Christmas From Home 2020 - How to set up a Seenit video story

As we’re going into holiday season, Seenit and its customers are leveraging our platform to bring together and highlight this year’s remote celebrations through the power of User-Generated Video (UGV). There is no doubt Christmas is going to be different this year and with the current events and their coverage, it’s easy to lose sight of all the positive things around us. This is why Seenit decided to run a Christmas From Home 2020 video story with one simple question to answer: “What does Christmas mean to you?”

Purpose of Story 🤔

To promote a sense of togetherness while we’re apart. User-Generated Video can be used to bring people together globally. It gives everyone a voice, and allows people to share their own experiences and opinions in a way that is unique to them and at the same time collaborative and inclusive when bringing those voices together.

Setting up a Seenit Story ✍️

1. Story title

This should be a clear, easy-to-understand summary of the Story. Therefore we decided to go for: “Christmas from home”

2. Video brief

What’s more authentic than a video message to contributors explaining what they need to do? This is the time to really hammer home what the purpose of the Story is, and get the contributors excited to be a part of it.

3. Story introduction

Contributors are more likely to take part in a Story if the introduction is simple, with a clear instruction as to what they need to do, and how the footage is going to be used.

Getting contributions ✅

Here’s how we encouraged contributions to participate:

1. We’ve set up regular reminders for filming deadlines to the Seenit team through calendar invites, Emails, group messages, we mentioned it during team meetings and through personal messages. Those personal messages on Slack (our internal messenger) always worked the best.
2. We also opened up this story to those outside of Seenit, so we promoted the project on our social media channels, and our CEO Emily’s LinkedIn.
3. We asked each Seenit employee to get a friend to film, which unfortunately didn’t work as well as we’d hoped.

The Final Video 🎬

Check out the final piece below. 👇

Results

For this project we managed to collected 54 clips from 12 contributors

Why is UGV so impactful?

• It’s an inclusive and diverse format as it can be opened up to anyone, anywhere - all they need is a smartphone. With UGV, within a day you can tell a truly inclusive global story that would be very difficult with traditional production.
• Crowdsourcing allows you to reduce your carbon footprint . By tapping in to people’s own creativity on their phones, you can avoid flying crews around the world.
• Add a global pandemic to the mix, and there’s no surprise we’ve seen a massive surge in UGV. Traditional video production is seen as a lengthy process and expensive to make so planning has largely gone out the window during Covid-19. During this time, UGV has provided the ability for brands to be responsive to the changing topics of discussion and to gather stories at the right time in the right place and at a fraction of the cost.
• Finally, the whole set up of lights, multiple cameras, a crew, a producer, a script means a different result. Don’t get us wrong, there’s a place for this kind of professional content, but the stories are always going to be told differently than the raw feel of user-generated videos shot at home, on a phone with simple prompts.

It is proven that professionally shot video is 4x more engaging than traditional forms of media like emails and blogs. Additionally we found that UGV can be up to x3 more engaging than that. So what are you waiting for? Make your content stand out and start your UGV journey today!