What was the scope of their involvement?
We’re working with The DVI Group on a small batch of these training videos now, but we potentially will work with them on 400–500 videos. It’s a large project for our company. The videos include a host or instructor who delivers information that is then mixed in with everything from 2D graphics, 3D graphics, technical graphic drawings, and other components. Each of the videos DVI is making is 8–15 minutes long. We’re starting to work through a big topic list of materials.
DVI is pretty much doing this project end to end for us. We’re providing the assets to be filmed, including employees on our end, and DVI is casting actors and actresses for the roles that are not the people we provide. The host instructor is an actor; we decided that would be a better move for us. DVI is taking care of all of that. They’re doing all the graphic production, filming, and full support. Right now, we’re basically doing a lot of technical scripting and providing technical support for them so that they can interpret the scripts and know what they’re looking at.
The key reason we sought a third-party vendor for this material had to do with the changing demographics company. A lot of people will be retiring soon and will be replaced with younger people.
We knew that we couldn’t make a video that’s going to keep people engaged and interested and leverage modern techniques and graphic design because of that difference in age. Over a five-month period, we used our corporate vendor to build a couple of prototypes, and we noticed that all the creative ideas came from the minds of the subject matter group that was putting these together rather than the vendor doing that. We realized right away that our internal vendor wasn’t investigating our needs, but DVI did. They did a deep dive into our manual sets and our culture. They interviewed our employees. They did a lot of work to set the stage. And then they went away and came back with a bunch of creative ideas on how the information could be presented. That, for us, has been the biggest return on investment so far, because a lot of people offered to do the filming, production, editing, etc. However, DVI was one of the few companies that really understood what we needed on the creative side. To make a long story short, DVI did the whole creative process, and then brought back ideas and storyboards. They did a bunch of demonstrations and examples with different formats, and then we sat down, talked them through and refined their ideas to get where we are now.
How did you come to work with The DVI Group?
We went through a pretty laborious process to hire DVI. We started collecting information about national companies that could do this kind of work. We wanted to be able to work with them closely. We narrowed it down to about seven providers, and then we started with phone call interviews. We narrowed down those to about three to five and then we met with them and asked for their proposals. Early on in that process, I think the subject matter strongly felt that DVI was bringing the creative stuff to the table that we wanted and were interested in, and they were doing a lot of work upfront to research what we needed and what the best way to deliver the material was. There were cheaper options in some of the other companies, but they didn't have the impressive background experience in training videos that DVI seemed to have. We narrowed it down based on what we saw as their ability to scale up quickly and come up with the creative process that we were missing.
Some of the other divisions in our company saw some of the work and material that DVI was doing and how quickly and efficiently they could do it. Because of that, I think they’ve been sucked into at least one other project at our company where we had to film our CEO giving an introduction because we knew we couldn't do it internally.
What is the status of this engagement?
We brought The DVI Group on board the project in November 2016, though we were doing some investigating of them before that. We’re working with them now, and they’re contracted with us to do what we’re calling Phase 1 of this overall project — 108 separate videos, 8 minutes to 15 minutes long — over the next year. DVI might be able to work for us for the next couple of years.
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