Inspire Action

A Familiar Face in the Washington Post

Chris Ammon — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 22:16:39 +0000

Full disclosure: I still subscribe to the paper version of the paper.
When I snapped open the Metro section today I was surprised to see a long-time Mind & Media client staring back at me. Dr. Matt Friedman, the Executive Director of VA’s National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, was profiled by the Partnership for Public Service as part of a series about career civil servants.

I say we’ve been working with NCPTSD a long time, but it’s a blip compared to how long Dr. Friedman has been committed to helping Veterans with PTSD. As the article says, he’s been working with Veterans since before there was such a diagnosis as PTSD; 40 years, to be exact. His dedication to Veterans is captured in this bit from the article:

“There is something so compelling and worthwhile and so important about trying to help people whose lives have been changed by their willingness to make a sacrifice,” said Friedman of his primary work with veterans. “Some have suffered greatly because of this willingness and are no longer the same person that they were. I just wanted to help them pick up the pieces.”

Amen to that! Mind & Media is proud to have provided multiple online multimedia presentation to the National Center for PTSD, including a professional educational series and three presentations created to help families learn about and deal with PTSD. Our Veterans deserve the best, indeed.

Video Vault: Blast from the Past

Kristal Farmer — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 18:53:31 +0000

After rolling up our sleeves and getting dirty working for the Army Environmental Center, our video team sanitized thoroughly and donned some scrubs to work with Inova’s Alexandria Community Hospital. We produced a short video highlighting the fascinating history of the hospital and the many wonderful services that are available to the community.

This video showcases many of the innovative procedures performed at the Center and the superior level of customer service offered by the staff of the hospital. Our team visited the hospital and through the kind participation of both staff and patients, was able to capture the doctor/nurse and patient relationship during three phases of the process: preparation, procedure and recovery. Check out the video below:

Using Video to Sidestep the Apple vs Adobe Stalemate

Chris Ammon — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 13:53:16 +0000

I remember when I first posted a video online. It was probably 1998, and my video production clients had just started inquiring about how get their shiny new video on their shiny new website. Those postage stamp-sized videos were 280 x 210 pixels and blazed along the mighty Internet super highway at about 38 kilobits a second. The clients clamored to see them, but rarely could straight away. “You need to get that plug-in and then restart your machine. Oh, you’re on a mac, you need this other plug-in and we need to encode it differently. We’ll offer two versions…at least.” Online video was more an exercise in patience than content consumption. Everyone wanted online video, but there were myriad road blocks, from bandwidth to delivery systems. It’s incredible to think how far things have come in 15 years.

Relentless competition pushed the online video industry to achieve great things. Competition is great, for sure, but, frankly, at some point, monopoly can make life simpler. When Flash became the powerhouse of rich media creation and delivery, it just made development easier, period. Sure Silverslight showed up and RealMedia has always been strong in closed settings, like universities, but by and large you could count on users to have a recent version of Flash player so they could see your content. For us, and our clients, last few years have been hassle-free. We’ve been creating Flash-based presentations—well designed, narrated, animated, including embedded videos–for public consumption, will much success. Even issues with accessibility have largely been tackled by Flash so our government clients are on board with Flash as a delivery tool. Federal clients are not early adopters of technology, I realize, so bear with me as I move with them away from the fossil that is Internet Explorer 6 to where this post is going.

This post, and our clients, are going mobile, to tablets and phones, and without i-naming names, the big boy in that space doesn’t like Flash (or Flash’s parent, Adobe). Federal clients that were forever locked to PCs and Internet Explorer are not only adopting more varied devices, but I also find that they are more eager to make their content available to the myriad devices used by their audiences. It’s a little bit like being back in 1997 again. Instead of Mac or PC, RealPlayer or Quicktime, it’s Android or iPhone, HTML5 or Flash. As I’m working through how I can give my clients the content they want delivered to as wide an audience as possible, I find myself heading back to my roots; to video.

What was once so hard to deliver is becoming the easiest. With amazing delivery services out there, like Limelight and Vimeo, to name a couple we use, it’s easy to create one video that is available across most—dare I say all—devices. Rather than develop a multimedia presentation in Flash, mixing narration, animation and video, why not just build the whole thing in the edit suite and deliver one big video?

One glaring reason is interactivity. Stand alone video is linear, so interactivity would be tricky, if not impossible, without some surrounding interface (HTML or Flash) or controlling mechanism (like a DVD player). Aside from that, though, if your content is linear, stand alone video might just be the answer.

E-Learning Prerequisite: Take a Walk in the Woods

Chris Ammon — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 20:27:35 +0000

I read in The Wall Street Journal about a study that says the best way to rest and rejuvenate a tired brain is to take a walk, in nature specifically. It’s better than a walk in the city and better than just relaxing with a cup of coffee.

Being in nature, the research shows, helps your brain get ready to pay attention and remember things, and that sounds like a perfect state of mind for learning, eh?

If you’re developing e-learning that really has to teach, as opposed to simply “check the box”, I’m thinking you might add, “take a hike” to the list of your course prerequisites!

Simplifying The .gov Landscape Is Not So Simple

Chris Ammon — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 18:56:38 +0000

As perhaps the first agency to respond to a June 13 directive to improve online services, the Energy Department just shut down a stand-alone news service site (energyempowers.gov), folding the content into the Energy.gov redesign. You can read about that on nextgov.

