Matanya’s Hope tells stories of Kenyan schoolchildren through photos & video

Multimedia storytelling can be an incredibly powerful tool for your organization to attract funders, motivate volunteers and demonstrate the power of your message.

Our friends at Matanya’s Hope asked us to create a visual story for their nonprofit by seamlessly blending photos and video footage that they have captured over the past several years with original interviews, music and graphics we developed.

Founded in 2005 by Illinois native Michelle Stark, Matanya’s Hope is a nonprofit dedicated to educating children in Kenya. Last summer I accompanied Michelle to Matanya Primary School and saw the destitution these children and their families face: severe poverty, hunger, lack of clothing. And I realized why Michelle is dedicating her life to this cause.

For nonprofits and other organizations looking to capture their stories through powerful imagery, here are some simple tips for creating professional-looking video:

• Use “b-roll” (stills & video)
• Incorporate stock music
• Use narration or background sounds

How to incorporate b-roll

By using B-roll – still photographs and short video clips referencing what the interviewees are talking about – you can make the video much more interesting than by solely using “talking heads” (straight interviews of people talking without any additional footage). As we are hearing Michelle talking about the children with “no shoes and torn and tattered clothing,” the still photographs visually reinforce what the interviewee is saying. B-roll also allows us to edit the interviews without a noticeable cut (“jump-cut”) in the action or picture on screen.

Use background music to add texture

Background music was also selected to set the mood of the video. Royalty-free music can be purchased online from a number of stock music websites for a modest charge. One of my favorites is Triple Scoop Music. There are also a slew of free sites offering rights-cleared music, generally using Creative Commons — see Socialbrite’s Free Music Directory.

For the Matanya’s Hope video, we licensed a song from a local Kenyan composer we discovered while we were there filming the video.

Narration and background sound round out the piece

Using natural, or ambient, sound captured while videotaping b-roll is another effective way to make the storytelling more compelling. Background sounds of children talking in a classroom help create a more natural, captivating video. Natural sounds can also be useful in making transitions or in reinforcing a point the speaker is making.

Next up: We’ll share our learnings on professional interviewing techniques.

And please make a donation to support Matanya’s Hope’s efforts to educate children in this region of Kenya. All net proceeds from the sale or leasing of photographs from the Matanya’s Hope gallery will go directly to the children of Kenya this charity supports.

Related on Socialbrite

• Online advocacy video best practices
• How to find amazing, powerful stories for your nonprofit video
• How nonprofits should be using visual storytelling
• 10 secrets to video storytelling success

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CrowdFlower & Samasource tap the cloud to fight poverty

A new free iPhone application, Give Work, released today lets iPhone users use their phones to provide work to refugees in Africa.

The project, a collaboration of Samasource and Crowdflower, lets you support refugees working in a datacenter in Dadaab, Kenya — the world’s largest refugee site — through “micro-donations” of time, time, not money. (We wrote about The Extraordinaries pioneering the micro-volunteering movement yesterday.)

Samasource’s Refugee Work Program trains refugees in technology-based skills and then puts those skills to use by connecting the trained refugees to stable, dignified work. CrowdFlower built the Give Work iPhone app, based on its crowdsourcing technology, to enable users to directly provide meaningful, paying work to refugees in the Samasource program.

“Working with CrowdFlower and iPhone users, the refugees we train in Kenya develop portable work skills and receive higher wages,” Leila Chirayath Janah, founder of Samasource, said in a news release announcing the project. “By training women, youth and refugees to complete paying remote tasks, we give them the ability to build livelihoods and become part of the digital economy.”

A range of tasks

The idea behind Give Work is to list a host of quick and easy tasks to be completed by the app users. Each task is real work for a real company. Tasks may include creating keywords for images or video clips to make them more searchable in a database, classifying text or finding points of interest online or in the real-world for numerous questions.

The app will let iPhone users directly help refugees in Africa get computer-based work experience and a paycheck through crowdsourced labor. Each task a refugee completes is given to an app user to verify — and the refugee gets paid for the work. The project’s managers laid out this scenario:

• A company in the Midwest needs online images checked for copyright issues so submits the job to CrowdFlower.
• A refugee in a Kenyan datacenter checks pictures for copyrights.
• An American iPhone user gives some of his or her time checking the same pictures to verify the refugee’s work.

All of this happens in a matter of minutes: The company gets quality work results, the iPhone user has fun and kills time while helping the world, and a refugee who was disenfranchised and unable to work is suddenly earning income, said the project organizers.

The post An app to support refugees working in Africa appeared first on Socialbrite.

Leila Chirayath, founder and CEO of Samasource, has been popping up at nonprofit events everywhere lately. Samasource is a nonprofit organization in Silicon Valley that connects small and mid-size businesses with individuals and firms in the developing world that can perform outsourcing work (such as data entry) in a socially responsible way.

They now have pilot programs in Kenya, Nepal and rural India, and their goal, as their website says, is “to catalyze sustainable economic development and poverty alleviation by creating a thriving, active market for socially responsible outsourcing to developing regions.”

The 4-minute interview was conducted on a very windy day at the 2008 Craigslist Nonprofit Bootcamp in San Mateo, Calif. (though I do need to get a fabric microphone cover). I caught up with Leila a few minutes before her jam-packed talk. As Leila says, there’s a lot of misinformation in the media about outsourcing, and Samasource can help you sort through the best options.

Watch or embed video on Vimeo
Watch video in H.264 QuickTime on Ourmedia
Download video from Archive.org

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• 2009 fbFund Winner Samasource Gives Work, Not Aid (insidefacebook.com)

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