Get the Most Value from Your Virtual Content

Here we are. Virtually or otherwise, we’re creating everything under the sun to stay connected, engaged and current in any way possible while we make the best of these coronavirus workarounds. But as time passes, how great would it be not to have to constantly recreate?

As your organization finds that you are now making recordings of classes, workshops or other virtual projects, be sure to think about reuse for additional revenue. Already have content that you’d like to get second life out of? There’s no time like the present to make that happen. Ready to start creating classes, webinars or online workshops?  Make sure that what you’re spending time and expertise on can be easily applied to both synchronous and asynchronous audiences.

We’ve got so much virtual content. Where does it go?

Take it from an info pro – once you have made recordings or other digital assets, they often tend to stay in the native application where they were created or pushed to. YouTube videos are in the YouTube cloud, Zoom cloud recordings are in the zoom cloud, insta content in instagram, etc., etc.

When you stop and think about it, the amount of content we are creating continues to expand while at the same time the possible whereabouts of the files also mushrooms. Before you can begin to re-purpose and monetize your recordings, you first have to know what you have and where it’s living. If I ask 10 people in an organization where their files live, the answers tend to be pretty labyrinthine. Work with your team members to determine file locations that you know of now, and then together make a purposeful team decision about where you really want these collections to reside.

How do we decide what virtual recording assets to keep?

To make that determination, first I highly recommended that you pause and reflect on the priorities of your mission. How do these recorded assets showcase your purpose? Tell your story to your stakeholders? What’s the best reuse audience that you can market these assets to? Who could benefit the most from access to your knowledge? Once you put some creativity toward this strategic pause, you will begin to think of partners, bundles, and collections that group well with one another, and how best to market these in support of your mission’s strategies.

If you have recordings that don’t align with your target audiences or your strategic direction, then these may not be assets to collect for ongoing learning platforms. Be sure to evaluate any digital assets by records management policies before taking further action.

As you begin to be inspired by the idea of monetizing the genius that is your organization, you’ll soon see that aggregating these collections or individual virtual events and then putting them behind a paywall where you can generate income will certainly help you to distill essential clarity from unknown chaos. This approach saves your organization time and money while generating additional income on reuse of recordings.

Here are the big picture steps to help you scale use and reuse of these knowledge assets. You’ll need to 1) know what you have as relevant content, where it lives now, or create content that serves a scalable purpose; 2) decide where best to house these files for catalog-like registration access by users; and 3) regularly review and select content chunks or bundles to re-purpose, market, or highlight on your web site based on your organizational goals as they develop. Finally, ensure that your teams continue to follow an explicit and well thought-out workflow to save everyone time and so that valuable recordings are not lost in an unknown location requiring you to recreate them.