Wednesday, December 7, 2011

WITNESS's new video toolkit

WITNESS has released its new video toolkit, which consists of a series of videos, documents and personalized web pages designed to help Human Rights Defenders plan and film thoughtful, effective advocacy videos. With its commitment to new communications platforms and organizations that support Human Rights Defenders, The Overbrook Foundation is excited about the release of this internet tool and its potential impact on the human rights field and grassroots human rights advocacy work. After working on video advocacy projects with human rights-based organizations in 80 countries for over a decade, WITNESS is in an ideal position to share its best practices and lessons learned with organizations or citizen journalists who may be creating their first advocacy video. While WITNESS Staff may only have the time or resources to train a finite number of organizations, this series of 35 videos can be viewed by a much larger audience. As a result, WITNESS’s impact can grow and more activists will be able to take advantage of the organization’s expertise.

This toolkit includes step-by-step videos and online forms so that users can track their progress and consistently review the objectives of their videos to maintain their focus. It also helps individuals to identify their target audience and optimize the timing for their video’s release. Using interactive videos and a multitude of case studies, the toolkit addresses the need to craft smart objectives for the video, to identify a persuasive messenger and message in the videos, and to pinpoint the outcome or action they hope to inspire in viewers of the video. Additionally, these pages and videos helps users to tackle the difficult decisions of how to show their videos to the target audience and how to integrate this advocacy tool into broader campaigns for human rights. WITNESS continues to welcome feedback on these videos to improve the quality of the program and it plans to release the toolkit in several more languages in 2012. Learn more at http://videoplan.witness.org/.

(The information found in this blog post was either sent to us from WITNESS or found through the author’s personal exploration of the toolkit’s videos.)

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