About Raise Foundation:

Raise Foundation is a registered Australian charity which provides best practice mentoring programs to impact the wellbeing of young people in Australia. Through mentoring, teenagers are given a positive role model to provided them support through tough times, particularly if they feel they can’t talk to other significant adults in their lives.

Solution:

• Authority Multimedia Content – Video

To find out more about Raise Foundation, please visit http://www.raise.org.au/

Transcription:

00:08 Liza: Cheryl, thank you so much for coming on board and having a quick chat with me sharing your experience in us working together. Maybe we can start off with just tell me more about, you know, the organization and, you know, what you guys do, who do you guys help.

00:23 Cheryl: So yeah, thanks Liza. I work for Raise Foundation. And it’s an in school mentoring foundation where we help young people who are either at risk of disengaging from society or from the community. We do one to one mentoring programs in schools throughout Australia. We do the 20 week program where they get an hour with a mentor each week and they get to talk to them. Yeah. Our aim Raise is to make children more connected, more resilient and more capable.

00:59 Liza: Awesome. That’s great. I mean I remember I went to a Tony Robbins event and I bumped into one of your volunteers and he’s so passionate about what he does with you guys.

01:09 Cheryl: Yeah. Yeah we got some really passionate volunteers. It’s an amazing organization now. It’s CEO Vicki Condon who started it over eight years ago. Yeah it’s just it’s gone from strength to strength and recruiting every year. We recruit a thousand volunteers to work with young people in Australia.

01:27 Liza: That’s incredible. And what’s your role within Raise

01:31 Cheryl: I’m the marketing manager, so I work part time. But yeah I’m responsible for doing their website, social media, graphic design, producing videos. Yeah like across the board all sorts of things and working with the management team and in particular the recruitment team in terms of recruiting our thousand volunteers every year.

That’s just amazing. That’s so cool. So Cheryl, can you share the projects that we work together? How did that come about?

02:07 Cheryl: Yeah we worked on an animated video together and the idea behind that was that this was the first time that we’re going to do a dedicated recruitment campaign for the thousand volunteers and we wanted to obviously drive them to the website to sign up and raise their hand to volunteer.

The idea with the animated video is that we wanted to show people the easy steps to becoming a qualified Raise mentor because we have…it’s a very easy process but obviously working with children there are some guidelines that we have to adhere by and people have to do a working with children check in a police check. And we wanted to show really easily how these volunteers can sign out to become a qualified right mentor and show them the importance, I guess, of once they raise their hand to mentor how they were really changing the life of the young person in Australia.

And so yeah, we worked on an animated video that will sit on a dedicated page on our website to help with recruitment and the idea, I guess, is to eliminate all of those questions and emails from the team, the mentors support team, in people asking questions and just streamline the process. So yeah, I think the video that we’ve produced is really going to do that.

03:28 Liza: Awesome. I remember in our first conversations especially with the recruitment team, one of the challenges was people tend to ask the same questions over and over again, wasn’t it?

03:42 Cheryl: Yeah that’s right. People ask the same questions because, I guess, they’re nervous too. I mean raising your hand to volunteer with a young person can be, you know, a little unsettling at the beginning because of what does it mean, what do I have to do. You know, working with children as I said the checks are in place so they ask a lot of question which is understandable. But we wanted to have this 3 minute video, 2-3 minute video that clearly showed how people could sign up to be a Raise mentor and really show how easy that process is. Of course, the team is still there to answer any questions and there will be a phone interview. But all of that is in the animated videos so I think it’s fantastic.

Awesome. Great. So can you maybe share what was your experience like you and us working together?

04: 34 Cheryl: Yeah yeah. Look I can only say that you and your team were absolutely amazing. I’ll be totally honest with you, this is the first time that I’ve been involved in putting together an animated video but I really learned a lot from the process and especially working with you. You are very helpful every step of the way. And you’re also very open to feedback which made the whole process a lot easier and streamlined because I didn’t feel you know nervous about going, ‘Oh, I want to change this and I want to change that’. But I do now understand the real I guess the process that you go through. There are particular steps that have to come before other steps to make sure that the video’s, you know, on track like character styling and voice overs and all of that.

So yeah I’m really, really thankful and grateful that you sort of held my hand through the whole process. But in saying that I was, you know, with my background I was clear what we wanted to achieve too. So you were also very open minded when it came to feedback which is the type of people that I love working with because obviously I want to make sure that the end result is, you know, as best as it can be.

05:42 Liza: Yeah absolutely. I mean working with you on this project, I was excited because I know that, you know, the impact your organization has to young people and that’s something we’re passionate about. And I also love how clear you guys were on the outcome that you want to achieve, the look and feel, and you know on our side, yeah, it took quite a few alteration. But the great thing is, you know, we got stretch along the way. You know, we achieved something that got to the outcome that you guys wanted. So I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed the process. So thank you for that.

And I guess you know the last question I have is there could be people watching this video who is thinking, ‘Oh, I want to do animation for our business’. You know, having gone through what you’ve gone through, what would be your recommendation for them?

06:35 Cheryl: Oh yeah. Well, firstly I would definitely recommend that animation is so valuable in terms of being able to get a process or a large amount of information over to a target audience in a short amount of time. I think animated videos is the way of the world, as we all know. But there’s so much out there in the marketplace. To get a cut through in the busy marketplace, I think the first thing animated videos is definitely do that.

And I think you touched on that just before, in terms of being really clear on what you want to achieve and I work with my colleague, Sharell who heads up the mentor recruitment team and, you know, she’s really thorough and that was fantastic working with her because as you said you came to the first meeting and she had already a process flow and everything in terms of what have had to happen.

So I think the clearer you can be in the brief, and the better the result is at the end. And I think the things that we tweaked along the way were very much about character styling because you know we’re working in a sensitive market. I guess with young people, we want to make sure faces are friendly and teeth are bright and colours are bright. So yeah, you know…

07:52 Liza: The right smile.

07:54 Cheryl: The right smile! Exactly! But you know, we don’t have large budgets being a not for profit. But my goal is to be able to do a series of these moving forward so to tell our story and to get information across to our target audience in a very entertaining, I guess, format. But yeah, in a very quick snippet through through videos.

08:21 Liza: Yeah. Nice and succinct. Awesome Cheryl. Thank you so much for that. And, you know, once again really appreciate the opportunity and I wish you guys all the best of what you do for the young adults of Australia.

08:33 Cheryl: Thank you so much. It’s been lovely working with you.

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