In 2016, The university’s Department of Educational Psychology partnered with the Granite School District to create the Behavior Response Support Team (BRST). The BRST’s goal is to provide behavioral, social, and emotional support to teachers, parents, and students from Granite Schools.

But, in the wake of COVID, the BRST team needed to figure out how to continue providing families and teachers with behavioral, social, and emotional support while following health protocols.

Their answer? Animated videos.

Animated videos helped the University of Utah’s BRST team communicate their behavioral and well-being principles to teachers and parents so they could support children’s remote education.

COVID made it impossible for BRST to support all teachers and students as they used to

When the BRST was first established, they provided support for teachers and students in classrooms.

The team would sit at the back of classrooms, watch how classes unfolded, and write down areas where educators could improve. They then offered consultation sessions for teachers, a safe space where educators could learn procedures to enhance all class participants’ experience and tackle issues such as a low ratio of positive comments or an unengaged class.

The BRST supported students, too. Besides coaching students around the emotional problems they were presenting, they created manuals and guides that teachers could use to provide behavioral support to keep students happy, motivated, and in a healthy emotional state.

The arrival of the pandemic meant that the teachers and children still in classrooms needed to follow strict sanitation guidelines. And those in online classes needed more technical help—like learning software and fixing audio problems.

Social distancing made it impossible for BRST to send learning materials or visit schools without the risk of spreading diseases. Online manuals were a valid alternative, but their text-based format didn’t allow the joint project to show procedures in real-time.

BRST converted their resources into shareable, animated videos

To continue supporting teachers and families in behavior principles and social and emotional wellness, BRST and the University of Utah used Vyond’s animation tools to create animated video versions of their behavior and wellness educational materials.

Then, they started releasing daily short videos filled with tips that families and teachers could use to cope and adapt to remote learning and the new safety guidelines.

The BRST team worked alongside University of Utah graduate students to animate stories around different wellness, sanitation, and behavioral principles. Their initial goal was to provide teachers and students access to these types of principles regardless of the school’s learning modality by creating animated video versions of the joint project’s old lessons and posting them across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Tik Tok.

BRST eventually sought ways of impacting more families and teachers. Their first leap toward reaching more people was to make their animated videos more accessible to non-English-speaking families.

BRST translated videos into new languages to reach more schools and families

Initially, BRST offered animated videos in Spanish, English, Portuguese, and Chinese. These four languages cover many homes, but with over 150 spoken languages inside the Granite School District, the lessons excluded multiple families. BRST’s co-director, Aaron Fischer, said, “We really wanted to make sure we were connecting with refugee and immigrant families as well as families we serve who are from marginalized communities.”

The BRST’s first project to expand its reach was to look at standard dual immersion programs across the district. This first project led them to translate their videos to Spanish, Chinese, and Portuguese. Eventually, they leveraged social media to benefit families worldwide and ask a more significant audience about the joint project’s following languages.

After looking at feedback from their posted videos on social media, the team translated their lessons to Korean, Arabic, and French to reach more schools and families.

BRST created videos to address COVID-19-related procedures

With many schools reopening—full-time or for hybrid sessions—for the 2020-21 period, the team decided to once again go beyond sharing animated versions of their behavior principles and wellness tips and start addressing the elephant in the room: COVID-19.

The BRST team created a series of videos around physical distancing, proper use of a mask, and the right way to wash one’s hands. All the videos are less than sixty seconds and feature engaging examples of sanitary advice made with props, characters, and backgrounds from Vyond’s asset library to communicate the directions.

Learning how to use Vyond is part of the training that the students who collaborate with BRST undertake. They produce videos daily, so their creativity and animation process becomes faster and more polished after each video. To animate quicker, they could use templates as a shortcut toward finishing a video. Vyond’s template library offers dozens of pre-filled videos that can either provide you with a raw story to tweak or do most of the heavy lifting for you.

If you wanted to create a video on proper mask usage, for example, our How To Properly Wear a Mask template would free up most of the work since it features the health procedures, music, and pace necessary to create a charming video.

To use one of our templates, visit our template library, choose one of over thirty featured categories to narrow your search according to your niche, and then click use this template. The entire process takes three steps but will save you dozens—if not hundreds—of steps while animating your videos.

Students and teachers found relief through animated video

Through Vyond’s set of tools, BRST shared daily tips around social and emotional wellness, health care procedures, and behavior principles to adults and children. Teachers, in particular, feel relieved for having a new method of teaching behavioral principles to students. Thanks to the animated videos from BRST, educators use the program’s videos at the beginning of the class to teach children behavior principles, reducing the pressure of doing it by themselves.

Whether you plan to use animated video because of its appealing nature or its flexibility to cover any topic you can imagine, Vyond’s intuitive interface and asset gallery can help you streamline the process.

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The post How the University of Utah’s BRST Uses Animation to Help Teachers and Students Cope with COVID Stress appeared first on Vyond.

There’s a near-infinite amount of written content and company blogs for Google to pull from. How do you differentiate yourself? How long will it take you to rank? When will you see a strong ROI?

Ellen Lichtenstein is a Sr. Content Specialist at AgentSync, a company that helps insurance agencies and carriers reduce their compliance risk and streamline operations. In the early stages of her career, Ellen worked as a producer and casting director in the world of unscripted television. In that field, communicating through videos was not optional. After transitioning to creating content for the insurance industry, Ellen has made a habit of adding video into the mix.

This habit made her test the impact of embedded videos on AgentSync’s organic search rankings. So far, creating a video for a blog post has resulted in higher rankings and blog engagement.

We interviewed Ellen, who has eight years of experience working in Vyond, to learn how AgentSync has been using Vyond for the past year to outrank competitors on Google. Apply her lessons to grow your content’s ROI and engagement.

What made you start using video content?

Some of the topics we cover can be a bit hard to understand. Including a video allows readers to absorb that information in another way. Video content is also known to perform quite well in organic searches. So when it makes sense, we increase our presence in the search results by including videos in our blog posts.

