Find a public advocacy video for a specific campus, local, or state nonprofit, organization, movement, or cause you would like to support. It may be a nonprofit organization, social cause, or political movement, but it should work primarily on the campus, local, or state level (not a national or international organization or cause). You can find nonprofits local to the South Carolina Midlands at https://www.midlandsgives.org/. For charities in other areas, check out https://www.charitynavigator.org/. You can find smaller social causes and campaigns at https://www.gofundme.com/. If you have social or political causes you care about, you can search those sites for projects related to those causes (such as education, clean water, solar power, food banks, or domestic violence). Once you find two charities or movements you would like to promote, search YouTube or Google for videos from those organizations. You are looking for one video that attempts to persuade the viewer to take individual action or change their own behavior. Often videos will ask viewers to donate money, but they may also ask for people to volunteer time or change their personal behaviors (such as boycott a company or product or vote for a ballot measure or candidate).
The video you analyze must have a person on screen, talking to the camera, for at least a third of the total video.
Remember that for this assignment, you should choose a video that has some visuals and motion – not audio with only still images.
Please select a video that is less than 10 minutes in total length.
Watch the advocacy video and apply the principles of emotion as explained in your textbook. The objective is to identify and assess the emotional appeals. The purpose is not to assess the whole website, text, etc., but only the video.
Complete Part 1 of the Advocacy Video APP Worksheet (available on BlackBoard) and then proceed to Part 2.
PART 2: Brief Sample Video. (for this part just write a dialogue for me to go with)m
After you have completed Part 1 of the worksheet, record a brief (60-90 seconds) sample video of yourself making an additional emotional appeal for the same cause or organization as the video you analyzed. Come up with one additional emotional appeal that could have been used successfully in the advocacy video but was not. Choose something that requires no video editing or use of images – something you can make powerful with just the use of words, your voice, and your body/face. Record a short video (60-90 seconds) of yourself making that emotional appeal directly into the camera (you must be on camera for the full time of the video, looking directly into the camera).
Remember, your goal here is to appeal primarily to the audience’s emotions, not present a logical argument. Use the techniques for emotional appeals as taught in the textbook.
Your video recording should be at least 60 seconds and not over 90 seconds. Focus on one emotional appeal for the video (no more than one) and follow the advice in the textbook for crafting powerful emotional appeals. You will want to practice your video a few times before you record it, or even do multiple recordings and upload your best one.
There are a lot of ways you can record a video, but here are a couple:
1. Record it with the webcam on your computer. (If you need help finding the app on your computer, see this guide: https://www.howtogeek.com/234786/how-to-take-photos-and-record-videos-with-your-computers-webcam/ ) You can also do this with web platforms like Zoom or Screencast-O-Matic.
2. Have someone else record you with the video recorder on your smartphone or tablet. Remember that audio quality can be a significant problem if the cell phone is far away from you and landscape mode (horizontal) is preferable to portrait mode (vertical) for online videos. This also requires a somewhat steady hand.
No matter what you choose, pay attention to camera angle, elevation, and lighting, as recommended in the textbook, and audio quality. Also, make eye contact (look into the camera)!
For this assignment, please do not use images, videos, sounds, or music.
When completed, upload your video to your own YouTube account and set it to Unlisted (not private, which would make it unviewable!). Also, be sure you put a viewable link in Part 2 of your Advocacy APP Worksheet. Be careful not to submit an Edit link! (The link should not have the word “edit” in it.) Videos with broken links or the wrong settings will be considered late until the settings are corrected or the proper link is supplied.
Then proceed to Part 3.
Finally, after completing both parts 1 and 2 of the Advocacy APP Worksheet, you will need to decide the campus, local, or statewide organization, purpose, and audience for your original advocacy video (the next assignment). Next week you will be making a short (3-5 minute) original emotional appeal video. You are welcome to use the same organization and purpose as you analyzed in Part 1 of this assignment, or a different organization and purpose, but your target audience must be a group of people you can reach and potentially influence.
Consider the specific action you want your viewers to take. Will you be asking them to donate money? Volunteer time? Change their personal behaviors? Take some other specific action? Whatever you ask of them must be something that could be done by a group of people who you can reach with your video. That might be classmates, members of a group or organization you know, people in your social network, work colleagues, or even extended family.
For example, I might persuade the people I work with to donate money to Harvest Hope Food Bank. I could easily send them a brief appeal and a link to my video via email. Or, I might persuade my friends and family in California to support efforts to help victims of wildfires in that state, especially since I stay in touch with many of them through social media.
Whatever your cause or organization, and whatever your social networks or connections with other people, everyone can find an opportunity to advocate a specific course of action to a particular group of people, especially if you stay focused on campus, local, or state-level issues.
Having located your cause and your target audience, think of four things you would like to know about your target audience. What are four pieces of information or background that might help you understand their values and emotional commitments?
Create a brief anonymous survey in SurveyMonkey with those four questions (and no others) and distribute it to your target audience, or a portion of your target audience. Your goal is to get at least ten responses to your survey before you need to complete the next assignment. Details on making effective surveys and using SurveyMonkey are in your textbook.
Once you have decided your organization or cause, your specific purpose, your target audience, and made your survey, complete Part 3 of the Advocacy APP Worksheet.
After all parts of the worksheet are complete, double-check that you have a working link to your brief sample video and that it is set to “unlisted” (not private). Then post your completed Advocacy APP Worksheet in a new thread in your group BlackBoard forum (not as a reply to another thread.)
