2019 ASHS Annual Conference

The Horticulture Innovation Lab has created dozens of short videos to highlight horticulture research and its value, sourced from its global network of scientists who are working to advance fruit and vegetable innovations that help smallholder farmers earn more income and better nourish their communities. With research taking place in Africa, Asia and Central America, sending a communications professional from the University of California, Davis, management team to shoot video footage of all of the program’s research projects while they are happening was unrealistic, so finding ways to collect video materials from researchers and creatively distill them into useful, attractive videos became necessary to reach broader audiences online. Domestic extension educators and communicators often face similar challenges with regard to being in multiple parts of a state or region at one time, but the costs and scope of international travel truly required additional ingenuity to find ways to crowdsource footage and has so far yielded three useful approaches with varying outcomes. In 2016, the program made a series of "lightning talk" videos that recreated researchers’ conference presentations, combining audio recordings with timed slides to recreate an essential version of each presentation for viewers who were unable to attend the conference in Cambodia. In 2017, the program trained its researchers in how to shoot their own video footage with smartphones and how to edit video clips into short stories. Then each project team debuted a 2-minute impact-story video at the program’s 2018 conference. In 2019, the program created a series of short video testimonials from stakeholders working with the research teams, to add farmer voices and in-country perspectives to a conference held in Washington, D.C., that was focused on the importance of horticulture. Researchers asked farmers one of three designated questions and supplied simple video clip responses for the program team to edit into a suite of video testimonials from Honduras, Nepal, Guinea, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. This presentation will share useful tips and considerations for creating each of these three types of videos, along with insights from video analytics that show varying rates of interest and success. Other research and extension professionals can use these video techniques to create engaging multimedia content that builds upon these ideas, in order to share their in-person experiences with wider audiences online.