Not every video creation process is alike. What does yours look like?

Usually, my process begins with writing a script. Each line corresponds to a scene number in Vyond. I don’t always outline my ideas for the visuals. But I tend to do that if I’m creating a video for someone less familiar with my work or with video creation in general.

If I need to get sign-off on the visuals before I begin working in Vyond, I’ll create a table. One column contains the script lines (either voiceover or words on screen), and the other column contains a description of what will appear on the screen.

I’ll just write out the lines if it’s unnecessary to sign off on the visuals. After spending so much time working in Vyond, I usually find my lines correspond accurately with what will end up in that scene number. But there are always surprises when I get into Vyond where I need to change something up, like splitting a scene into multiple pieces or combining scenes into one.

What impact have you noticed since you began using video in your marketing efforts?

Our team tracks how much engagement the videos get on our social posts and how well the blog posts perform in organic search results that have videos embedded in them. So far, we’ve seen a pattern of increased and consistent growth in page views after adding a video to a blog that was previously published text-only.

^{Gradual increase in blog post page views since adding a video to a blog post}

For example; we published a blog in July 2021 and charted its pageviews. You can see there wasn’t a lot of traffic at first, which is fine because it was new. We’d expect to see more traffic over time. Then we added a video in mid-September. You can see the monthly page views for September were a lot higher than the August page views when there was no video. And it’s continued to grow since then.

In another instance, we saw a blog post move up eight spots in ranking for a specific keyword after adding a video to that post.

We also publish videos on LinkedIn and Twitter to see additional engagement we might not otherwise experience with just the blog post without the video.

Tell us about a recent video that exceeded your expectations of what video can do.

Recently, AgentSync partnered with Senior Life Insurance Company. The goal was to create a customized producer onboarding portal that took Senior Life Insurance’s agent onboarding process from days to minutes.

We produced a video, including using Vyond for parts of it, and put some paid ad spend behind it. We wanted to tell this powerful story and show potential customers the improvement they could expect by adopting our technology and some customizations. We have been very impressed with the results.

This video has brought in a large number of qualified leads and contributed significantly to our sales pipeline. That’s proof of how the AgentSync/Senior Life Insurance story impacted our audience of potential customers when told through a short video.

You’ve been using Vyond for eight years. Which aspects of it do you like the most?

I find Vyond to be extremely user-friendly and intuitive. As someone who comes from a video production background, most of the features and functionalities of Vyond are intuitive to me. I’ve used Vyond across many companies and clients, in-house and as a contractor through my own company.

I’ve typically used Vyond for educational purposes for both internal and external audiences. For example; I’ve used it to educate employees about company culture and benefits and to teach potential customers about industry topics relevant to my clients and their products. I’ve even used Vyond as one of several tools in a large-scale public health initiative. In all cases, Vyond helps me convey complex information to audiences of different education levels in a way they can absorb and retain.

How long did it take to feel like you mastered Vyond?

It took me about six months to feel like I really knew Vyond. My skills have continued to grow over the years, and I’m sure there are features I don’t even utilize.

I credit my expertise in Vyond to a larger understanding of visual storytelling methods and experience creating content across various media and many use cases. Vyond was simple to learn and performs as I would expect it to.

What advice would you give a reader who wanted to try Vyond after reading this interview?

Just get into the platform and use it. You can definitely spend time watching training videos and participating in educational resources. Still, I think the best way to learn is by doing.

Beyond that, my advice is to get creative and experiment with the software. I’m always surprised by how much I can do when I explore different functions and combine them in unique ways.

Animate videos to increase your blog’s engagement and profit

With tools like Vyond, brands can access a professional suite of animation tools to adapt any blog content into a video and boost your page sessions.

Adding Vyond videos on their site has increased companies’ conversion rate by 67% and social media shares by 375%. Because of our templates, you can take advantage of these benefits regardless of your animation experience.

Animate your first video

The post How Ellen Lichtenstein Uses Videos To Boost AgentSync’s Blogs’ ROI appeared first on Vyond.

The acceleration of remote work as a norm has challenged companies to train their staff on valuable skills from a distance. Fortunately, remote training is a preference and not a burden for employees—51% report preferring self-led online training to other forms of training.

Nedko Krastev provides that online training with 365 Data Science, the online course platform he co-founded. The company’s goal is to help people of all levels grow in their careers as data scientists, data analysts, and business analysts without investing in an expensive degree. Instead, millions of students can pick between 38 high-quality online courses in their own time and expand their skill sets.

We interviewed Nedko to learn how 365 Data Science uses Vyond to create online courses for millions of people worldwide. You can apply these lessons to train your staff on the skills to keep your business relevant.

Try Vyond for Free

How do you use video at 365 Data Science?

Nedko: Videos are at the center of our business—we are a company specializing in online course creation. We create, distribute, and deliver top-quality online courses to a global audience. Currently, we aim to establish our proprietary platform as one of the leading players in the data science and finance niches.

What are your steps to take a course from idea to finished project?

Nedko: A course creator on our team writes a script and creates a storyboard. Then, they hand the storyboard to a visual artist who recreates it in Vyond. Once the video is ready, we record a voiceover, add sound, and publish it on our platforms or YouTube if it’s marketing related.

More and more companies are entering the eLearning space; how do you make your videos stand out from your competitors’?

Nedko: I believe animation and engaging storytelling are the two secrets that allow us to create more engaging videos compared to other companies in our field. We put a lot of effort and time in order to do that, but it certainly pays off in terms of higher user engagement in the long run. One of the most important aspects of online education is to engage learners. We do that by leveraging storytelling and visual representation in our videos. Vyond is instrumental for both of these techniques—you have a very hard time telling a story with PowerPoint slides, for example. At the same time, After Effects isn’t a solution that allows us to create multi-hour courses. Vyond brings the best of both worlds.

