Video marketing does not have to be hard. With Gather Voices’ Video Relationship Management (VRM) software, organizations are delivering more revenue quickly, affordably and simply. And now, with our new Video Marketing Solutions, it’s easier than ever before to co-create content with your community to drive return on investment.
Watch a replay of our 30-minute live demo of Gather Voices’ newest software solutions. Michael Hoffman, Co-Founder and CEO of Gather Voices, introduced:
Michael Hoffman:
Hey everyone. We're going to get started shortly. A lot of folks are just starting to join.
Hi everyone. It's Michael Hoffman here and we're going to just start in one minute, let a few more folks join. More folks are coming in. Hello Aaron, Diane, Hannah, Jay, John, Julie, Kathleen, Tom, Victoria, Matt, Kevin. Thanks for attending.
All right, I'm going to get started. I only have 30 minutes. You are at the webinar, ‘Gather Voices Just Got Simpler, Video Solutions You Need to Drive More Revenue Quickly, Affordably and Simply’. Thank you for joining today. I'm Michael Hoffman for those of you who don't know me. I've been working with organizational leaders of associations and nonprofits and other businesses for 20 years around engagement strategies. And I am the CEO here at Gather Voices. We are a Video Relationship Management software company, and you'll learn more about that in a minute if you don't know about it. I also founded an agency called See3 Communications which just works for nonprofits and social good organizations. And when I have time, which has not been recently, I teach marketing at the University of Chicago. So, let's jump in and start with, why are we even talking about video and why prerecorded video? So Gather voices is all about, not this synchronous thing we're doing here on Zoom, but pre recorded video.
And why are we talking about it? It's because it is effective. So, the vast majority of marketers say that video is important to them and that it delivers positive ROI. 88% more time is spent on web pages that have video on it. That's huge in terms of stickiness. Video delivers 1200% more shares than images or text. 1200%, that's amazing. And video will improve your email. So it will improve open rates and on average, 200-300%, it'll improve click-through rates. People want video, is really the lesson of this. And an exciting thing that I'll tell you more about in a minute was we have some clients that are tracking to these metrics. So these are from studies, big studies, but we're seeing these kinds of numbers in real life as well when video is incorporated.
So, video is so important, but organizations struggle to get enough video to use it in these ways that we're talking about, and that's because, the truth is video is hard. Traditional video production is time-consuming, it's expensive, it's geographically based, it's complicated. So if you've ever looked at professional editing software, a professional video camera, it's all of those things, and that's not what we need to be able to scale video. And so at Gather Voices, we're all about making videos simple. So we make videos simple at Gather Voices. So what is Gather Voices? We are a subscription software that automates the creation, the management and publishing of videos made on these powerful devices. So we still call this thing a phone, but it is really a super computer with a professional video camera, right? And we have these unbelievable cameras. Everybody has them. And Gather Voices makes it possible for those cameras to work for your organization.
So the thing is though, we're not doing video for video's sake. We're not doing video because it's fun. We're not doing video for our health. We're doing video because it delivers. With Gather Voices, the video is being used to improve engagement, to increase revenue and to be able to create that video at scale, that lets you do all those things that we've talked about in terms of your emails and all those things. And we're doing it in specific use case areas, specific solution sets that we're building around the things that our clients need to do. So for example, events, I'll talk more about that. Membership, continuing education, advocacy, fundraising. So what we're doing is saying, "Okay, it's not just generic video, it's video that will help you bring people to your event, or help you raise more money. What does that look like?" And that's what we're building into Gather Voices.
So, we work for a lot of trade and professional associations. This is some of those. And you've probably heard of some of them, as well as other kinds of companies. This is just a few. We have about 100 client partners using us for a wide range of things and I'll show you some case studies of a few of them in a minute. But what I'm really excited about today is that we are not only making Gather Voices even more simple, we're also building that intelligence into the product to make it easier to achieve those goals. So there's two types of folks here on this webinar with me today. There are Gather Voices clients, who are I think excited to see a preview of what Gather Voices is going to look like, and then there's Gather Voices future clients, who are going to learn about why Gather Voices is something that they might want to have for their organizations sooner or later.
