Client Insights - Belmont Hill
The importance of video in telling their school’s story
We recently sat down with Melissa Larocque, the Senior Associate Director of Admission and Financial Aid at Belmont Hill School, to get her thoughts on the importance of video in telling their school story… and how they approached curating updated content for their storytelling. We invite you to watch highlights from that conversation in the above video.
To view the series of videos we’ve created for Belmont Hill, please visit:
Video Transcript:
My name is Melissa Larocque. I'm the Senior Associate Director of Admission and Financial Aid at Belmont Hill School.
Our target market are boys, you know, our preteen and teenage boys primarily. And what do they connect with? They connect with video and media in a way that's really strong and authentic. And they're smart. They're smart consumers.
So, we really felt like it was important to be able to create assets that speak to them.
One of the unique things about being at a school for boys is that a lot of people aren't aware of what happens here. So, we have a very unique charge to be able to express that and have people understand what happens within these walls.
In person is the best way that we can market and advertise ourselves, but if people can't come to campus, then our biggest challenge is to have people see and understand what happens here. And so, we found that the best way to do that is through video.
At Belmont Hill, one of the unique challenges that we had is that we did not have an existing video library. And so part of what was really appealing about having Copper Hound come in and film for us is that we were able to start to curate this library of footage, and it's just something that will continue to grow and grow, the more collect and the more we curate.
We're fortunate that we're in an area where there are a lot of great schools. And so part of the biggest piece of our challenge is that we need to go beyond that and talk about what makes Belmont Hill different, or what our DNA is, and how we properly communicate that. Having a sustainable relationship with a film crew that can come in and sort of build on that understanding and build on that trust and get to that nuance is really invaluable.
That understanding and that give and that take, that's where kind of the magic happens. And so for us, it was really important that we felt like the partnership that we were gonna enter into would be a thoughtful one and one where we really take time on that storyboarding.
One of the things that allowed us to plan for this first big project was that we knew it was not just a one and done project. We knew that we were going to have assets that would last for multiple years. So the way that we looked at it was that we were investing in the upfront cost of this, but the fallout of that for years to come is that we're able to pull together really professional, really great quality finished products for not as much money as that initial investment.
So much of what makes a school unique is intangible. It's a feeling. It's such a challenge to be able to share with the outside world what happens within these walls because nobody experiences it except for the boys. So to be able create something and edit it together as a compilation of what a boy experiences in a typical day here is just really fun and it's really exciting to put that out.