What’s some of the feedback you have received around the course and the resources you offer?

Nedko: “As a former BI Data lead & IT Consultant (MIS/Comp Sci), the detailed subject materials, along with the infographic styled storied presentations, were extraordinarily well done.”

“I loved this course, and I was able to learn many new valuable ideas and techniques! The animations and explanation suited me, and I was able to understand concepts that used to confuse me!”

“I studied probability, statistics, and AI at university, which made it easier for me to grasp some concepts. And since I’m familiar with Java, it made it easier for me to learn Python and its packages. So we could say that some parts of the course were like refreshers, but the best part is that now I get to understand them and untangle a few knots in my head!”

Which video software other than Vyond have you tried so far?

Nedko: Prior to using Vyond, we used a software called VideoMakerFX. It provided certain templates that we could fill in, but it didn’t allow for storytelling, and videos created with it were mostly static. At the time, our videos felt like a podcast with some presentation text on the screen. Once we started using Vyond, we were able to greatly improve the storytelling used in our courses, which became a trademark of our business.

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What makes Vyond more useful to use than VideoMakerFX and other software?

Nedko: A large part of the visuals used in our videos are not from the library we have in Vyond. But the engine that Vyond provides for moving objects and creating a video is so much faster than other software such as After Effects. We almost always rely on Vyond for our course creation needs.

How long did it take your team to become Vyond experts?

Nedko: When we hire a new visual artist, they almost immediately start using Vyond. In less than two to three weeks, our visual artists can create amazing videos leveraging Vyond and the Adobe suite together. Creating quality videos takes some time, but in the long run, it is worth the investment.

What’s your next project?

Nedko: Our most important projects are the two platforms, 365datascience.com and 365financialanalyst.com. We want to do our best to engage users and deliver a great learning experience.

Create animated online courses for a global audience

Nedko: Like 365 Data Science, you can use Vyond’s intuitive interface and fast engine to take your courses from ideas to reality. Animated videos will help you keep your customers’ and employees’ attention throughout the course. The videos also teach them valuable skills to apply to their personal lives and work.

Thanks to our many templates, you can create videos faster regardless of the type of training you want to produce.

Animate your first module

The post How 365 Data Science Creates Engaging Online Training appeared first on Vyond.

There are many reasons for the rise of self-employed people, like the desire to explore creative interests and build passive income streams. But unfortunately, freelancing isn’t a stress-free route. Self-employed people still have to find clients and become trustworthy vendors.

After working in tech sales for 10 years, Louis Ceaser IV noticed he could solve both problems through animated videos. “In sales,” says Louis, “you tell stories that lead to trust and business outcomes.” He founded Launch Your Story in 2021 with this in mind.

The animation and content house helps entrepreneurs and freelancers tell their own stories. These stories show viewers that freelancers are also humans who experience growth and pain. When customers of Louis’s clients see these videos, they are more likely to support their businesses.

We interviewed Louis to discover how he uses Vyond to grow his and other people’s freelance business.

What does Launch Your Story do for your customers?

Louis Ceaser IV: I help entrepreneurs tell their stories in a way they’ve never told it before through animation storytelling. This video asset can be repurposed across their website and social media channels to give their current audience a behind-the-scenes look into their lives or used to attract new clients.

Typically, how involved are your clients in the creative process?

Louis: I like to take a hands-on approach when working with my clients through the creative process. My skillset is listening, writing, and interviewing. It’s about asking the right questions to draw the right answers to form a strong script. Once a solid script is in place with emotion and flow, the animations come alive.

Speaking of your creative process, what does your video creation process look like?

Louis: I have a seven-step process:

1. Virtual meeting: I like to have a brief conversation with my client to understand what they’re looking for and see if I can deliver that vision.
2. Record the message: If they don’t know what to say, I’m great at interviewing them and pulling out the answers. I then take the recording and produce a script.
3. Place the script in Google Docs: Make any revisions/edits as they see fit.
4. Storyboard before the script is finalized: I already have a good idea of the best-animated scenes available in my toolbox to help bring their story to life. I’m a visual learner, so combing their script and going line-by-line helps me with the imagination process.
5. Voiceover: I love doing voiceovers, but if they want to use their own voice, that’s cool, too.
6. Animate: Using my notes from storyboarding, I’ll go into Vyond and start creating the scenes, along with customizing the avatars, camera angles, and transitions. I also add in the voiceover audio and search for the best non-copyrighted music that matches the emotion of the video.
7. Approval: I send them a private link to view the video. If I get two thumbs up, they now have a video asset they can repurpose across any platform to help amplify their personal or business brand. I’ve had one person cry, a few who are super thankful, and some have walked me to the next referral. I’m humbled to use my gift to positively impact the world with animation and story.

What interesting opportunities have your videos led to?

Louis: I’ve been invited to the LinkedIn Creators Program, taken on LinkedIn influencers like Justin Welsh and String Nguyen as clients, and proactively done animated videos for Rachel Beck, Heather Monahan, and Lewis Howes. I’ve also had the pleasure of personally connecting with Vyond Rockstar Rued Riis for business advice.

It sounds like you have a great relationship with LinkedIn, which you’re also very active on. Why did you choose that platform?

Louis: I chose LinkedIn because this platform is kind to animated video and the potential organic reach your asset could experience. Also, my clients are entrepreneurs and small business owners, and, now more than ever, they are looking for innovative ways to share their personal stories on LinkedIn.

Why did you decide to use Vyond for your work out of all the animation tools?

Louis: As a Mac user, Vyond’s interface reminds me of iMovie; it’s easy to navigate around. Being able to record my voiceover, complete the animated scenes, and import music all in one user interface is a game-changer for me.

How long did it take you to become a Vyond expert? What’s the biggest takeaway from your experience so far?

Louis: It took me about nine months before feeling truly expert-level comfortable with the tool. I still have some growth to experience when it comes to scene transitions and understanding camera angles. However, the business-friendly avatars are my favorite. Vyond is so fun to use, and I love the new updates every month.

