Introduction

Videos can do things that printed media cannot do. Videos have sound and movement, which means they can show and demonstrate products, services, and ideas in action. The capacity for action, sound, and movement enables videos to communicate information, ideas, and emotion in ways not possible with the printed page.

Companies showing videos to internal message recipients (such as employees) and external message recipients (such as sales prospects) can turn these media presentations into events with immediate and memorable impact, where the presentation itself becomes the center of attention.

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Asking the Right Questions

Since I think of video as being an event, I try to understand how the video fits into the larger sequence of events in which the audience is involved. For example, the role of the video “event” could be as part of a training effort, a product launch, a corporate announcement, or a trade-show presentation.

Whatever the event, at some point, the audience will be invited to sit and watch the video presentation. My job is to help create a video that serves a specific purpose at that point in time. To accomplish this, I begin by asking myself the following questions:

• Audience. Who are the people who will be watching the video?
• Expectations. Do they have any expectations, and what do they know about the subject?
• Telling the story. How can I use video to tell a story in a compelling way that will achieve my communication objectives?

Here is how I thought through these questions in the context of a video script I wrote for the battery company Rayovac.

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The Audience

The audience for the Rayovac video consisted of thousands of employees who would undergo training on the SAP business software. The video would be shown as part of a fifteen-minute introductory session, which would precede more detailed technical training.

In beginning to use the SAP software, employees were being asked to change the ways in which they did their jobs. Day-to-day activities would change: all business processes were being incorporated in the SAP system; lots of paper documentation would go away; and employees would now be required to use the SAP software for everyday tasks.

Furthermore, employees—especially long-term employees who knew their jobs backward and forward and may have been settled into predictable routines—would have to learn the complex software to do their jobs. Things that had become routine would no longer be as routine, especially as employees underwent the learning process to master the new software.

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The Expectations

The SAP implementation was a long-term, massive, multi-million-dollar corporate effort that involved employees at all levels of the organization—top corporate leadership, steering-committee members, functional managers, and every employee. Rayovac’s president called the SAP implementation a “once in a company lifetime event.”

All Rayovac employees would have been exposed to SAP in some way before seeing the video I was writing. As I mentioned, implementation of the new system would bring about fundamental changes in the ways employees did their jobs. In some cases, this could mean resistance to using the new software.

Since the SAP system is a global business system, non-adoption by some employees could equal system failure or underutilization. In fact, one of the reasons business-system-software implementations fail, is poor adoption by employees and failure to follow new procedures.

On the other hand, many Rayovac employees took pride in their participation in the company-wide mobilization brought about by the SAP project, and they were enthusiastically dedicated to seeing the project succeed.

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Communicating the Essence

In the face of such a massive corporate undertaking, my challenge was communicating the essence of the SAP project to employees in a video that would be under ten minutes long. The SAP software itself is hugely complex, and it incorporates business processes from all parts of the corporate organization.

In trying to understand how to tell the story, I interviewed Rayovac employees and spoke with business-process experts. I also obtained materials that were part of Rayovac’s corporate-wide initiative to introduce and implement SAP.

• As the writer (and as is often the case) I was presented with materials that were unsuitable for the audience for which I was writing. The materials were too specialized, too technical, too complex, and too dry for my purposes. This meant I had to adapt and reshape my source materials to fit the job at hand, if I was to achieve my communication objectives.
• For example, from the business-process expert, I was given five flow charts—each about three feet long and containing dozens and dozens of boxes describing business functions and decision points—that showed how information would flow through the SAP system.
• Five different business processes were documented in the flow charts: item management, supply-chain management, procurement, financials, and order to cash. Each flow chart would have to be reduced to its essence, and the name of each business process recast in plain, simple language that employees in all parts of the organization could understand regardless of their particular expertise or responsibilities.

• I also gained insights into Rayovac’s point of view on the SAP project and its benefits from looking at materials created by the committee charged with gaining organizational buy-in for the project.
• Again, this material was decidedly not in the form I needed for my communication, but it did provide valuable insights into the SAP project. This material was organized into sections called What?; Why?; Where?; When?; Who?; How?; What Will I Need to Do?; and What Is in It for Me?.

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Telling the Story

With the background I now had on the SAP project—in terms of its business purposes, operational requirements, organizational challenges, implications for employees, and corporate benefits—I could now define the purpose, tone and appeal, and content of the video.

• Provide an overview of the SAP initiative and of its implications for the organization.
• Give a voice to Rayovac’s leadership. I thought it was important for top executives to give their point of view about the project. I did not script them but did provide talking points.
• Explain how business processes fit together within the organization under SAP.
• Show the benefits to the organization of using the SAP software and the detrimental effects of not using the software.
• Make clear to each employee the importance of his or her individual actions in making the SAP initiative a success.

• Tone. In the video, some of the things I wanted to convey included optimism; purpose; respect for the greater organizational good; and personal responsibility.
• Appeal. I wanted to use humor in the video to create a light touch that would help minimize any misapprehensions employees might have had about the project in general or about their roles in the project in particular.

• Clips of Rayovac executives.
• Explanation of the benefits of the project in terms of the company’s future.
• Illustration of the business processes that make up the SAP system.
• Scenarios showing SAP in action and the inter-relationship of everyone’s responsibilities.

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The Script

Here is the script I wrote for the Rayovac video. The narration is in the right-hand column, and accompanying visuals are in the left-hand column.