Behind the Recommendations
When you come to TruScribe, we don’t expect you to know everything about whiteboard video. All we ask is a chance to tell your story for you, in the best way we know—and that way is whiteboard. This means that we expect to get questions from our clients about our process, and that we pride ourselves on being able to make recommendations. So let’s think a little about the ‘why’ behind our recommendations, and the logic that drives our opinions on best practices.
Our recommendations and suggestions are not instructions or demands—they’re best practices, based on our expertise and knowledge of our field. When our recommendations run contrary to a client request, suggestion, or question, we make sure our clients know that we’re not saying “no”—we’re interested in more information. That’s why our first question is something close to “Can you tell me what you hope to accomplish with this decision?” or “What effect are you hoping to achieve with this choice?”
With more information, we can provide our best-informed alternatives (if, indeed, we would recommend a different course of action). We’re always trying to accomplish the same goals that our clients are: effective communication, high engagement, great retention. Let’s get a bit more specific, with some background and a few examples.
Recommendations from TruScribe come frequently from the design principles of Scribology, a set of guidelines we follow in content creation that neuroscientific and brain science studies have proven to be effective boosters of engagement and retention.
Our recommendations also come from a more general adherence to simplicity. This means that the more quickly and universally understood a visual, the more likely we are to promote it (all things being equal). Ours is an approach that avoids unnecessary complexity and ornamentation in favor of effective message transmission.
That last clause—“in favor of effective message transmission”—undergirds every recommendation we give, and every choice we make. In our blog posts and videos about Scribology, we explain why the principles work. Of course, we don’t expect every client to come to us with a perfect understanding of those principles, and are happy to discuss at length any element on which a client might have questions.
A perfect example of this is accent color. TruScribe best practices involve a single accent color, as this allows that color to become a powerful focal tool, drawing the eye to significant parts of the frame, as well as taking on thematic significance. All things that are green, for example, are not only important to the understanding of the frame, but directly related to the client’s brand.
The recommendation to maintain that use of a single color typically comes up when we’re asked the question “Can we have multiple accent colors?” Our response is, as described above, first a question: “What would you hope to accomplish with multiple colors?” We find the answer to our question usually has to do with maintaining interest and engagement, and a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses manner of impulse to be as exciting and eye-grabbing as many other online videos.
Knowing this reason helps us explain our recommendation. Having one accent color is actually far more effective at creating and maintaining engagement, we can explain, and meet them right where they already are with a solution that accomplishes the goal they have in mind. And as we explain that when every color “means something,” none of them have any significance, we can see our clients agree with the reasoning behind (and strength of) our suggestion.
We know that our clients are clever enough to understand our design principles and content creation methods, and this is why we don’t tell them what to do. With their intent understood, we can have a discussion of how we’d accomplish it—and have accomplished similar goals many times in the past—and the client remembers that they hired us for the very expertise they’re receiving.
We want to make the video you want to show. Our recommendations spring directly from that desire, never from an interest to change things or alter your message because it’s “how we do things.” We do things the way you need us to, to ensure that your message is as effective as it can be.
So if you’ve got a topic in mind and a story to tell, engage us! Got some ideas and you’d like to hear our thoughts? We’d love for you to ask us your best question. We’d love to give you our thoughts, and get to work on bringing your message to life!