What advice would you give to folks who are new to Vyond?

Louis: Be confident in yourself and give yourself enough patience and grace while learning the tool; it’s not going to happen overnight. Also, play around with the tool and with the new features. You don’t need a fancy mic or recording studio to make professional videos. I used some simple headphones and recorded them in the car when I started. Don’t let perfection get in the way of your progress. Get started today!

What’s your next project?

Louis: I will be releasing the Launch Your Story animated podcast to encourage 1M+ to share their personal and career stories with the world. I’m also taking on new clients, so if you need to transform your story, book excerpt, or podcast soundbite into an animated video, we can work with you.

Create animated videos to grow your business

You can use Vyond’s set of intuitive animation tools to create engaging stories that tell your brand’s story. Like Louis, you can create an engaging story from scratch that amazes your peers, colleagues, and clients. Or you can use Vyond’s templates to build your story on top of a pre-animated one.

As a first video, you can share your company’s mission, the reason you founded it, and your values. You can eventually tell more complex stories as you become better at animating. Like Louis’s stories, these videos help you build trust with clients and attract new ones that value what you stand for.

Animate your first video

The post How Louis Ceaser IV Uses Vyond To Grow His Freelance Business appeared first on Vyond.

As one of the biggest suppliers of gaming and lottery products for the world’s best casinos, the 114-year old company specializes in having a good time. It’s not always so easy, however, to bring that same sense of fun to typically boring topics.

HR professionals around the world perpetually struggle to make dense and complex topics engaging for employees, and few subjects are as complicated as employee benefits. To make these important policies more accessible, Susie Fotheringham and her team at Scientific Games reached for video.

Read our interview with Susie to hear how enterprises like Scientific Games make employee benefits enrollment fun with effective videos created in Vyond Studio.

Q&A with Susie Fotheringham, Director of Employee Benefits at Scientific Games

How did the pandemic impact the work you and your team were doing?

A lot of the ways we communicate benefits are visual – whether it’s signage in offices, in-person conversation or onsite presentations. With the majority of our employees working from home, we lost that connection and visibility. We had to get creative. Our employees’ needs to get care and learn about care relied on virtual options. We had to adapt quickly.

Why did you choose to use video?

Let’s face it. How many Zoom meetings have you attended last year? PowerPoint animation isn’t as engaging as we’d like it to be, either.

We wanted to illustrate our message in a fun way that would capture the attention of our audience. We ourselves as a team found animation and video as a much easier way to digest complex benefits information.

Open Enrollment is our Superbowl; our main event each year. We wanted to explain our benefits and provide resources that you didn’t just have to read or listen to. Videos and animation provided a way to illustrate what we were trying to communicate. It was painting a picture with real paint, not just the audience’s imagination. We told a memorable story that resonated with people more than a flyer or bullet point on a slide ever could.

Why did you choose to create these videos yourself?

Truthfully, the cost to outsource it didn’t fit our budget. We had a vision of what we wanted to do and once we realized that it wasn’t very hard to do (i.e., I cannot draw a stick figure) the choice was made for us. It also helped that it was incredibly fun.

Did you find it challenging to make these videos yourself?

The initial challenge was believing we could create videos with absolutely no experience in this space. We honestly were surprised at how easy Vyond made the process.

We kept improving our output because we learned new techniques or because of a recent product release.

The art of doing a voiceover was and still is the biggest challenge. We learned it’s very common to be hypercritical of your own voice and it’s something that you have to get over. We gained so much appreciation and respect we have for people that create videos and animation. We learned so much about the process and started noticing the production value in commercials we saw on TV, videos other members of the Vyond Maker Community shared, and the template videos put out by Vyond.

How do you make content that’s typically boring more engaging?

Humor and human connection. Particularly in the last year, we all needed a laugh. It has more of an impact when it’s not expected, and trust me, getting someone to laugh about the importance of life insurance is a badge I’ll wear all decade.

We also made a human connection by introducing our benefits team with characters that looked like us.

How does making a human connection help HR professionals in this kind of work?

It is Human Resources, after all! Personal or human connection is literally embedded in every function of Human Resources – particularly benefits.

Benefits affect you, your family, wellbeing and more often than not, people don’t invest the time to learn about it until either they are sick or someone they love is sick. As HR/Benefits professionals we have an opportunity to advise people on the value of being proactive. Taking the time to invest in a multi-channel approach ensures that you engage more people and Vyond gave us the opportunity to do that and do it well.

Create engaging HR videos.

With Vyond, anybody can create compelling content that gets their message across. By giving yourself the power of video, you can communicate in a more dynamic, engaging, and fun way. Vyond Studio is designed to empower all kinds of businesses to make media that moves, even if they don’t have any video experts on the team. All you need is a little imagination. Give it a try with a 14-day free trial of Vyond.

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The post How Scientific Games Brings Benefits to Life with Video appeared first on Vyond.

Bringing levity to the learning experience is so important that we included it as one of our 25 essential tips for making an instructional video.

While it’s easy for everyone to see the value of humor in eLearning, it’s hard to find good examples. When we saw what Matt Heinze and his team at Kasasa were creating with Vyond, we knew we wanted to share it.

Watch some of their witty videos below, and read on to hear how Kasasa brings humor to its training videos:

A Q+A with Matt Heinze

What kind of work do you do at Kasasa?

As a whole, Kasasa is a fin-tech company that provides financial products and services to small, community-based banks and credit unions. We help them compete and “win the war” against the big megabanks.

As for me, I’m a senior instructional designer on a team that mainly creates training, and support materials for frontline, back-office, and leadership of these institutions. Our instructional design team is part of a larger team that consults with our clients to optimize their performance.

When an institution partners with Kasasa, they don’t just get our products and we walk away. We’re with them through the long haul and give them the tools and guidance to be their best.

What was the first video you created with Vyond?

