Using Video to Tell Your Story

Updated: February 13, 2008

Posting video on your Web site allows your organization to tell its story and earn the public's trust by sharing a personal message from your residents, clients, CEO or staff members. Creating a video and posting it on your Web site has become fairly simple. This fact sheet highlights what you should include in your video and how to post it.

Factors to Consider:

Determine staff time. Find out if there is someone on staff, a staff person's family member, or a local college intern who knows how to shoot video. Determine how much time you think should be invested.

Figure out your technology needs. Depending on how professional you would like your video to be, your investment in technology could be relatively small.

Create your content. As with any communication materials, it's important to determine the purpose of the piece. Here are some helpful hints for creating your video:

• Know your audience. Figure out what your target audience is and cater towards them.

• Don't reinvent the wheel Look around to see what is already out there on the topic. You may find an existing video that will tell the story well.

• Share your story. Document what you do regularly. Then when you will have a library of content to pull from when you are creating your video.

• Keep it short. Get your message across in 30 seconds - 2 minutes.

Format. Most online video-sharing sites accept clips encoded with common formats such as .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG.

Web sites to host your video:

Uploading clips to video-sharing sites costs nothing and requires very little time and technical skill. Here are a few of the most popular video-sharing sites:


Log on to the Web site that works well for you, create an account and follow the company's instructions for posting video. Once you have your new video posted on the host Web site, you can link it to your Web site. Copy the HTML code provided by the Web host and have your Web designer paste it into the proper place on your Web site. You can either embed the video so that it plays from your Web site or link to the Web host and have your audience watch it there.

For more information about using the internet to earn the public's trust, click here.