Exigencies

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In order to fulfill graduation requirements for the MAPC program at Clemson, I had to either write a thesis or complete a client project; I chose the latter. The following provide context for my deliverables for the project:

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Sponsor-focused Video: In order to maintain the Summer Enrichment Camp each year, the Gordon Community and Cultural Center needs long term donors to support the camp. The Center needs some type of media in order to reach and persuade these potential donors.

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Recruitment Video: After completing six grade, students graduate from the camp and some move on to become teacher assistants. However, in order to have camp, the Center must have students who attend it. Therefore, the Camp needs additional students to enroll in the camp for the upcoming and future camps. The Camp needs some type of media that can serve as a recruitment tool for prospective students.

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Funder-focused Video: In order to thrive within the Abbeville community, the Summer Enrichment Camp needs the support of its community’s citizens. Although many are aware of the Center, more awareness needs to be raised to garner additional financial support. Also, the camp lacks volunteer teachers to teach the students each summer, so some type of media is needed to encourage qualified teachers to volunteer each summer and to raise awareness.

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Social Media Strategy Document: The Gordon Community and Cultural Center needs several up to date platforms to display the media that will be created in order to raise awareness and receive financial and volunteer support. However, the Center’s Facebook page is outdated and it does not have another active social media page. Additionally, the Center needs a platform on which it can network with other organizations. Therefore, the Center needs a social media strategy in order to reach out to various audiences.

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Audiences

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Lloyd Bitzer states that “a rhetorical audience [is] distinguished from a body of mere hearers or readers: […] a rhetorical audience consists only of those persons who are capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change” (8). The audience for each product created was based on Bitzer’s perspective on the rhetorical audience-those who had the power to change the exigence that each of the forms of media were designed to address:

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Sponsor-focused Video: Potential financial sponsors for the Summer Enrichment Camp

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Recruitment Video: Potential, future students and parents of prospective students of the Camp

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Funder-focused Video: Potential, future volunteers and potential financial contributors of the Camp, such as individual donors, foundations, churches, community members, and parents

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Social Media Strategy Document: The Executive Director of the Center and client for this project, Janice Carr

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Rhetorical Strategies

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John Poulakos states that “some of the factors contributing to one’s sense of the timely and the appropriate are one’s discretionary powers, the cultural norms in which he participates, his reading of the situation he wishes to address, his image of his audience, and his prediction of the potential effects of his words on the listeners” (42). All of these factors guided my creation process of the video and social media strategy deliverables. A large portion of my video creation process heavily followed Poulakos definition of rhetoric: “[…] the art of which seeks to capture in opportune moments that which is appropriate and attempts to suggest that which is possible” (36). For the two finance driven videos, (sponsors and funders) my goal was to utilize the interviews to capture what I believed to be persuasive moments that would first, give my audience an accurate view of the Summer Enrichment Camp, and second, encourage my audience to imagine how much more improved the Camp would be with their financial support. Additionally, Poulakos states that “the rhetorician tells them what they could be, brings out in them futuristic versions of themselves, and sets before them both goals and the directions which lead to those goals” (43). For each of the videos, at the very end, I included contact information for viewers to get in touch with the Executive Director of the Center as an attempt to display to my audience that they too can become contributors of the success of the center that was just presented to them in the video, just by reaching out.

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In Visual Explanations, Edward Tufte states that “displays of evidence implicitly but powerfully define the scope of the relevant, as presented data are selected from a larger pool of material” (43). Although he is referring to quantitative statistical visual data in this particular instance, his statement also applies to my video and selection process. I had to sift through all of the interviews conducted and choose the most relevant and persuasive from this “large pool.” He goes on to say that “Like magicians, chartmakers reveal what they choose to reveal. That selection […] whether partisan, hurried, haphazard, uniformed, thoughtful, wise-can make all the difference, determining the scope of the evidence and thereby setting the analytic agenda that leads to a particular decision” (43). Similar to how chartmakers determine what information is crucial enough to be included in their applicable visuals, I carefully chose splices of video from interviews for each video that I felt what lead my audience towards supporting the Summer Enrichment Camp.

 

A major goal for these videos was to have my audiences personally identify with the Center and Camp. As a result, I began each of the videos (excluding the recruitment video) with an introduction to the Center and Camp so as to immediately introduce my audience to the values and goals of the Center and Camp. In “The Rhetoric of Identification and the Study of Organizational Communication,” George Cheney states that “an individual who is inclined to identify with an organization will be open to persuasive efforts from various sources within that unit” (146). This is initiated by the organization “communicating its values, goals, and information” (147). My goal for the introduction was to have my audience automatically identify as being a part of the organization through shared values and goals (education) so they would be inclined to continue to watch the rest of the videos. The beginning of the videos also feature a picture of the building in which the Summer Enrichment Camp is housed and the name of the Center and Camp (and the Sponsor video features the Center’s logo). I included these “unifying symbols” to stress “the significance of its name [and] logo” to not only introduce the setting for the Camp, but to also add another layer of identification (Cheney 155).

