Villagers Media is helping Canada’s faith groups and charitable organizations become a part of the internet TV era.
"As creative marketers we need to refresh our approach to marketing and get past using cold calls, billboard/radio advertising, self-promoting Websites and direct mail as our main strategies of promotion and focus on the more recent and often ignored strategies around story-telling, community-building, communicating powerfully with the goal of evoking emotion."
Ryan Caligiuri, Winnipeg-based marketing specialist. Globe and Mail, January 2010.
For 20 years, Villagers Media Productions has worked with more than three dozen Canadian faith groups and charitable organizations on their conventional TV and video projects.
Now Villagers is working to bring the TV and video assets of these groups to an educational internet TV hub, to be called Global Villagers TV.
Beginning with twelve pioneer groups, GVTV will design and populate individual internet TV sites for each of the participating groups. Each video or program on each of the sites will include a study guide and lesson plan. Once these twelve individual internet TV sites have been launched, we will establish a hub site that links to the twelve sites and makes an overall invitation to educators in key related disciplines – possibly values education, social justice, geography, history - to use the sites and provide feedback and suggestions for the future.
The prime focus of GVTV will be to acquaint students, teachers and lifelong learners with the extraordinary social, spiritual and economic development works of Canadians throughout Canada and the world.
Over time, as these groups form GVTV as a hub of educational TV channels, they will, together, convey a common cause. But the real story will be in the diversity and multitude of individual journeys: the gifted trend-setters and social entrepreneurs who overcame challenges and obstacles to arrive at the forefront of this country's compassionate leadership.
Eventually, GVTV will be user-monetized. Lesson plans with embedded videos will become teasers to offerings of extensive study themes and lesson plans suitable for school board subscriptions and available through catalogues published by major educational materials purveyors. Throughout the short-, medium- and long-term phases of the GVTV roll-out, individual group participants will be able to justify their investment in video production and internet TV site development simply because they are now in the "virtual" space where they need to be. Where those they need to reach can be found. In a language they can hear and feel. With an message they will take in and pass on to others.
