Hispanics In Philanthropy (HIP) End of Year Video for The Migration Program
Featuring grantees: Women’s Link Worldwide, CAFEMIN, Associacion Pop Noj
CHALLENGE
To create an End of the Year video for Hispanics In Philanthropy (HIP) while also making three grantee videos the grantees could use for their own fundraising and other purposes. This was also to be done using footage and interviews I would train them to capture to use as our content. Unfortunately the grantees did not use our direction for capturing footage and interviews.
SOLUTION
Working with great editors in both Argentina and the US, we were able to creatively use the footage and interviews they sent, and a few follow up questions, to create good two-three minute videos for each of the grantees in Spanish with English subtitles or in English with Spanish subtitles. These videos provided great footage for a 5 minute video for the Hispanics In Philanthropy Migration Program and for the participating grantees.
OVERVIEW
The Hispanics in Philanthropy Migration Program, based in Mexico City, asked for something that in retrospect was impossible. They wanted an end of the year video highlighting their work, while also creating three short videos for their grantees to use in fundraising, publicity, etc. All videos were to be made in Spanish and English. One key factor to our success was hiring a bilingual editor, based in Argentina, who would creatively edit with very hard to work with material. Variant Strategies had to give a lot of direction and manage expectations for HIP. Meanwhile, HIP had a hard time finding eligible participants. Eventually they found CAFEMIN in Mexico City, Associacion Pop Noj in Guatemala, and Women’s link Worldwide in Spain.
We made the shorter videos first, with a range of difficulty. We wrote up instructions, translated to Spanish, on how to record a good interview using a cell phone, and another set of instructions on what to look for and how to capture B-Roll. One of the organizations did everything perfectly, but they were more established and worked with the funder community. The other two organizations weren’t able to follow the instructions, in part, because they couldn’t visualize the end product. For those organizations we needed to ask some follow up questions and ask for additional b-roll, and through our creative powers managed to make three decent to very good videos.
Then we made the HIP Migration Program Video, for which we used bi-lingual U.S. based editors. HIP took direction and with the three grantee videos, it we had great material to use to create an end of year video for HIP’s migration program. Overall, the success of the project was due to Variant Strategies' ability to manage expectations, provide clear guidance, and creatively work with challenging material. Despite difficulties in finding eligible participants, the team was able to produce high-quality videos in both Spanish and English, achieving HIP's desired outcome.
This project was Produced and Directed by Variant Strategies in collaboration with Women’s Link Worldwide, CAFEMIN, Asociacion Pop Noj.