And Gather Voices works in really three steps, gather, build, and share. So let me just describe those really quickly for those of you who are not familiar. Gather is all about how do you get videos, and you get videos through what we call request. A request for video is a way to ask you to make a video and tell you exactly what we want on video. And that's what a request is. Those requests can be sent by email or embedded into existing workflows. I'll show you an example. Build is all about how do we take those raw videos and do things with it? How do we edit them? How do we put branding on them? How do we put captions? How do we put calls to action? How do we create montage videos? How do we make those usable? And then share is obvious. How do we put those videos on social media, put them on our website, create galleries, and do all the things we need to do to drive the engagement that's going to help us meet our goals.
And so we are redesigning the Gather Voices interface. And so for all of you clients, we're not taking anything away, we are reorganizing things, making it easier to navigate. We're also making analytics much more central to what we're doing. And so I'm going to, and of course I preloaded this, but I didn't go to the preloaded version. So this is just a quick review. When you log in to Gather Voices, you will see a performance dashboard that will bring the analytics up front. So where are you getting videos? How are you getting videos? How are they performing? And being able to easily see all of that. The other thing we've done for those of you who are current clients, you know that groups are something that you see when you log in, groups are going to be moved over in a kind of, let's call it slack style on the left side.
So your different units of videos that you're working on if you have groups in your plan, you will be able to navigate to them from here, from the left side. I also want to just say, if you have any questions, feel free to put those in the chat and I will pause to take a look at the chat. So go ahead and do that. So back to this. So let's go through the gather, build and share for a minute. So gather, again is all about those requests. How do we collect those videos? The solution set is really taking pre-configured requests based on what we know works from all of the client experience we have, giving you activation playbooks that tell you, well, how do I get people to make videos? Well, we're going to tell you, because we'll tell you exactly how to write that email, where to put that request to get the videos back, because we've seen what works.
And then what do I do with the videos when they come back? That's the content strategy piece. And so with Gather Voices, you can create these video requests and see the performance data. So I want to walk through what that looks like. So for those of you who are less familiar, I'm going to just walk through this. This is the Video Gathering Association, which is completely made up by us to make it easy for you to see our requests and action. And it's actually a live site. So you can go to videogatheringassociation.org and do what I'm doing here.
In one of our solution sets for events, a video request might be, I want to collect videos from people who are registering for the event to talk to us about why they're excited, because I want to collect those videos in order to use that to market the event to the next set of registrants, right? So if I have a workflow like this, I can then ask somebody right in the stream of work that they're already doing, to make a video. And so this is a regular website, but as you can see, this is a Gather Voice video request embedded right into the website experience. And I'm actually going to reshare because I think I didn't share sound. Okay. And so I'm going to walk through this really quickly so you can see an idea of how these video press work and then I'll come back and continue to walk through.
“Hi. This is Ciona and I'm so excited that you'll be coming to our conference. We would love for you to make a video telling us what you're most excited about at this year's conference.”
So I'm going to stop right there. So video requests can have videos in them, which orient the user to why you want them to create a video. And this is a video request that's all about, tell us why you're excited to come to the event. The end user clicks start. You can add these additional talking points. And again, what we're doing is we're taking these requests that worked for these different circumstances, and we are templatizing them so you can use them out of the box. The user hits record, the software looks for the camera. This will work on a web browser, a mobile phone, you name it. And the first thing we do is give people a little tutorial about all the things people get wrong with video, really about light and sound, right? Be in a quiet place and make sure the light's in front of you.
Once they click start, here they are. And so if I'm ready to record, I can do that from here. And I'm sure you've all been on a Zoom meeting where you just see the top of somebody's head like this, and what we've done is we've built intelligence into the software that will, for example, say, "We can't see you. Maybe you mean to be in this shot." And so we call it gentle coaching. So we're helping those users account for the worst things that might happen. So if it was loud in here, I'd get something that came up and said, "Hey, it seems really loud in here, maybe you want to move to a quiet place." When I'm ready to record, I click start, I get a countdown timer. And here I am, I'm recording, and I see my timer ticking down over here, and I see my sound levels over there.
And if I forget what I'm going to say in the middle, I could pause, I could even review the talking points, I continue to record. And when I'm done, immediately, I have access to the video I just created. I play it back, and if I don't like it, I can do it again. So the end user, the person you want to make the video, has control over this until they're happy with it. And once they're happy, they say, "Okay." They have to agree to the terms and tell you who they are. But we do have single sign-on opportunities, other things like that. But they have to agree the terms, which include the royalty free license to that video content, so you own it.