Collapsing separate, focused websites into larger, more general sites may not always be the way to go. Sure, it might, might save money, but at what cost to usability or to brand recognition? For example, when the National Center for PTSD was rolled up under the main VA.gov domain, not only did their acronym (brand name) vanish from their URL, but their specific content got surrounded by a ton of irrelevant VA content as their site got dropped into the VA content management system wrapper. That may simplify the VA’s Web presence, but does nothing to simplify the task of navigating that enormous site for information on PTSD.

Beyond usability challenges, moving several distinct programs under one single domain also brings up challenges with content management. One contractor may be creating content for a specific program office initiative, but since they don’t hold the web hosting contract of the larger .gov entity they can’t easily post or update the content they create. We run into that too often. Technical specifications of the primary .gov web server can stalemate a website that would, if allowed to run in another environment, be serving the public as intended. Instead, months vanish from the calendar while program offices and contractors, with no partnerships in place, and separate contracts to honor, negotiate which group must accommodate the other. Instead of focused, nimble contracts, and websites, the agency gets one giant, clunky website (plus one giant web hosting contract).

So while I applaud most efforts to reduce government waste and right the financial ship, I can’t help but hesitate when I read agencies are being encouraged to collapse sites, that might currently do a great job serving a niche purpose or audience, into often already super-sized .gov parent websites.

Farm Food Blog

Jill Nienhiser — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 19:46:35 +0000

I’m pleased to announce the launch of my own blog, Farm Food Blog. My blog will discuss farm foods as well as profile farms and farmers, and the plants and animals that live there. I’ve been maintaining westonaprice.org and realmilk.com for the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF) since 2001, so this is an opportunity to write from a personal perspective about all that I’ve learned about nutrient-dense foods and sustainable agriculture over the years.

I aimed to set my blog up “right” from the start, using lessons learned I’ve gathered from others. I spent time choosing the name and URL, paid for an attractive design, installed Google Analytics and Feedburner from the start, and integrated from the get-go with corresponding Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr accounts.

Happily, via my WAPF connections, my blog was picked up immediately by the Real Food Media (RFM) network with 13 featured bloggers currently. RFM is a blog network focused on whole, natural, nutrient-dense food. They carefully vet advertisers and provide automated banner ads for my site so I can focus on writing while having approved advertising to help my site pay for itself. My blog posts go out in the RFM summary emails daily, exposing my content to a much wider audience than I am able to garner for myself, especially in these early days.

RFM also provides a forum for featured bloggers to connect and share ideas and lessons learned. Some of the bloggers have been blogging for a number of years and have become profitable–in fact, one blogger supports her spouse and child via her blogging and their joint management of a farmers market. In addition to advertising revenue via click-through from the free content, she sells online classes, recipe cards, and menu plans.

It is great to see how social media tools like blogs are helping nonprofits disseminate their message, and helping entrepreneurs promote nutrient-dense, sustainable food.

Video Vault: Award-Winning Broadcast Programming

Chris Ammon — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 16:31:01 +0000

This month’s Video Vault takes us back to 2002, when just about all hands on deck were engrossed in creating an original broadcast television show. Parent Sense was a magazine-style show providing information on raising healthy families. Mind & Media partnered with The Dr. Spock Company to produce the series of eight half-hour episodes in just three months. To meet the demands of the tight schedule, we expanded our video team by drawing on the production expertise of people from other departments. They quickly turned into camera operators, directors, and producers, making it possible for Mind & Media to field multiple video teams across the country simultaneously. All eight episodes of Parent Sense aired on public television stations in over 90 percent of the nation’s markets (including the top five markets), and the series earned two prestigious industry awards for its high-quality information and production values. Here’s a clip from our award-winning episode about the importance of play.

Read more about Parent Sense in our website portfolio.

Another Classic from the Video Vault

Jason Hunter — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 19:17:58 +0000

Here’s another oldie but goodie from the Mind & Media video vault. In 1999 we created and produced a 39-part, ½ hour news magazine style series for public television called “Frontiers of Medicine.” The series focused on cutting-edge research, technologies and treatments impacting almost every area of medicine, from new synthetic skin for burn victims to innovative intrauterine (“open fetal”) surgery designed to correct deformities like Spina Bifida. The series highlighted innovative treatments performed at leading medical research institutions, hospitals and universities throughout the United States, such as: the National Institutes of Health, Sloan Kettering, Children’s Hospital, UCLA, Harvard, the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic and John Hopkins. The series, which ran from 1999-2002, was shown via public television stations nationally, ran in the top 19 out of 20 television markets and reached over 90% of all American households.

To learn more about the campaign, visit our portfolio page here: http://www.mindandmedia.com/frontiers-of-med.html

From the Video Vault

Jason Hunter — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 21:31:09 +0000

For our inaugural “From the Video Vault” post, we went deeeeep into the vault. This video was produced as part of a public information campaign that we were involved with from 1997-2000.

As a result of the Panama Canal Treaty of 1977, signed by President Carter and Panamanian General Omar Torrijos, responsibility for the Panama Canal and everything associated with its operation was to revert to Panamanian hands by the year 2000. Working as a subcontractor, Mind & Media helped the Treaty Implementation and Plan Agency (TIPA) to conduct an awareness campaign aimed at educating American and Panamanian citizens about the US Army’s environmental/public safety efforts on former range lands being returned to Panama under the Treaty.

Videos (several of them in both Spanish and English) were only one type of media that were used to carry out the campaign. Mind & Media also used its in-house production facilities to create:

Branding language and visuals
Easy-to-understand iconic signs and publications
Print materials in English and Spanish
Public service messages for Panamanian radio and television (Spanish-language)

Enjoy the video:

To learn more about the campaign, visit our portfolio page here: http://www.mindandmedia.com/panama-canal-transfer.html