Your best content is often already happening inside your organisation.
The people closest to your work are seeing interesting things, meeting interesting people and making a difference every day. But they don't always have the time, confidence or skills to capture that for your communications team.
The Story Champion Scheme helps you build a network of people who can recognise good content opportunities, capture useful material and create video themselves.
We'll work with a group of up to 12 people from across your organisation, developing their confidence and practical skills through hands-on workshops.
The training is adapted to your people and the work you actually do. It might include finding ideas, understanding what makes people want to watch, filming with phones and cameras, interviewing, presenting, planning and creating content for different platforms.
The aim isn't to turn everyone into a filmmaker. It's to give the right people the confidence and skills to contribute.
The best content doesn't always happen in the marketing department.
It might be a researcher making an important discovery, a farmer trying something different, a community project reaching a milestone or an expert explaining something people need to understand.
Story Champions learn to recognise those opportunities and think about what could be captured.
Sometimes that's a finished piece of content. Sometimes it's a great interview, a few useful clips or an idea that your communications team can develop further.
By developing people across your organisation, you can create more opportunities for ideas, footage and useful content to come from the people closest to your work.
That means more authentic material for your communications team to work with, without relying on the same small group of people to create everything.
We'll also provide practical resources that Story Champions can use when an opportunity comes along, such as filming guides, question prompts, planning templates and shot lists.
The scheme gives people the opportunity to practise, get feedback and keep improving.
As their confidence grows, they'll become more comfortable spotting opportunities, picking up a phone or camera and capturing something useful.
The goal is to make creating content feel less like a special event and more like something your people can do as part of their normal work.
The Story Champion Scheme can work particularly well for organisations with people working across different teams, projects or locations.
It could be a good fit for:
The common thread is simple: you have people doing interesting and important work, but you need more of that work to become useful content.
By the end of the scheme, you'll have:
Most importantly, you'll have people across your organisation who know what to look for, what to capture and how to create stories.
"The PFLA were introduced Down to Earth Media through the close network of farmers working regeneratively in the UK. When Covid-19 hit in Spring 2020, we were forced to move our programme online and were lucky to receive emergency funding from the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation to do this. Video training was high on our agenda and Alex was full of ideas and we clicked immediately. We decided to run sessions both for our staff and also our certified members, behind and in front of the camera respectively, to ensure we covered both bases and give ourselves the maximum opportunity of generating video content in the future. We're lucky that we're a community of inspired and engaged practitioners who are perfect for putting on camera and Alex was an excellent tutor, making the whole process feel easy. We can't wait to see what the results are and thanks to Down to Earth Media for making it happen."
Interested in running a workshop for your team? Get in touch and tell us a little about what you're looking to achieve. We can then talk through your needs and work out the best approach.
