The Riverside Economic Development Commission and Riverside TV have launched a new initiative to market the village and they are looking to enlist residents to help them do that.
Throughout the month of October – and the months thereafter – they’re inviting people to share photos and short videos to a web page that’s been specially created for that purpose.
Called “This is Riverside” the commissions are looking to regularly edit together photos and videos that represent “everyday” Riverside – from family firsts, to youth sports and activities, wildlife, local events, your hidden gems as well as submissions that are season/month-specific – like Halloween and fall colors.
The initiative grew out of a joint meeting on Sept. 20 of the two village advisory commissions to find out in what ways each could leverage the other to help bring Riverside to a wider audience.
“One idea was crowd sourcing media to get people involved,” said Jennifer Fournier, the chairwoman of the Economic Development Commission. “We thought it would be a neat way to express how special our village is.”
The first video, featuring photos and videos collected in October will launch in early November. Fournier said she hoped new videos could be rolled out monthly, though the community response will dictate that at some level.
Anyone 18 or older can upload photos and short videos (5 to 30 seconds long) by visiting this web page. You’ll need to provide your name and email when making a submission.
The Economic Development Commission and its members have begun promoting the initiative on social media, which is where the videos will be shared as widely as possible, hopefully with the help of residents and businesses.
Delivering the videos will be the biggest challenge for the commissions, since there’s no budget for promoting the videos.
“We’ve got to figure out that strategy, because we want to make sure these aren’t going to fall into a black hole,” Fournier said. “Riverside TV will be helpful with creative direction and we’re going to leverage their expertise for getting the flavor of Riverside. Over the next year we hope to investigate the media relations part.”
Colin Hughes, chairman of the Riverside TV Commission, said the project “seemed like a natural fit.”
“If we can boost [the videos] by leveraging Facebook and Twitter to reach more people, we can position ourselves in a greater way to reach more people,” Hughes said.
Even though it was rolled out just over a week ago, Hughes said they’ve already started getting submissions, “so the engagement is higher than people thought it would be.”
Riverside TV will process submissions as they are received before editing everything down to a short video, whose lengths have not been set in stone at this point. They will also add music and titles.
“In theory [editing videos] could go faster that most videos,” Hughes said. “We’re hoping to use as [many submissions] as we get as possible.”
While this is the first collaboration between the two commissions, it may not be the last. According to Hughes, the two commissions discussed collecting its archival material in one place and making it easier for the Economic Development Commission to access those materials for other marketing initiatives.
Riverside TV is in the process of acquiring an archival drive that can be backed up to the Amazon Glacier cloud system. Right now video is saved onto a series of external hard drives.
“It’s a much cleaner, safer way to archive video,” Hughes said.
