Making Great and Engaging Videos 🎬📹

by | Jan 13, 2025 | Acumen Blog, Association Management, Marketing & Communications, Meetings & Conferences

By: Edith Chavez, Program & Marketing Manager & Matt Close, Membership & Communications Manager

Lights, mobile device camera, action! Video has come a long way since Norma Desmond was ready for her “close up” in the movie Sunset Boulevard. Short-form videos are now powerful tools for storytelling, allowing you to capture and share moments dynamically. People want to connect with people, not brands, and there are opportunities around every corner, including your next conference.

 One of the best opportunities to help align your videos to your association’s objectives is on-site during your conference.

  1. Capture the Moment:
    Focus on seizing authentic, spontaneous interactions or emotions that resonate with your audience. This doesn’t necessarily mean walking around your next conference with a bodycam on or having a drone constantly hovering above your keynote speaker’s head but rather keeping your mobile device on the quick draw to better capture moments happening around you.
  2. Anticipate the Moment:
    Stay prepared for significant moments before they happen. This gets easier to do with repetition. The better you get to know your stakeholders and what their primary goal is, in addition to regularly attending annual conferences, the better you will be at anticipating those moments you wish to capture.
  3. Turn Around:
    Sometimes, changing your perspective or angle can add an unexpected, interesting element. After you’ve captured the moment, turn around and record those reacting to it – action/reaction.

In case you can’t remember this at your next conference, just ACT like you do…

    • Anticipate
    • Capture
    • Turn Around

Use a mix of actions and reactions to help you create a narrative for your next promotional video. Capturing both the action and the response helps add context and emotion.

If you don’t have the opportunity to capture videos on-site don’t worry, there are a lot of tools out there that can help. Some of these tools you might already have available like Zoom or Microsoft Teams.  

The first step is to know your audience. This will help you identify what platform/s to share your videos on and help create content to establish credibility. Once you have a clear understanding of your audience, you are ready to begin recording.

A few things to keep in mind before hitting that record button are:

  • Have a clear idea of what the group wants to achieve with the video before starting.
  • Make recording as easy as possible:
    • Create a document with instructions and helpful tips that you can share beforehand.
  • Try to be present during the video recording.
  • Talk to the presenter and make sure they are comfortable and provide some instructions.

Once you have your video clips ready, you are ready to edit and create your own engaging video clip. During editing you’ll need to figure out the length of your video. This will depend on the platform you decide to use.

  • LinkedIn – Between 30 seconds and 5 minutes
  • Twitter – 20-45 seconds
  • Facebook – 30-90 seconds
  • Instagram – 30-45 seconds
  • Vimeo/YouTube – 5-15 minutes (integrated videos on website)

Whether it’s recording content on-site or off-site there are always plenty of opportunities to capture the moment. Just remember to ACT!