NDSA:Meeting Minutes 4-30-12

Deb Rossum, Kim Schroeder, Butch Lazorchak and Carol Minton Morris

Agenda

• What do we need to move telling video stories forward?

--Kickstarter funding? --Does this effort fit into an overall NDSA Communications plan? --Other?

Discussion

• We (NDSA curators) may be having an effect on Kickstarter funding success, need a way to measure this

• Given the percentage of projects that are funded from our curated selections it looks like they are doing very well against other projects

• Can we track stats in some way? Do they monitor the failed projects?

• Looks like the more active we are in making selections, the more we show up at a higher rank on the curators page; we should continue to be aggressive about finding projects to highlight (each of 4 curators adds new projects once a week).

• In a way Kickstarter provides us with good P & A stories; if there is a story we =call attention to on NDSA page it may also be compelling material that we could follow-up on for a more in-depth report.

• KS stories are their own source material and Kickarter pages are the tip of the iceberg; we could try to get finding to extract more of the story from them. • What is step one?

Action item: Find out how they track their projects and ask if we can use their tools to gather some data.

• Student PSA projects underway, Kim Schroeder --report --next steps, can we help? --making outreach docs accessible for students to use

• Would like to complete an 8 minute teaser video with students for the summer meeting; PSA-like teaser; humor is good; can't cover the complexity in 30 or 60 seconds; look at some of our best stories and how it was handled; there is a tech challenge from each of the case studies that were submitted

• Would like to have a short pilot video reviewed at the national conference--would be helpful for us to have a session that would help students to find out what works and does not work

• Would there be an opportunity to showcase at the meeting? Maybe a poster but deadline is past.

• First need communications plan for what "it" is that we want to do; KS or videos projects need to start with what the "it' is' could be a video, web site or channel

• Core messages that would support a video might come from a communication plan

• suspend until we have a plan?

• mining the popular press for stories seems worth a look in the meantime; Here's a national story to use to get our core messages across; Amy R is posting and we could logically follow-up

• People do not freely share their problems; too embarrassing and too sad; professional journalists have already wrung some of the unpleasant details out

• Kim's student video writers and editors will meet next week and we will provide feedback

Action item: We will give give feedback on student editors/writers efforts and discuss in person at next meeting.

Action item: go through projects on KS to look for good stories: Deb will find 2, Carol will find 2 and Kim will look for 2 from popular press.