Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

We rolled out a new online registration system for diocesan convention. The confusion and questions started almost immediately. We want to offer good customer service, to be helpful and responsive to parishioners. But we also wanted to find a way to pre-empt some of the questions so that we wouldn’t be consumed with e-mails and calls from 500 registrants.

Enter screencasting, this week’s favorite solution. Screencasting allows you to capture the computer screens and mouse movement as well as audio. This is different than a screen shot, which captures a moment in time. A screencast enables you to create a step-by-step, instructional video that walks users through the actual process.

I started experimenting with free screencast software, like Audacity and CamStudio.  I’ll admit that my patience was short for a steep learning curve. Because this isn’t something I plan to use every day, I wanted a program that was easy and intuitive. While I’m sure both of these free offerings could work fine for the casual user, I kept bumping into problems.

I decided the adage, you get what you pay for, was surfacing here, so I did some more research to find another screencast program. Ultimately I chose Camtasia Studio. In surfing today, I noticed that the price is about $300. A deep online digger may be able to find older (and cheaper) versions available for download. Nevertheless, I think for some organizations, this is a good investment.

Ironically, I turned to YouTube and screencasts to show me how to use the new program. (As a side note, I do this pretty often when I’m stuck with a piece of software, from figuring out the mail merge to learning something new about a spreadsheet. There are lots of smart people who have posted great step-by-step screencasts on YouTube). 

When I started my own screencast, there were a few kinks. For instance, when I was recording a screencast longer than two minutes, the sound file grew too large and kept crashing the video. By slightly reducing the sound quality and thus the size of the sound file, I solved the problem. A couple of times, I completed the recording only to realize I had never turned the microphone on. Even the best software can’t overcome some operator errors. 

The software allows you to choose the format for the video and then easily post to your website. 

Here’s the final product, a how-to for convention registration. It’s not perfect, and I doubt it’s a contender for any video/web awards. But it gets the job done. It augments in an important way a sheet of FAQs (frequently asked questions). 

Now I only have one problem: Getting people to watch the video before they call or e-mail us with questions. I can’t overcome that instinct in everyone, but we have a new policy when we get a query about registration. We are glad to help – if the person still has questions after watching the screencast. Amazingly, most haven’t needed to call back a second time.