CSR, Video and Social Media – Making it all Work Together
Many businesses talk about their commitment to CSR, the power of video and the importance of mastering the use of social media. Few, in our experience, have figured out how to combine all three effectively – until now.
We’ve worked with Barclays Citizenship and Brand Team for six years now on their Citizenship Awards, previously known as The Chairman’s Awards. Last year, more than 60,000 employees received direct support from Barclays for activities that benefited more than 8,000 charities and community organisations worldwide. Every year, the Barclays Citizenship Awards celebrate the outstanding achievements and dedication of these people, who inspire and motivate their colleagues around them to get involved.
From our point of view it’s a huge project – and it’s got even bigger this year. We create short films of each of the 30 finalists and then longer films for the winners and overall winner. This involves a massive logistical exercise, with camera crews shooting worldwide within a very short production timeframe. The films are then edited in-house, using our six Avid suites. You can read a little about the experience of one of the five camera crews filming this year’s finalists in this blog.
In previous years, although the awards have generated a great deal of internal interest they have not really been publicised widely outside the business. This year, the challenge was to develop a means to run a parallel, public award – The People’s Vote – opening up the awards to all of Barclays staff, families, friends – and all of those involved with or interested in the projects around the world.
Using James, our online video distribution and evaluation service, we developed a bespoke Facebook app that publishes all of the videos to the Barclays Volunteers Facebook site, allowing visitors to watch the films and then ‘vote’ for their favourites by using the Facebook ‘like’ button.
Crucially, once a viewer ‘likes’ a film, it will then appear on their own Facebook wall, allowing the films to spread virally across all of those who vote and all of their Facebook friends. Our James analytics then record the number of views for each film, the location of those views and even the device on which they are watched – data to which the Barclays team has access via their James dashboard.
The People’s Vote is now live – please visit and feel free to vote for your favourite project.
