I’ve had the pleasure of working with the Sumner School District outside of Seattle, Washington in recent months to help them prepare for and launch their new Sumner-Bonney Lake Pathways Coalition. We had the big launch event this past Monday night; the participation was excellent and there was tremendous energy behind the effort.

As we’ve been preparing for the launch, I created video in a narrated PowerPoint format to explain the initiative to folks who were invited to the launch event.  This way, they could get a basic understanding of the pathways concept.  Aaron Tomyn, a staff member with the school district, developed a live action video with lots of footage of children and teens that was shown on the night of the event.  We both used Camtasia, an editing and screen capture software, to produce the videos, and uploaded them to our respective YouTube accounts.

Here they are:

Explanatory Pathways Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6H-w-jRr48&t=205s

Pathways Coalition Launch Video: https://youtu.be/sLoNToSrqVo

These are both low budget, bootstrap-style productions, but still they tell the story in a much different language than typical print-based communications.  Frankly, I’m not a digital native and using video to communicate is still a new language to me.  But if we want to communicate and reach all of our stakeholders, learning to speak “video” is a must.

Think about how your pathways work could be enhanced through video-based communications.  And if you have some good examples of your own, please share the links with us.

Thanks!

Hans Meeder is President of NC3T, the National Center for College and Career Transitions (www.nc3t.com).  NC3T provides planning, coaching, technical assistance and tools to help community-based leadership teams plan and implement their college-career pathway systems and strengthen employer connections with education.