke more uplifting responses from the public.
• Measurable: The video screening will secure a 15% increase in participation in local community dialogues in this location over the next six months

• NOT Achievable: The video will make officials act to push for ratification of the Kyoto Protocol.
• Achievable: During our advocacy briefing, we will provide a video report with accompanying recommendations for interim steps to support the upcoming legislative debate on ratification

• NOT Realistic: Attendance at  our video events will  quadruple last year’s attendance.
• Realistic We should aim for a 5% increase in attendance for this year’s video event while maintaining our routine efforts.

• NOT Time-bound We aim to have the anti-discrimination law past as soon as possible.
• Time-bound We aim to have the anti-discrimination law passed by August 1st, 2009.

What Next?  Plan Your Video