Dorst MediaWorks Pivots During Pandemic, Embraces Clutch for Verified Reviews
Here at Dorst MediaWorks, we know that small businesses make the world go round. In the USA alone, there are 30 million small businesses employing almost 60 million workers. These days, times are tough, especially for small businesses.
We’re like a lot of small businesses: we don’t do a lot of marketing. Our marketing is our work. During the past 15 years, Dorst MediaWorks’ video teams have been to 50+ countries and made hundreds of documentary-style videos for organizations that do good.
But Covid-19 has been a nightmare. It put a stop to travel. Practically overnight, business stopped. We had a few stressful weeks. How could we make videos like we always had?
After all, we tell stories featuring real people: we travel, we spend time with people, we film them. But the pandemic made us explore our own resilience, imagination, and problem-solving to respond to these challenging times.
We had a hot minute to give our clients a good work-around. Some asked for videos made with Zoom interviews, but our initial results were insipid. It was like giving a 5-star chef a microwave for her birthday. It’s not innovative, it’s not special, it’s not good. So don’t do it.
How could we tell stories without spending time with beneficiaries on the ground? Well, check this out:
It turns out that a lot of our normal workflow with our clients at USAID, the World Bank, and other international organizations, is relevant whether we’re traveling the world or quarantined. We pivoted from travel to telling stories in new ways. We wrote scripts that didn’t require in-country footage. We moved our post-production from Premiere to After Effects. We favored photos over footage. We used narration over interviews.
In other words, we changed our identity and the way we work to respond to the unique and stringent constraints of Covid-19.
And it worked. Our last few jobs have had our clients so pleased that they offered to write reviews. For us, as a small business that doesn’t do much marketing, reviews are super important. Google and Yelp are a couple ways to do it. But something we’ve preferred of late is a verified platform like Clutch. They offer a holistic process that gives potential buyers a full look into how vendors operate.
As part of the process, Clutch reaches out to our clients for a 15-minute interview call. Clutch assesses the impact that Dorst MediaWorks has had. We are graded on quality, attention to deadlines, project management skills, and overall price. Then Clutch transcribes and distills the interview into an edited format. For example, take a look at our most recent reviews below:
Another free B2B resource we love is Clutch’s sister site, The Manifest, where you can browse through company projects and see business metrics.
We’re thrilled you’ve read this blog, and are interested in helping small businesses like us! Drop us a line if you’d like to talk about your next big video project. And above all, stay safe and healthy. 😀