The first videos I made were joke-y experiments that I would share with my team to get some laughter going. At the same time I was trying to get the hang of the tool and its capabilities. My first real video ended up being a scene for Episode 101 of our video series, Rewardsville.

How have your videos changed since you first started?

It’s been almost two years since we started producing the Rewardsville series. From a technical perspective, I’d say I’ve found ways to move the camera more. I try not to stay too static if possible.

I also try to get more coverage. I’ll do a scene one way, and then at the end I’ll redo clips from different angles, like close-up reaction shots of different characters. Then when I pull all the scenes over to Adobe Premiere, I decide which to use.

I also redo all of the audio in Premiere when I pull the scenes over. I do the sound editing/mixing in Premiere, adding a ton of sound effects and music during that stage. From a creative perspective, three seasons is a lot of seat time for learners. We want them engaged.

The libraries of props, actions, and backgrounds in Vyond are extensive and I love coming across something wacky and thinking “how can I incorporate this into this story about people working at a financial institution?” We’ve tried to do things that are a little out there that will grab the learners’ attention, like have a character lost in the Patagonian Mountains, train a cat to be an evil megabank spy, or introduce lost treasure folklore into the town’s history.

Humor seems to play a big role in Rewardsville. What would you say to instructional designers who are more tentative about using humor at work?

Oh boy! This could be a very long answer! Here are a few tips:

Don’t be afraid.

If you have an idea to make learners laugh, explore it. The reward is SO high. The scenario/lesson becomes WAY more memorable. Sure a few people may not like it, but MANY more of them would not like it if you shared boring standard content instead. If you have the freedom, don’t be boring and standard.

Are you going to remember a lesson detail because it was in a bullet on slide 44 or are you going to remember it because your favorite character figured it out and turned it into a catchy song?

Don’t create in a bubble.

Share your ideas with your peers, team, etc. and even get them involved in ideation. When you have more people involved, at least giving feedback or ideas, then you have that reassurance, “okay this is working.”

You don’t need to make people roll on the floor.

If you have people smiling as they watch, then you’re succeeding. You’re connecting in a positive emotional way.

And I should include a disclaimer that humor doesn’t work across all subject matter.

What challenges do you face when trying to engage learners with your training?

I think boredom is a big factor for all learning. “I’ve seen this same ol’ training” one may say before tuning out. The challenge there is giving them something fresh and unique. Vyond is a great tool for this.

Another big one is context. How can you best fit the lesson into a scenario-based manner?

Also, relatability: ”Oh that happens to me,” or “Oh that happened to my teammate a few times.” People relate to stories more than anything. That’s what Rewardsville is all about. We embed a couple learning objectives into one scenario-based storyline that gets a little silly, keeps your attention, and is memorable. We have many different characters that learners can relate to or call their favorite. And we hear about that in feedback. We have our characters fumble and make mistakes and become successful heroes at different points throughout.

We also take this to another level by introducing interactive Storyline 360 pieces throughout a season where you make choices for the characters or judge their performance based on what you learn. I think Vyond’s Business Friendly style really helps us achieve that story-based, light, inventive approach. It makes many of our crazy ideas possible.

Have you gotten any feedback from learners on these videos?

Yes! We released Season 1 in Fall of 2020. Season 2 came out in early 2021. Since then, learners have been able to give star ratings (1-5) and add comments to each episode. At the end of the season after the final exam, they’re given an NPS question.

Across Season 1 and 2, the average star-rating per episode/activity is 4.8-4.9 out of over 5000 episode/activity completions.

Our NPS score for Season 1 so far is 91 and for Season 2 it’s currently 94.

Some random, favorite comments include:

• “Gold medal show”
• “Cute and funny! 🙂 Yes, great reminders for how to be successful with Kasasa!”
• “Entertaining – fun way to learn.”
• “Great, engaging content. Enjoyed seeing how things can go wrong in branch and what we can do to be more mindful of our customer’s needs.”

Your videos recently got some impressive external recognition, right?

Yes! We submitted Season 1 to the Communicator Awards late in 2020 and they recently announced winners. We got an Award of Distinction in the category of Online Video Campaign or Series – Web Series. We’re hoping to submit the project for other instructional design and media awards now that we have a lot of positive learner feedback to point to.

Make award-winning instructional videos.

With Vyond, it’s easy to create clear and engaging how-to videos on any topic, in a range of professional styles. Create stories with characters, scenes and props pulled from our huge asset library or generate new worlds with our AI. Show step-by-step processes by uploading your preferred footage or by recording your onscreen actions with our screen capture tool. Sign up for a free 14-day trial to start creating award-winning training videos today.

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Representation matters, even—if not especially—outside of entertainment. We all have a responsibility to include and amplify underrepresented perspectives in the content we produce, be it for training, recruitment, marketing, or something else altogether.

Vyond’s all-in-one AI video creation platform comes packed with features that empower makers to create customized characters (even robots!) in a variety of professional styles. While we’re proud of the platform’s growing capacity for representation, what matters most is how we use it.

We heard of one Vyond maker, Kelsey Hoppe, who was tackling the issue of representation head-on with training videos tailored to non-Western contexts. To learn more, we hopped on a call with Kelsey to ask her about how she depicts diversity with safeguarding and risk management training videos created in Vyond.

What Kelsey Hoppe Learned about Representation in Animation

Over the course of talking with Kelsey, we got some great insights on how Safer Edge tackles cultural contextualization with Vyond. Here are her ten tips for makers depicting diversity with animation:

1. Create your own characters.

“Vyond’s Character Creator is a brilliant feature. While building your own characters can get time consuming, it really can better contextualize the video within the culture you are representing. This includes all the background characters. Creating your own characters gives you so much more range than using stock characters. Character creation also enabled us to reach some of our goals in visual representation of disability and ethnic/religious minorities.”

2. Vary skin tones.

“Small things make such a big difference in making an animation feel authentically representative, but this is a big one. Since you can create all your own characters, and no one person on earth has the exact same skin tone as another, give each character their own skin tone.”

