Localization upstages production values in global development videos

It’s easy to believe that high-quality production standards are always important when creating videos. For people born in the more recent generations, we are accustomed to watching videos with fancy production values and glossy imagery. While this might improve the overall viewing experience for entertainment purposes, illuminAid and other global development organizations have learned that it’s not the most important aspect when creating video for educational purposes. Rather, it’s the localization of content that fuels knowledge dissemination and behavior change when disseminating video content to communities in low and middle-income countries.

While some International Development Executives believe professionally-created video is better than locally-made video, even if the videos are dubbed or subtitled, we have not found this to be true. illuminAid is a staunch advocate of hyper-localized video that resonates better with the audience and can spur emotions that can catalyze positive behavior change in key aspects of life, such as health/disease prevention, civic engagement, agriculture, education, etc.

For instance, a video created by a local NGO in Africa will have much more impact on their community than a professionally-created video produced in an environment that's foreign to them. Localized videos featuring beneficiaries from the community are more believable than videos produced in the United States with highly modern production values. illuminAid has countless examples of these kinds of videos posted on our website and YouTube channel.

Relevance can often be established from recognizable geography and culture as well. For our international development work, it is of paramount importance that beneficiaries in impoverished areas of the world can understand and relate to videos they see from NGOs trained by illuminAid on video production. That way, positive behavior change can be achieved, and communities can become resilient as they uplift themselves out of abject poverty.

illuminAid would be happy to talk with any NGO about how to incorporate community-led, highly localized video programming in their work with beneficiaries in the developing world. To learn more, please contact us via our website. We would embrace any opportunity to discuss how this communications approach can work at scale for your international programming.