Here’s an example of how this model works:
Sender and Receiver
In focus groups with prospective students, Vassar kept hearing that students wanted to know what it was like to live at Vassar—what the dorms were like, what the social life was like, etc. In this situation, Vassar is the sender, and prospective students are the receivers.
The Message
The message the college wanted to get across to prospectives is that student life at Vassar is created by students. Vassar students come from everywhere and have a zillion interests, passions, and perspectives---and that multiplicity is student life at Vassar.
The Channel
We considered developing a student life publication to communicate this message, but about the same time, YouTube came into existence, offering numerous possibilities for communicating about student life and other aspects of the college.
YouTube offered us an enhanced site (no time limit on videos and up to 1GB per video), and we developed a Vassar YouTube presence, focused largely on student life--brief interviews with students, videos profiling student organizations, comedy troupes, dance performances, and the like.
Creating the YouTube site did involve writing, as you can see if you visit the site---the description of the institution, titles and descriptions of the videos, etc. It also involved storytelling--creating a mini-story in each video about the person or organization featured; art directing the shoots and the editing; and collaborating with Vassar’s graphic designers.
Noise
The main source of potential noise was inauthenticity. We wanted to avoid a highly scripted, institutional “voice” because prospective students are very media savvy and know when they are being sold. Plus—we didn’t want to sell them. We wanted Vassar to sell them.
The Outcome
Vassar was the first of its peers (selective liberal arts colleges) to have a fully developed YouTube channel. In the first year, these videos received over 100,000 “views”--and that’s not counting the Quidditch video, which “went viral” and received over 100,000 hits. Many of these videos also serve a dual purpose because they’re embedded in the Vassar admissions website.