,3. Know your setting.

“It’s so important to know what a Kenyan refugee camp or rural Indonesian village or water pump in Mozambique actually looks like. We’re lucky because most of our staff have worked in these locations, but Google is also extremely helpful. We were constantly asking: ‘would this tree be in Indonesia?’ A little research gave us the ability to answer these questions accurately.”

4. Choose props thoughtfully.

“We didn’t want anything to be in a video that wouldn’t be in that context in the real world. This meant some creative use of props and asking the question, ‘would a bucket like this be in a refugee camp?’ or ‘what would a single mother living in a refugee camp have in her tent?’ It’s amazing what you can find with all the props available in Vyond, or what you can import using creative commons imagery.”

5. Be creative with your settings.

“This was one of our biggest challenges, as most ready-made backgrounds tend to depict developed-world scenes. For example; we really struggled with a video that was supposed to be set in rural Afghanistan. Then a member of our team said, ‘a room is a room is a room.’ How could we make this room look like an Afghan schoolroom? We altered our script so that a majority of the video could take place within a schoolroom rather than out in the amazing Afghan countryside, which we would have really struggled to recreate.”

6. Integrate familiar objects.

“We asked the client for pictures of their offices and what tools they use in their different locations, and then recreated them in PowerPoint to import into Vyond. This brings a sense of ‘realness’ as the audience would be able to recognize these items from their regular life.”

7. Use representative voiceover.

“Having real people record our voiceover with non-American/UK accents has been key for us. People who watch our videos—especially non-native English speakers—tend to comment on how helpful this is. ‘They speak English like we speak English’ is the kind of comment we receive. Even if the person isn’t brilliant at doing voiceover or the audio isn’t amazing quality, it’s always worth it to have a real person representing the audience.”

8. Activate gender and ethnic diversity.

“We have a huge number of things we require all our work to show or represent in order to represent ethnic and gender diversity. We always ensure that we give women or minorities active speaking, teaching, and leadership roles rather than having them be in passive audience/learner roles. We don’t feel that it’s enough for women or minorities to simply be present in the video when they need to be active and leading in the real world.”

9. Give covered women speaking and leadership roles.

“We can tend to think of women who choose to cover (or a myriad of other people – young people, disabled people, etc.) as being passive or having accepted a disempowered role in society. This couldn’t be further from reality, especially in countries where women who choose to cover are leading in politics and activism. Using animation can be a great way to disrupt our quiet biases about people by giving covered women speaking and leadership roles. Other ways to do this could be to show any group that we don’t tend to think of as ‘leaders’ in the main teaching/speaking roles.”

10. Simplify the language in the script.

“And then simplify it again. We thought we had done a pretty good job of removing idioms and culturally-laden terms, but we fell at the first hurdle (to use an idiom) when it was reviewed by a global group. Our language was still too conceptual and complicated for a non-native English speaking audience. We had to go back and do another round of simplification.”

Use animation for cultural representation.

Vyond combines the simplicity of our easy-to-use platform with the customizations necessary to represent a complex world. We’re continuously improving our versatile all-in-one video platform to meet the need for diverse representation in all video content. Get a head start on creating your own DEI training videos on topics like Juneteenth, gender & pronouns, and more with the Vyond Video Template Library. Give Kelsey’s advice a go by creating a custom video with Vyond’s free 14-day trial.

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That endeavor naturally led the Idea Learning team to experiment with creating their own animated videos to meet their clientele’s needs. The dynamic, story-driven nature of video makes it a highly effective medium for eLearning, a discipline that has historically been plagued by disinterest and disengagement among its audiences. It’s no surprise, then, 98% of enterprise organizations say video is valuable for improving communication and for training employees better and faster.

To create eLearning videos that were customized, learner-centric, and engaging, Shannon and Jillian reached for Vyond. Before long, the all-in-one AI video creation platform became a staple in the Idea Learning toolkit.

We interviewed Shannon and Jillian to learn more about why video works for eLearning, and how Idea Learning uses Vyond to deliver top-quality content to their clients.

Why Idea Learning uses Video for eLearning

What was the last video you created in Vyond?

Because we can’t celebrate in-person this year, we made a quick Happy Birthday video for our employee Katie using a Vyond template. We love being able to customize the characters! In this video we created super realistic representations of ourselves.

How did you find your way into eLearning?

As custom instructional designers, we’re always looking for the best delivery method for each client/project and sometimes eLearning is the right solution. Our experience as learners had left us with the impression that eLearning wasn’t an emotionally engaging learning experience. Later, when we started Idea Learning, our clients began to request eLearning. It was then that we knew we had to find a way to connect with learners’ hearts as well as their minds using eLearning platforms.

You wrote the book Let Them Choose: Cafeteria Style Learning for Adults. What is “Cafeteria Style Learning” all about?

As practitioners who design workplace learning experiences, we share a passion for transforming workplace learning to appeal to learner curiosity, influence behavior change, and generate meaningful, relevant experiences. Throughout our careers as learning professionals, we have observed a tendency toward resistance to learning among those who seemed skeptical about workplace training in general. Some of the assumptions we witnessed include training classes are a waste of time; the content is generic and doesn’t help with individual roles and responsibilities; and learners don’t feel engaged in training in a personally meaningful and productive way.

We developed Cafeteria Learning as an alternative or complement to traditional training. In practice, it’s an approach to learning that allows instructional designers (chefs) to apply content (ingredients) to a variety of interchangeable activities (recipes), resulting in an informal classroom workshop in which each learner builds a customized learning experience (meal).

Idea Learning is known for designing top-notch interactive training for its clients. How does video fit into that?

