Many of my association and nonprofit clients are looking to expand their reach.
During the pandemic, virtual conferences helped associations and nonprofits expand their reach by connecting with people who couldn’t – or wouldn’t – travel to an in-person event. These events widened the audience, made meetings more inclusive, and opened the door to new engagement strategies.
Now that in-person is largely back, the question becomes: what’s next? How do you continue expanding your reach and making your content more accessible to more people?
Here are some ideas we’re exploring with clients right now:
Embrace Audio and Video in Your Content Strategy
Younger audiences – Gen Z and Gen Alpha – often prefer consuming content via audio and video rather than reading long-form content.
Here are three options to consider:
1. Launch a podcast.
According to Riverside, 34% of Americans listen to an average of 8.3 podcast episodes per week, and 83% spend more than 9 hours listening to podcasts weekly. A podcast can help you build thought leadership, keep members informed, and create touchpoints beyond your newsletter and social media posts.
2. Add “Read Aloud” to your website.
With text-to-speech services available from AWS, Open AI, Google and so many other companies, it’s now easy (and affordable!) to offer your blog posts, articles, and white papers in audio format. You can even train the AI to pronounce industry-specific words correctly and choose voices that match your brand vibe.
3. Make your content video-first.
Consider taking your most popular content – FAQs, toolkits, blog posts – and turning them into short videos. Think: “explainer video” meets member resource. Add captions and transcripts for accessibility and search engine optimization.
Add Multilingual to Your Strategy, Even If You’re U.S.-Based
You don’t have to be a global organization to benefit from multilingual content.
Roughly 41 million people speak Spanish as their first language in the United States alone. And yet, many organizations rely on browser-based translations to serve non-English speakers – an approach that is far from perfect.
AI makes it easier than ever to serve your content more accurately across languages. Here’s what’s possible with AI today:
- AI-generated translations trained on your industry’s language and your own content, for improved accuracy.
- Multilingual closed captioning, in real time, for your educational webinars, conferences, and on-demand content.
- Live and on-demand dubbing of your content, using synthetic voices that sound natural, in a variety of languages.
At Matrix Group, we helped SQFI launch a website in nine languages, using AWS Translate and a custom CMS integration. The site is searchable and indexable in all nine languages, and the translations sound great. We also offered closed captioning during the American Art Therapy Association’s Virtual Annual Conference.
The Possibilities Are Endless and More Affordable Than Ever
Not long ago, live translation, voice dubbing, and multilingual content required major investments in time and budget. Thanks to AI and cloud services, it’s now faster, more accurate, and within reach for organizations of all sizes.
How are you planning to expand your reach this year and next? Have you added new audio, video or language strategies to your toolbox? Let me know – I’d love to hear what’s working.