Case Study: NSW Education Standards Authority
How an Australian exam board swapped student acceptance speeches with video messages for hybrid event
70% participation
among audience in just 2 days
120 videos
produced in 30 minutes
Gained 400k
video views in national press
OVERVIEW
Client: New South Wales Education Standards Authority (NESA)
Project: High School Certificate First In Course video acceptance speeches
Type: Community engagement
Summary: The government agency collected student video messages from every top student in the state and compiled them into themed video stories for use during a virtual event.
ABOUT NESA
Driving improvements in student achievement
The New South Wales Education Standards Authority (NESA) is a government authority with the responsibility for the establishment and monitoring of quality teaching, learning, assessment and school standards in the Australian state of New South Wales. It is also the state’s exam board.
The Challenge
Every year the High School Certificate First-In-Course event is the key public relations opportunity of the academic year. The state’s best and brightest high school students, who top their subjects, are made available to media at the annual award ceremony. In 2020, due to the COVID pandemic, NESA made plans for either a wholly- or partly-virtual event. It needed an innovative way to deliver the student acceptance speeches to media. With a very short window between results being announced and the hybrid event, NESA needed a video collection tool that could produce hundreds of branded, captioned videos quickly.
The Solution
The government agency used Vloggi to collect video messages from the 120 First-In-Course students filmed on their own phones in their own homes. The upload link could not be distributed until the results were announced and the videos had to display data from the NESA database including student names, schools and subjects. Over the course of 24 hours, almost 70% of eligible students uploaded virtual acceptance speeches, or video testimonials, for use by NESA in the hybrid event and for media coverage. The agency created 15 compilations grouped by subject area in just 30 minutes. Each video compilation featured professional motion graphics for intro and outro sequences with no video editor required. All videos were made available to media via a public relations portal.
The Result
NESA was able to distribute video compilations and individual student video messages to media across the state. One article, from the largest newspaper in Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald, featured a NESA compilation and recorded over 350,000 unique page impressions. This was a 100,000 rise in page impressions from the same article in 2019. Additionally, over 60 local media in New South Wales used the student videos in their reporting of the top students and over 350 individual video clips, fully branded, were downloaded by individual students for use in their own social media. NESA went on to collect videos from students sharing their inspiration with their peers.
"We see video becoming increasingly important going forward, particularly in allowing each dog owner to share theirs and their pooches’ personal experiences”
Chantel Myers
Senior Communications Officer, NESA