“If keeping someone’s attention in a lecture were a business it would have an 80% failure rate,” – John Medina, author of Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School

Storytelling is one technique we use to engage our learners and video is a great way to tell stories and keep learners’ attention. Video can complement in-person learning and also be embedded in eLearning. We also sometimes use video to introduce a topic or as a tool to reinforce learning. Prior to finding Vyond, creating video was time consuming and required technical expertise from outsourced video production crews and motion graphic designers. This sometimes created financial roadblocks for our clients. Vyond allows us to create videos internally, making it feasible to include video in more client projects.

Can you give me an example of a when you’ve used video for storytelling or to create an emotional connection with learners?

One of our clients is an international construction software company. We partnered with them to introduce new employees to the fundamentals of their industry. Through the use of Vyond videos, we were able to create vignettes that brought each concept to life with unique characters guiding learners through each module. Pairing the subject matter expert’s narration with the visual engagement of Vyond brought personality and authenticity to the course. The good news is learners loved it and we’re working on the next project with them, also using Vyond.

Build eLearning videos for your clients.

From your first video to your fiftieth, Vyond ’s all-in-one AI video creation platform makes it easy to create professional-grade eLearning deliverables. Vyond’s Agency and Producer Program is perfect for freelancers and teams who want to wow their clients with custom video solutions. Vyond partners like Idea Learning are able to earn affiliate income, transfer video rights, and get dedicated support from the Vyond’s partners team. Join the Agency and Producer Program today to start making dynamic and engaging eLearning videos for your clients.

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At Vyond, we’re proud to have customers like Texas State who are tackling that challenge with video through interdepartmental partnerships and collaboration. Video is, after all, one of the most powerful communication tools we have today. As many as 98% of enterprise organizations believe video is valuable for improving communication and training employees more effectively. Vyond Studio makes it easy for anybody to create videos for internal communication.

Texas State’s Office of Human Resources and Talent Acquisition teams met the DEI call with a re-commitment to enabling diverse hiring practices. To create their Diversity Hiring Toolkit, the Organizational Development and Communications team reached for Vyond to get big ideas across in an engaging and visual way.

Using Video to Promote Diversity in Hiring

1. What is your team at the Office of Human Resources responsible for, and how does it support the larger mission of Texas State University?

The Organizational Development and Communications team goal is to empower learning, nurture growth, enhance performance, and strengthen leadership skills at Texas State. The team also focuses on creating HR communications that promote awareness and employee engagement. We provide support to the other five areas within HR, including Benefits, Compensation, Employee Relations, our Master Data Center, and Work Life.

Part of the university’s mission is to “embrace a diversity of people and ideas”. Our support for the university is visible through the partnerships we have across campus and our accomplishments in rolling out multiple projects and communications to support the mission and bolster our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. The Staff Diversity Toolkit project specifically targets that part of the mission by providing supervisors and hiring teams with the best practices and resources to recruit and interview inclusively.

We create content with our employee audience always in mind and make sure to find a way to meet their needs through either development or communications. We strive to always make sure our content is engaging, clear, and most of all accessible for our vibrant and diverse campus community.

One of our goals – to strengthen and empower leadership skills – aligns directly with the expectation of leaders to maintain ethical standards and inclusive practices that reflect Texas State’s mission, vision and values. As we are part of the Office of Human Resources, it is within our purview to set and maintain the example for an inclusive and healthy work environment and culture, and follow through with our ability to institute change and practice inclusive excellence through our communications, training and development function.

2. Tell us more about Texas State’s recent recommitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. What role does your team play in meeting that priority?

Texas State University values a diversity of people and ideas, a spirit of inclusiveness, a global perspective and a sense of community as essential conditions for campus life. Our role in supporting that mission is through collaboration on projects such as this one.

The Staff Diversity Hiring Toolkit project aligns with Texas State University’s shared values of embracing a diversity of people and ideas, and of building a spirit of inclusiveness across campuses. This toolkit supports the culture of inclusion at Texas State by providing a comprehensive review for recruiting, screening, and hiring for diversity.

3. How did the Staff Diversity Toolkit come into being?

The Texas State Talent Acquisition team researched universities across the country to see how others implemented diversity hiring training and found that most higher education institutions had toolkits in place for promoting diverse recruiting best practices. The Talent Acquisition team then reached out to our OD & Communications team for ideas on how to roll out a Staff Diversity Hiring Toolkit to campus. Together we came up with the idea of using the research gathered to create two videos coupled with a best practices digital handbook. The goal was to make the content easy to digest and retain so the creation of these materials was the most practical solution for our audience. The process for implementation started in early January 2020 and launched to campus in May 2020.

4. How did your team discover Vyond, and why did you choose it to develop the Staff Diversity Toolkit?

In early 2019 we assigned our communications intern the task of researching the pros and cons of a few different animation platforms. After completing a 14-day trial and playing with the tools in each, it was easy to see Vyond was going to be the best fit for our team given its features and design capabilities. We purchased Vyond that summer and the following semester our next communications intern was tasked with helping rollout the Staff Diversity Hiring Toolkit using Vyond. After learning a little more about the scope of this project and the details required to be included, we knew we wanted to make the content engaging to offset the jargon heavy policy verbiage.

5. What did you learn in the process of creating the Staff Diversity Toolkit? Any key results or insights?

Since this was our first time using a video software like this in our projects, it provided a lot of insight into the flexibility of visual communication and impact on engagement. We were excited to learn how much information we could share creatively in a short amount of time through video. We also learned a lot more about script writing for training purposes. We were very excited to try a friendlier approach to sharing information since often policies and other HR related topics are easy to overlook due to their length and jargon.

6. Describe your approach to creating these training videos.

At first, we started with a very lengthy and verbose word document which we quickly translated into a friendly training script. Once we had the script, we started storyboarding the scenes. After running all initial drafts through the project team, it was time to begin creating the templates in Vyond. We had multiple Vyond drafts until the final video was vetted and approved by all members of the team. Since this was the first project where we incorporated Vyond as the primary channel, our approach was very structured with detailed guidelines, multiple status updates, and deadlines in place.