 

In the sponsors-focused video, I utilized the common ground technique Cheney discusses through “equating [the Camp] with others in an overt manner” through splices of the Executive Director’s interview (148). This can be heard at the very end of the video where the Executive Director says words such as “we’re and our” indicating a shared connection with the Camp and future sponsors of the Camp. Cheney states that “the assumed ‘we’ is both a subtle and powerful identification strategy because it often goes unnoticed” (154). I wanted to have my audience connect with the Camp, but also not feel as if they were being bullied into supporting the camp. Incorporating these unified words helped to subtly convey this message.

 

Similar to this approach, in the funders-focused video, through the parent interviews, I utilized the “Praise by Outsiders” tactic Cheney also discusses. Although he is referring to employee and workplace relationships, his statements also apply to the parent and audience relationships present in my video. He states that these are “techniques to encourage the employee to identify with the organization by representing the view of others” (152). He goes on to say that “Implicit in the statements is the idea that employees should hold the same positive view of their employer that actors in the environment do” (152). Hearing praise about an organization from someone within the organization can sometimes appear to be biased, so by including parent interviews in both the funders-focused and recruitment video, my goal was to convey to my viewers that not only do those who run the organization have this positive view about the Camp, but outsiders do as well, which implicitly pushes them to do the same.

 

Additionally, within the funders-focused video, I chose to include a snippet from Sam Logan’s, one of the grandparent interviewees, interview in which he implies “identification by antithesis” (Cheney 153). In this particular clip, Mr. Logan talks about how students often fall behind in their studies during the summertime but how the camp is fighting against this summertime lag. Cheney states that “identification is evident […] when employees are urged to ‘unite’ against a common ‘enemy’ usually some threat from the environment. In this way, […] an explicit dissociation from one target implies association with another” (153). In this particular case, the “enemy” is summertime student lag, and what this clip implies is that if the audience joins in with the Camp, together they can defeat this “enemy” and ensure students stay afloat in their studies.

 

Finally, all of the videos are composed of diverse narration, images, background music, and the sponsor video even features live video. Ann Marie Seward-Berry states that “movement perception is so essential to our being that, like color, it is registered immediately and automatically by the perceptual system” (46). She goes on to say that “When changes in the visual field occur, they demand our notice because through movement, we are better able to understand the object’s structure and to resolve ambiguities in the environment” (46). So, “whatever moves in any apparently meaningful way in our environment gets our attention” (46). Thus, I chose to include live footage of what was being described by the narrator in the video; by doing this, I aimed to display what was being discussed so as to provide evidence of the speakers’ word in the hopes that it would first capture my audience’s attention, and second, persuade them to financially support the Camp.

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Process

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During the summer, I met with the client, told her what I was capable of producing within the realm of professional communication, and asked her what the Center needed that I could create. She expressed that the Center needed funding and additional students, so we both agreed on me producing many videos to address those different exigencies.

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Sponsor-focused Video:

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Prior to creating this video, I attended the Summer Enrichment Camp for several days in order to interview the Executive Director and a volunteer teacher and capture many pictures and video footage of the camp in action. Next, I created an outline for the video with my audience as the main focus. I modified many of the images used in the video using Adobe Photoshop. Next, I created a draft of the video and sent it to my client; the first draft did not include contact information at the end, so I created another video (the final draft) that fixed some sound issues and featured both contact information and general information about the Center and Camp at the end. I later shared the video with my committee members who also gave me feedback.

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Recruitment Video:

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For this video, I first interviewed several parents in the Abbeville community. Next, I made an outline for the video, created the video, and sent it both to the client (who approved it) and my committee members.

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Funder-focused Video:

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After interviewing the parents, (same interviews from above) I made an outline for the video, created a video, and sent a draft to both the client (who approved it) and my committee members.

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Social Media Strategy Document:

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First, I conducted research about popular social media networks. Next, I used information from my research and personal experience to type out a strategy for the Center. I transferred this information to the Adobe InDesign application and created a document. I exported this document and sent it to both my client and committee members. One of my committee members called to my attention that the document was missing an introduction, so I typed up an introduction to properly introduce the strategy and modified the original, adding the introduction at the beginning of the new document.

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Constraints (artistic proofs)

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Although my client has expressed that it was my best video, (and I tend to agree as well) the funders-focused video was the most challenging to create because there were many exigencies waiting to be addressed in one video. Lloyd Bitzer states that “situations may become weakened in structure due to complexity[…] at a given moment, persons comprising the audience of situation A may also be the audience of situations B, C, and D, [and] the rhetorical audience may be scattered” (12). My client conveyed that she wanted me to address several different audiences in the funders-focused video (potential volunteers, individual donors, foundations, churches, etc.). Creating a video that spoke to each audience persuasively was challenging and may have injured its potential to reach the maximum level of persuasiveness for each distinct audience because it attempts to reach, perhaps, too many people at once.

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(inartistic proofs)

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The biggest constraint for this project was the physical distance between myself and my client. My client resides in Mississippi, and I attend school in South Carolina. Although I would periodically drive to her location, our primarily means of communication was via text message, and sometimes text messages can be misinterpreted, so many times I misinterpreted her desires for certain aspects of the project.

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Reflection