They hit upload and you can see how fast that works. So that's the request experience. And so what I want to show you here is that in Gather Voices, you will have access to a request library on those best practices, those requests like you just saw, that are out of the box. So you can start from that request with those talking points, even that video, those things, and then you can adjust it to fit your organization as needed. But you're not starting from scratch. Those requests are pre-configured for that specific use case, and those are what we know wins.
We have a question, is our opt-ins GDPR compliant? Yes, so you have total control over that. Our clients can create the term center of their dreams and are able to add their own terms. You can also add additional fields to tell users any specific things that you need to for not only GDPR compliance, but other kinds of compliance. We've worked with a lot of healthcare organizations, for example. So that's the gather. So you gather the videos using video requests like that, the videos flow in, and then it's all about build. So what do I do with those videos when they come in? Well, I want to brand those videos, caption, put a frame on them, make them look great, create compilations. Also, in Gather Voices, you can create something called the hive. And a hive is a interactive video gallery that you create a few clicks. So let me just show you what that's going to look like. So for our current clients it's going to look a little different than it...
Let me make this full-size. So when the videos come in, they will come into the back end like this. You will get pinged when a new video comes in like we do now. And then when you want to work on that video, you then have all the opportunity to do that from a single page. And so you can launch a video editor. And when I say video editor, I mean a simple video editor for non video experts, that's what we have at Gather Voices. So you can trim the video, ad branding, add a call to action with a few clicks without having to know how to use Premiere Pro or something complicated. You can add captions with a couple clicks. You can download the video. You can do all that. From here, you also see a lot of information about the video.
So who made it, where they made it, when they made it, all of that as available. And then we have a set of collaboration tools here. So I want to leave comments, I want a thumbs up, I want to tell my team, "Hey, what do you think of this video? Should we use that or this? Or this one combined with the other one's going to be great, right?" So you can use this for collaboration there as well. And Alison says, "Great." Thank you, Alison. And so, yeah, we're really excited about it as well. And then also, I'll just say, as you can see here, additional services, we know sometimes you need to do something that you can't do in the software that we can help you with, and you should call us for that. If that's advanced video production, so if there's video editing things that you want to do that are more complex that you can't do on the platform, we can help you with that.
If there are things strategically that you need help on, call us, we can help you with that. And we're also working a lot on captioning and multi-lingual captions. So we really believe in that, both for accessibility and also the fact that many, many people are watching many, many videos without the sound. Okay. And then share. So what happens once those videos are made? Well, in the new Gather Voices, we are going to surface the videos that are ready to share. So instead of seeing the raw videos, your edited compilation videos all together. When you go to the share tab, we're going to surface the ones that are ready to share, which are the ones that you've edited, captioned, made montages, all of that. And then as you can see here on the right, with one click you can push videos to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Vimeo, and other things, as well as build video galleries right from the software and I will show you of what that looks like in a minute.
And we make it easy with a couple of clicks, to be able to take a animated GIF, for example of the video, with a play button and put it in your email so that that email will get clicked on and that'll go to a beautiful individual video page that we have, as well as showing you analytics around those videos. So, that's the Gather Voices solution. As you can see, I'm kind of excited. But let's see it in action. So what are we talking about? Again, I want to just reiterate, when we talk about our solution set, we're saying this isn't just software, this is pre-configured requests for events, for continuing education, for advocacy, for member engagement, all of that. Pre-configured ready to go. Activation playbooks, how do I ask people to make videos?
Where do I put it? What do I say? What should the email say? All of that pre made, ready to go for you. And then content utilization strategies. So what do I do with that? So being able to give you that information to help you walk through this step by step, to achieve the kind of goals that our clients are achieving. So let's talk about that. So on our events solutions, what's built into that is event promotion, event engagement, as well as sponsor value. Those are the things that our clients have said they were important, and those are the things we're doing. There's very specific different requests in there, like getting all your session speakers to make videos, getting those testimonials or those pre event videos like you saw I did. One of our clients here, ASTS, The American Society of Transplant Surgeons, they had a 320% higher click-through rate when they put videos that they collected from Gather Voices into the emails around the event.
320% and they did AB testing. So we know it was the videos that did it. This is really powerful stuff. And it's something where today, mostly people think video it's just too hard. It's complicated. There's a certain paradigm in people's minds about what video means. And with Gather Voices, you can break out of that. And the regular people who run these events, who do programs, who do social media, can use video like they use everything else in the organization.
