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Guide: Designing an Advocacy Video

All the cool digital tools in the world aren’t much help without an effective strategy. Posts in the new “Strategy” topic will present ideas for how to fit digital tools into your overarching strategy for change.

In this first post, we will present a strategy for designing a YouTube-style video to promote your cause. A good advocacy video should contain the following elements:

1. Start With Background Info

Assume the person viewing the video knows nothing about your cause. You need to tell the viewer who, what, when, why, and where of the cause you are fighting for. The goal of presenting this information is for the person to understand the injustice that has occurred and why action is needed.

There are two options for presenting this information: slides and voice-over. If you are using slides, just type the information (white text on a back background looks nice). Then animate the slides. For voice-over, you need to write a script of the information and then record it and layer the audio over the video. The slides option is easier as you do not need to edit the audio track.

• EXAMPLE: Video Denouncing Homophobia

This video denounces the homophobic statements of Sally Kern, an elected representative from the state of Oklahoma in the USA. The first 33 seconds show the use of black-and-white slides to give background information about the issue. Specifically: Who? a State Legislator. What? a speech delivered at a gathering in her district. When? (doesn’t say) Why? she thought only 50 people were listening to her speech. Where? the state of Oklahoma.

2. Use Emotion to Create Interest in Your Cause

The whole purpose of a video is to inspire the viewer to participate in your cause. At the beginning of the video you assume that the viewer doesn’t know about your cause and has only a limited curiosity in it. By the end of the video, you want the viewer to care so much about the issue that they want to get involved.

There are many ways to create interest on the part of the viewer, and most of them involve emotion. You want to make the person sad or angry about the injustice that has occurred. You can also use humor to arouse interest.

It’s often a difficult decision whether to use humor and satire when talking about a serious or tragic subject. The positive side of using humor is that more people will probably watch your video and send it to their friends – it is more likely to “go viral.” The negative side of humor is that it might not inspire the moral outrage that often causes people to take part in a social change campaign.

• EXAMPLE – SADNESS: A Video by Fouad Alfarhan’s Children

Saudi blogger Fouad Alfarhan has been in prison without charge since December 11. In this video, featuring a message and images of Fouad’s children, the video creator wants the viewer to feel the sadness and tragedy of Fouad’s situation.

• EXAMPLE – HUMOR: The Hillary 1984 Video

This video, a mashup of a 1984 commercial for Macintosh computers to make fun of Hillary Clinton and compare her political rhetoric to brainwashing (as in the book 1984), is one of the most successful viral videos ever made. Because of its witty satire of Hillary Clinton’s style of speaking, the video became very popular online.

• EXAMPLE – HUMOR: The World Bank Office

Here is a less well known example of video satire from the organization Avaaz.org. The purpose of this video, created in 2007, was to pressure Paul Wolfowitz to leave the World Bank. The video makes fun on Wolfowitz by comparing the World Bank under his presidency to the sitcom about workplace disfunction, “The Office”.A final note on creating emotion – the importance of music. The images of the video are the most important, but the soundtrack is also key. Adding music is the easiest way to add sound to a video. When deciding what music to add to your video, think carefully about the emotion you want to inspire.

• EXAMPLE – MUSIC: The Tunisian Plane Video

This video, by Tunisian activist Astrubal, shows how the Tunisian presidential plane appears to have been used for non-official purposes. The tone of the video is high drama, with powerful music playing in the background. To see what I mean, watch the first 30 seconds without sound and then turn the volume up. The music has a powerful effect on the overall impact of the video.

3. Be a Winning Cause

People are rational creatures. They are more likely to get involved in a cause they believe will succeed than a cause they believe will fail. (This explains why presidential candidates get more donations after they win a primary – donors want to support a winner.)

One of the easiest ways to convince viewers that yours is a winning cause is to show that it has many supporters. The easiest way to do this is to show photos of your supporters in the video. (The homophobia video at the top of this post does this very well.)

• EXAMPLE: Fouad Mourtada Worldwide Rallies

Another way to show that your cause has lots of support is to include photos and video of people participating in events related to your cause, such as the protests against the imprisonment of Fouad Mourtada, a Moroccan who was sentenced to three years in prison for creating a fake Facebook profile of the King’s brother. (This video also does a very good job of giving background information by using slides.)

4. End the Video With a Call to Action!

This might seem like the most obvious part of an advocacy video, but it is often ignored. The purpose of an advocacy video is to inspire the viewer to care about you cause so he or she will take action. However, even the best advocacy videos often forget to add a call to action at the end of their video.What is a “call to action”? It is an action that the viewer can take which will help your campaign. You might ask a person to go to your web site to sign up to receive action alerts, or donate to your campaign, or sign an e-petition. The important thing is that you translate the emotion you created into a concrete action which will benefit your cause.

• EXAMPLE: Video Against Racism on TV

This video, which shows footage of a racist word being spoken on television. Ends with a call to action asking people to contact the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) to lodge a complaint. Ideally, the video would give more information about how to lodge a formal complaint, but the key is that it capitalizes on the feelings of outrage the video inspires by asking viewers to take a concrete action.To summarize, these are the four key elements of an effective advocacy video. Any video you create for your cause should include these elements:

1. information
2. emotion
3. success
4. call to action

So now you have a strategy. How do you actually create the video? Well, you can try to create it yourself. (We recommend the software Adobe Premier Elements, which is pretty easy to learn.) However, a better option is to find someone in your movement how already knows how to create videos and let him or her use these strategies as a guideline. Technical ability is critical to video creation, but without an effective strategy, even the best-made video is unlikely to achieve the goal of getting more people to join your cause.