Get big ideas across with video.

Whether you’re tackling inequity or introducing your team, video is one of the strongest tools in your internal communications toolkit. Vyond’s drag-and-drop animation studio gives everybody the power of video, no experience necessary. Create your own videos like Texas State and start making media that moves with Vyond’s 14-day free trial.

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Luckily, the myth that mastery requires 10,000 hours turned out to be false, and practice isn’t the only way to get good at something. Nevertheless, experience goes a long way if you want to create masterful content. Vyond Studio is packed with advanced features to bring even the most complex ideas to life, but those capabilities may feel out of reach to new makers. That’s where Robb Bingham comes in.

As an experienced learning strategist, Robb works on the team Converging Solutions—one of our affiliates—to transform learning and development at medium and large businesses. Over several years of developing content for eLearning, marketing, and internal communications, he’s picked up expert-level mastery of telling a story with video.

He uses those skills to help new members of the Vyond Maker Community learn everything they need to know to get started quickly in Vyond Studio. We interviewed Robb to hear how he shares the power with even the most nervous novices.

Interview with Robb Bingham of Converging Solutions

At Converging Solutions, you offer a Vyond Quick Start workshop. How did you get your own start with Vyond?

Converging Solutions came to Vyond after using a more limited animated software program because we wanted Vyond’s more advanced capabilities like lip sync, motion paths, and a broad set of characters and templates.

We were impressed, and the jump for our team was pretty easy from some of those other tools. We found the Vyond Resource Library to be most helpful! We were also able to learn quickly (and frequently) in Vyond Studio from our own trial and error.

As we began to introduce new team members to Vyond, we realized that there was an easier way to get people up to speed quickly. Maybe “easier” isn’t the right word, because it’s pretty intense! (But it’s also a lot of fun!) We created an opportunity for them to learn by doing in a workshop experience. More on that later!

Your work spans learning, internal communications, marketing, and more. How does video fit into all that?

At its core—at least when it’s done well—an animated video tells a story.

That allows us to use Vyond for many of our client projects. Here’s a shortlist of some ways we’ve found animation to be incredibly helpful and sets our deliverables apart:

Learning

At the top of the course, instead of starting with a boring list of objectives, we start the course with a video like this one that illustrates the difference the course content will make in the learner’s life. (“What’s in it for me?”)

In the middle of the course, we use video to illustrate a case study and bring otherwise dry topics to life!

Communications

Instead of sending out a company card at Thanksgiving like every other company, we made a holiday video. It took a few more hours, but it also made an impactful impression of our company and highlighted our desire to make a positive difference for our clients.

Marketing

In the marketing space, your animated video should generally have a direct call to action. The story can really spell out a specific pain-point and help the viewer understand why they must take action now.

(This video was the first one completed by our newest team member.)

Other times, the call to action isn’t as glaringly obvious. For example, when we promote our Vyond Workshop, we provide a link to the sizzle reel below. The purpose here is primarily to validate credibility as an expert in the field. The call to action in this case is communicated in the marketing piece that contains the link instead of within the video itself.

What are some key themes you cover in the Vyond Quick Start workshop?

While storytelling isn’t the sole focus of our Vyond Quick Start workshop, it is a significant theme for the first segment. Why? Because no matter how good your development skills are in Vyond, if you aren’t telling a compelling story, you are missing the entire point!

It would be like trying to walk without a skeleton. You need those bones to provide structure and create leverage for muscles to work together to go anywhere! Similarly, the story is where you start from, and we start the workshop talking about an endless number of ways to start your story that can grab the viewer’s attention.

From that foundation, the workshop is mostly about getting up to speed developing in Vyond as quickly as possible. Attendees get hands-on right away with some guided activities and rapid-fire feedback from peers and developers. A lot of the workshop is spent in breakout rooms where attendees get to apply concepts just covered and get real-time support as they work. It’s been such a popular format, and people wrap up the day with a major jump-start on the idea they brought into the workshop.

How have attendees described the experience of participating in your Vyond Quick Start workshop?

Everyone who has gone through the workshop so far has described the session as one of the most efficient ways they’ve experienced to get up to speed quickly and start developing projects that they really feel proud to share with others. This very-full one-day workshop experience leaves the attendee:

• Feeling like they’ve mastered the basics.
  “I learned more in this one day than in a month on my own!”
• Helping new Vyond developers learn what GOOD looks like.
  “I learned so much from all the examples the instructors shared, as well as how to leverage, learn from, and repurpose the templates… what a booster-shot for rapid development!”
• Outlining a specific list of next-step topics to finalize their project and continue the progress made along their rapid learning curve.
  “I really feel like I can finish the project I’m working on now in a few more hours rather than days or weeks!”

Who should attend the Vyond Quick Start workshop?

I’d say there are three primary audiences that see the most benefit from our Vyond Quick Start workshop:

1. Newbie developers to Vyond who know they want to learn to animate videos, but have limited time because video development is not their “day job.”
2. Anyone that’s started to use Vyond and got bogged down with the basics or became intimidated by the limited progress they’ve made and want some mentorship to improve it.
3. eLearning, Communications, or Marketing specialists that really want to set their deliverables apart, and want to learn how to make their projects look as professional as possible as quickly as possible.

The bottom line is if you want to get up to speed making Vyond videos as quickly as possible, and get several pro-tips to chew on right away, then this workshop is a no-brainer! We’ve also offered it up to design teams as a virtual professional development day, which is a great way to build a sense of team, learn and laugh (a lot) together in the middle of our pandemic world events. We have 2-3 developers that co-lead the session so it really helps keep everyone interested and highly engaged!

With Vyond, you can make media that moves.

Vyond Studio gives you all the tools you need to master the art of video. When you give your team the power of Vyond, you’re also giving them access to a broad community of makers like Robb and a team of supportive video experts to guide them along. Give yourself a kick start with Converging Solutions, or take a look yourself with a free trial of Vyond.

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