A Short Intro Video for the NPO Network

In my last post, I talked about creating a video overview of the problems charities face, and how we have a proven solution that will make philanthropy work better. I created this 26 minute video to begin the process of looking for funding, since we've taken the effort as far as we can on our own, in our spare time.

When I told my brother, Professor Vern Walker, that I had created a 26 minute video to do this he immediately told me that was way too long - it needed to be no more than two minutes!

My position was, if someone didn't care enough to invest 26 minutes of their time to learn about the situation, they certainly wouldn't care enough to donate to the cause. I still feel that way, but I understand Vern's point: really busy people need a quick way to find out if my topic aligns with their interests. That's all I can hope to achieve in two minutes - to help them decide to invest 26 minutes in the longer video. To actually convey information about the problem and our solution requires much more time than two, five or even ten minutes. I wish Life weren't so complex, but if this was a simple problem, someone would have already solved it.

So, with much consternation, I embarked on creating a two minute video that would drum up interest in the NPO Network and my video overview of "How to Make Philanthropy Work Better". Full disclosure: it runs 2 1/2 minutes...

The Decision to Look for Funding for the NPO Network

After working on the NPO Planner and Grant Generator for about eight months, my vision for what it can become has grown from a standalone application to help my local food bank, Food for Others, to an online community that helps charities and foundations alike. I've picked the name 'NPO Network' as my working title for this effort.

I see the NPO Network as a place where charities can find planning and automation tools, as well as search tools that help them find like-minded foundations.

I see foundations coming to the community to get the information they need for selecting charities and giving grants. The community's automated grant application generator will give them the control they want without the expense of designing and maintaining their own grant application website. I think foundations will appreciate that all the money they give will go towards a charity's mission, and not to pay for foundation search firms and grant writers.

And I see an online community that connects a network of coaches with charities and foundations that need their help. My experience tells me that there are a lot of people just like me who are ready and able to put their experience to work helping others.

This vision is much bigger than the project we began work on many months ago, and we've taken things as far as we can take them in our spare time. To move forward, I will need to find some funding.

My goal is to provide our services to charities for free; I don't know if this is really possible, but it is my intent. To achieve this we need to find partners who share our vision and are willing to invest in our efforts.

My first step is to create a video that gives an overview of both the problem charities face, and our solution to it. This 26 minute video is my first attempt at doing this:

Video Overview of The Shape of Knowledge

I wanted to create a fast and easy entry point to the content of my eBook The Shape of Knowledge. I decided to make a video but I didn't want to do a traditional PowerPoint presentation - too boring - so I created a Prezi for the visual portion of my presentation.

If you're not familiar with Prezi, it is a visual presentation platform that lets you layout your content on a big whiteboard, in any way you want. Then you create a presentation path through the space, zooming in, zooming out, panning back and forth... there are tools that make it easy to create this path, including simple animations within individual frames. It is a real playground for the imagination, and the basic version of the service is free to use.

I like Prezi because I am very visual - that's why I am focused on shape and structure. What I liked about using Prezi as the vehicle to tell my story is that it let me layout my visuals the way I see them in my head, as a tree. But the presentation path is, by definition, a 'line' shape. This made my presentation both a story and an example of the story's main message: that there are best practices in knowledge shaping that make the transmission of knowledge more effective.

Best practice #1: Pick the best shape to store the expert knowledge. My Prezi shape is a composition tree.

Best practice #2: Prune the expert knowledge to fit the context of the current situation. I ended up breaking my story into two parts, the first focusing on the conceptual foundation and best practices, the second focusing on implementation. The unnecessary content was pruned away during the creation of each part.

Best practice #3: Present the solution with the simplest shape possible. The shape of my solution is a line, a linear path that represents my story-line.

I created narration using Adobe Audition and put the videos together using Techsmith's Camtasia. The videos are posted on YouTube.

Here is Part One:

Here is Part Two: