Video & content programfor Centacare Family Services

The primary outcome Centacare is seeking is awareness — awareness of what Centacare delivers, and awareness of the issues themselves. That covers potential service users, potential volunteers, and businesses or community members who may support the work. Donations are a secondary but still important outcome.

A related point raised was that the breadth of Centacare's work is not widely understood: people tend to know only the service they or someone close to them used. Referral to Centacare is predominantly word of mouth, which is difficult to attribute.

Following advice received after Gather and Grow, the intention is to theme this content more narrowly rather than presenting Centacare broadly — focusing on poverty, and within that, homelessness, food insecurity and financial crisis.

Each film runs to approximately three to five minutes depending on content, following the format used previously, with multiple interviewees per topic so a complete story can be assembled in the edit from a range of experiences. New to this round: each topic also includes a documentary-style shoot of people engaging with the service, in addition to the formal interviews.

Listed below in the order they fall: the soup kitchen launches around November, Christmas Day in December and Back to School in January. The now-housed film is not tied to an event and can be scheduled at any point.

The long-form films work well with a captive event audience, but reach beyond that audience is limited. To address this, short cuts and sound bites will be drawn from the same interviews and footage — short standalone pieces that introduce a story, raise awareness, and can direct people to a page on the Centacare website carrying the full-length film and information on how to contribute.

Some of this is necessarily opportunistic: the strongest sound bites emerge during the interviews themselves. Volunteer sound bites were specifically identified as useful, given Centacare's need to recruit more volunteers.

Centacare's site is WordPress, managed with Scoop; the team can update copy and embed video themselves. Centacare will supply a list of relevant awareness periods and national days, with topics and dates, so the short pieces can be released when they are most relevant. Noted examples: Homelessness Week (first week of August), Men's Mental Health Week (November) and the Christmas appeal (from late October).

Three 30-second animated pieces in the same style and using the same character treatment as the existing animations, which Mullermind produced previously via Amplify. These can now be commissioned directly with Mullermind.

They are primarily for the website and social media, and exist because many people using Centacare's services face literacy barriers — a short video explaining a service is easier to take in than text on a page. Centacare will supply the three scripts; Mullermind will adjust them for timing and flow to fit a 15–30 second TVC length, as with the previous batch.

Each animated educational video is delivered as a 30 second and a 15 second animation, with wide and square adaptations for web and socials, and includes storyboarding and scripting, a professional voice over, a music licence, TVC approvals and station delivery, and two rounds of revisions.

Three of the following services are still to be selected by Centacare:

• Family separation counselling
• Emergency relief
• Homelessness service
• Housing First
• The Men's Hub
• Parenting program
• Employee assistance program

A further three animations are wanted but have been deferred to the following financial year.

Three of the four films are tied to seasonal activity: the soup kitchen launches around November, Christmas Day in December, and Back to School in January. The now-housed film is not event-dependent and can be scheduled as soon as the team has identified suitable clients.

Bringing this forward now gives a workable lead time. Our recommendation is to shoot whatever can be shot early — starting with the now-housed film — and to treat each topic as its own campaign, delivered one at a time rather than all at once.

Every deliverable sits under a named project with its own subtotal, so each project can be tracked, approved, staged or invoiced on its own. Social cuts are priced against the film they are edited from — they use footage already captured for that shoot, with no separate shoot day.

Each film is priced as an editing component at $800 per edited minute ($2,400 for a 3-minute film through to $4,000 for a 5-minute film), plus a shoot day covering the interviews and the documentary coverage for that campaign — either a half day (4 hrs) at $1,080 or a full day (8 hrs) at $1,860 — plus social cuts / reels at $220 each. All figures are exclusive of GST.

Projects can be taken up individually. All five are ticked below by default — untick anything Centacare does not want to proceed with, choose a half or full shoot day for each film, set the edited length with the slider, and the total updates live. The full program runs $30,380–$39,900 + GST depending on shoot lengths and film lengths.

Film pricing moves with duration because the edit is charged per edited minute. The slider is an estimate only — final pricing is adjusted to reflect the finished duration of each film (a 3-minute film is invoiced at $2,400, a 5-minute film at $4,000, and anything in between accordingly).

Weekend loading applies where a shoot falls on a Saturday (20%) or Sunday (30%) — relevant to the Christmas Day lunch depending on the year. Travel outside the Geraldton area is charged at $110 per hour per person plus $1.10 per kilometre.

• Centacare to select which of the five projects to proceed with, using the selection form in Scope & investment, and send it through.
• Centacare to identify suitable now-housed clients so that shoot can be scheduled first.
• Confirm consent process and on-site signage for the Back to School and soup kitchen shoots.