Delivering Impact: Doing it for the Pathways to Wellness Conference
How can you use promotional video for an event to show the impact it delivers?
That’s a challenge I took on as a side pursuit of my coordination of the Pathways to Wellness Conference, held online October 7. The event capped about 7 months of a slowly accelerating cadence meetings and operational planning.
My role as coordinator also made me a co-chair of the conference planning. The conference is put together and put on by the Wellness and Recovery Committee, representatives of government and nonprofits in the Northern Virginia area. It was my second year involved with the conference and the motivated and experienced committee team.
As a result, I had a solid idea of what a conference attendee might want to know about. Here’s where thinking with empathy drives content decisions.
Video 1: Who, What, Where, When
I made this promotional video to highlight the breadth of the offerings at the conference. It’s about the who, the what, the when, the where. You can’t attend without knowing those facts.
The titles of the segments are intriguing; the faces draw you in. And there’s the declaration that it is “a celebration of mental health recovery in uncertain times.”
Any benefit to the intendee is inferred…by the reader/watcher who pays attention and connects the dots.
What I wanted to figure out was how to deliver the why.
Video 2: The Why plus All the Other W’s
You can see this one delivers more just based on the thumbnail.
Immediate impact: you’ll think; you’ll relate; you will see you are not alone. We’re already getting into the things that will make a difference in the life–or at least the day–of a conference attendee.
A few seconds later in the video, we cover what conference attendees said they learned.
“Taught me definite leads to follow.”
“Support work!”
“Everyone is different and recovery works!”
“Self-care is so important.”
Learning is long-term impact. If impact is a strong effect on someone (it is), then learning is one of the most powerful impacts a conference can have.
If you want people to feel an event is worthwhile, show immediate and long-term impact to people who’ve attended other events like it.
And there’s another reason why using quotes from attendees is valuable. It’s something called social proof, the phenomenon of people making decisions based on what they see other people doing. Throughout the video, there are roughly 20 quotes. That’s about 20 people talking about how great the conference was for them.
If the topics are appealing, if the time and place are convenient, then these brief, to-the-point testimonials would be just the thing to tip a mouse cursor to click Register.
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