Another example is member engagement. So with our membership solution, you can help acquire new members, you can help retain existing members and co-create really engaging content, which ties people to your organization in a much stronger way. I want to just show you this example quickly. So this is something that we're doing with ASAE. And this actually uses the hive, which is that Gather Voices product, this page, this site, created in a couple clicks right from Gather Voices. And so able to have one of those video requests like you saw me do, and then collect videos, in this case, African-American Association Executives telling their stories, telling about who inspired them. If you haven't seen this, somebody will put the link in the chat. You should definitely have a look.
These are some really phenomenal stories here. And these videos will play.
“Hi. I'm-”
And then they will also autoplay to the next video. So you can see how this works. And this is something that you can again, co-create content with your members through our membership solution. Continuing education, that's another really important thing where we build solutions. So maximizing attendance, how do we get butts in seats? Video can help with that, it turns out. How do you capture people's attention? And again, co-creating content to create engagement, like Groundwork Ohio which just getting started with Gather Voices, using video, getting 11% more applications than they did previously.
Okay. And advocacy. So, advocacy is another really important solution set for us. It's something that's important for our nonprofit clients, for our association clients for many organizations that do different kinds of advocacy. So being able to collect powerful stories from real people about those issues, that is powerful to make change, but it's also kind of member engagement and fundraising, right? These things all kind of link together, which is exciting. So if you engage people for advocacy, they're more likely tied and connected to your organization as an engaged member. They're also more likely to get if you're a charity, because again, they feel invested in those issues.
And so Safe and Justice organization that talks about crime survivors and has them tell their stories, really powerful being able then to have a tool, to go out to people at some scale and say, "Tell us your story. You've been living with this pain and this experience yourself. And now you have an opportunity to tell that." So that's the Gather Voices solution set. We're adding more and more to that in terms of those prebuilt requests and playbooks. And so with Gather voices, you can collect more videos, you can create more engagement and you can grow your revenue and achieve your mission. So we are super excited about it.
For those of you who are clients, you will be getting much more communication about the switch over to the new view in the next couple of weeks coming up. And if you are not yet a Gather Voices client and you have any questions, you can let me know or you can send me an email. While I have you, we are creating a tremendous amount of free content that take the things that we're learning from these real client experiences, and not only building it into the product, but also just giving it away because everybody should be doing these things.
So in this case, this is about virtual and hybrid events and the tactics that drive value and attendance and attention and engagement, and putting that into this guidebook. So I think somebody will put that also into the chat because you probably can't click on my screen. And you should check it out. It is great. So we have a couple of minutes left, if there are any questions. And we will be sending out a recording of this for the folks, for you and for the folks who didn't make it. If anything comes up, if you have additional questions, feel free to email me directly. I'm just michael@gathervoices.co. Let's see, we have a question. Is there a way to integrate the Gather Voices pages, which look amazing by the way, thank you, into an existing website?
Yes, that is such a good question because when we built the hive, the interactive video gallery, the first thing people said was, "We love this," but it's on this sub domain and we really want to have gallery like this on our new website. And the answer is, you can. So when you build the hive in Gather Voices, you get a link to this. You can actually write your own URL here. So you can write the back half of this URL yourself, but then you can also grab embed code where you can embed this gallery on to any site, you can embed the gallery with the featured video or without the featured video. You can even embed it with the featured video and with the request itself. So you can actually have the request asking people for videos and collecting them and then showing them on the same page if you want it to.
And what's cool about this is that when you approve a new video, it auto updates the gallery. So if you put that gallery, if you've embedded it onto your website and you keep collecting videos, that gallery will continue to evolve without you having to call your IT people or do any kind of coding or any changes like that. So thanks for that question, Jay. Another question, probably from a current client, when will the new interface be live for everyone? We are working on a specific date. We want to do some additional testing before we do that. If you are a current client and you are super eager to move to the new look, please talk to your customer success person, reach out to Ilana or Qin and talk to them. But soon, we're talking about a couple of weeks, few weeks and not months or years. And we have one minute, one more question, you have for services. To offer services to update existing websites more seamlessly [inaudible 00:31:26] style and content. We can help.
Yeah. So we either have, or we have partners as well that have. So we really think holistically about how do you achieve the goals and then what are those things you need? And if those are things that we don't do, we will point you in the right direction to do them. Let's see, any more questions? Nope. Not at the moment. And I know we only have one minutes, so I want to thank you very much again. And if you have questions that come up, feel free really to send me an email, just michael@gathervoices.co, and I hope you all will have a fabulous rest of your day.
