[Above: Shooting the concept video in Wisconsin. Photo: Erika Gilsdorf]
ANNOUNCEMENT:
The nonprofit Destination Stewardship Center is launching a new video tool for helping you show and distribute your stewardship success stories across multimedia platforms for travelers, practitioners, and the general public.
We Can Help Fund and Shoot Your Stewardship Successes
The DSC’s new pilot program is intended to help destinations tell their stories by means of the most rapidly growing and influential medium of all: video. Proposed series title:
“The World’s Inspiring Places”
Short-form videos now power social media. They help tourists make travel decisions. They help practitioners learn from each other. They help governments learn how and where to find needed methods and expertise.
“Video is a mega trend, in a decade, video will look like as big a shift in the way we share and communicate as mobile has been.” —Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook
According to Insivia, using video in various forms has almost become a staple in digital marketing tactics:
- By 2017, online video will account for 74% of all online traffic.
- 55% of people watch videos online every day.
- Including video in a landing page can increase conversion by 80%.
- 82% of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter.
- 51% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI.
Our goal is not standard promotional videos, but rather a video series that showcases stewardship success stories—ways in which people have helped protect and enhance a distinctive natural and cultural assets of a place, and thus enrich both the travel experience and local quality of life. Any kind of destination may have a qualifying story, whether urban, wild, or rural, as recently described by DSC Director Jonathan Tourtellot on National Geographic Voices.
To see how this will work, take a look at our brief Video Pilot Invitation deck (pdf).
Our concept video illustrates the basic idea by using the case of a rescued trout stream, Wisconsin’s Kinnickinnic River, known among locals and anglers as “the Kinni.” You can watch it as a short clip, 15 seconds to a minute, suitable for social media . . .
. . . or longer, up to 4 minutes, suitable for Youtube and for websites:
Under the leadership of DSC video producer Erika Gilsdorf,
➤ WE NOW INVITE APPLICATIONS
. . . for your stewardship success story to be featured this summer in the pilots for the online series. We will assist with arranging the necessary tax-deductible funding and distribution options. There are lots of ways to do this. For a conversation and more details, contact us: info@destinationcenter.org.
This information also appears on our dedicated page, Tell Your Video Story.