Higher Ed Videography: Should You Hire In-House or Outsource?
If one thing is true in higher ed marketing, it's that marcom is spelled with one "m."
If two things are true, it's that, and the undeniable fact that we all need to be doing video.
As colleges and universities increasingly rely on visual media to engage students, alumni, donors, and stakeholders, a crucial decision looms: should institutions build their own in-house videography teams or outsource to professional agencies? This choice can significantly impact budget allocation, content quality, and overall messaging strategy.
Let's explore the pros and cons of each approach, but first let me offer this disclaimer:
If you don't have a crystal clear video content strategy in place that starts with a distribution roadmap, and works backwards from there to dictate the types of videos you should be producing, then let me stop you right there. Spending money on in-house or outsourced production help is putting the cart before the horse, and a decision in either direction is going to be an inefficient use of your budget.
Let's get the strategy in place (which I can help you with) and then make an informed decision about the most appropriate type of talent to bring on to execute it.
Hiring In-House
Pros:
Agility: The ability to move quickly on time-sensitive video needs since you have direct access to your videographer at all times.
Familiarity: Someone that's on staff will have a more granular understanding of your institution's brand, and the culture on campus.
Flexibility: The ability for that videographer to film a wider array of b-roll since you're not paying a fee every time you send them out to film. This way you can afford to send them to a small event for instance that might be overkill to have an outside crew document.
Convenience: You'll have immediate and direct access to the b-roll since it always lives under your roof, and you'll never have to pay a fee to receive the raw footage, given that some outside video vendors charge extra for that.
Communication: Communication is easier having direct access to someone that's on staff.
Collaboration: Cross-departmental collaboration is made easier.
Ideation: Assuming you hire someone with leadership and directing abilities, that person can more readily help other departments shape their ideas before they go into production.
Cons:
Misalignment: Many institutions hire in-house without a clear content strategy, and then fall victim to "short-order cook syndrome," creating videos and fulfilling requests for other departments that are not properly aligned with institutional goals.
Hidden Costs: The cost is much greater than just their annual salary. You also have to consider the following costs:
- Benefits: on average, $12.09 per hour worked according to 2023 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That's an additional $25,147 annually.
- Equipment: A video camera is only a fraction of the equation. You also need lenses, camera stabilizers like tripods and perhaps a gimbal for smooth walking shots, audio equipment, lights, light modifiers, grip equipment like light stands, sand bags, and various attachments.
Then you need a way to transport all that stuff from location to location so you'll need some cases at the very least, and ideally a cart of some sort. You'll also need a place to safely store all that gear. And that's just the production equipment.
Your videographer will also need a high performance computer that can handle the bandwidth required to work smoothly with video files which are very large, plus hard drives to store footage, backups for those hard drives, and ideally a cloud backup solution which comes at a monthly cost.
That's all assuming you're just hiring one do-it-all videographer.
For a school that's starting from scratch purchasing video equipment, you should plan on around $20,000 to get up and running with modern professional grade gear.
- Management: There's an obvious cost to managing an employee - not only in dollars, but in mental load.
- Ongoing professional development: The idea that you're going to find one unicorn videographer that needs zero refining and excels in every area of their role is slim. Learning costs time and money. For instance, if you want drone shots in your video content, your videographer will need to be a Part 107 licensed drone pilot, which is required for anyone flying a drone for commercial purposes, which higher ed marketing content falls under. This requires a lot of studying. The stuff the FAA requires you to know in order to fly a drone for commercial purposes is quite ridiculous. It feels like you're studying to fly a commercial jet. Nonetheless, it's unavoidable.
Scarcity: Finding great storytelling talent is very difficult. I could write a whole article on this point alone from over a decade of hiring freelancers and staff that looked great on paper but didn't have that spark required to create truly compelling content. You might find someone who can shoot great looking video footage, but their storytelling skills in the editing phase are lacking. Or you might find someone who's a good editor, but they don't understand camera settings and lack the lighting chops necessary for a cinematic look.
Charisma: There's a large social component to being a videographer. You have to be "on" and able to make your subjects feel comfortable. Being on camera is a vulnerable experience. It's hard to open up to someone who's socially awkward and lacks personality.
Empathy: Being a videographer is a little bit like being a therapist. As a storyteller you have to draw out the compelling stuff that's hiding beneath the surface. Someone who is a good videographer on a technical level might not have this creative conversation skill.
Output: If your budget only allows for one videographer, output is going to be an issue. You'll need to throttle your expectations about what one person can achieve in a given amount of time without cutting corners. A better situation would be someone to produce, direct, do all the filming, and interface with stakeholders, and a separate editor who's focused primarily on post-production. But that's likely doubling your costs.
Outsourcing
Pros:
Perspective: You'll benefit greatly from a fresh perspective. When you work in house long enough, you become too close to the work to be objective in your decision making. An outside partner will bring expertise from a wide range of clients and experiences that will help you view your goals in a new light.
Prioritization: Hiring an outside video vendor will force your team to prioritize projects, as each project comes with a tangible cost, thereby reducing budget wasted on non-mission-critical busy work.
Cost-Effectiveness: It's often less expensive across the fiscal year to outsource given that you're not paying for equipment and benefits and all the other hidden expenses that come along with hiring an employee.
Efficiency: You don't have to manage the day-to-day activities of internal staff and you're not leaking productivity having that person tied up in meetings.
Expertise: The quality of work is often superior with external partners. Unless you're going to pay an internal videographer somewhere in the range of $75k - $100k, you're really limiting the quality of talent to people that are willing to forgo what they could be making as a freelancer in order to work a 9-5 job in the often-bureaucratic environments that exist within higher education.
Versatility: You'll get access to more specialists. A good outside agency is going to have a variety of contacts they can pull into a project at any moment, like animators, script writers, and freelancers with specialized equipment and licenses (like the drone pilot license I mentioned earlier).
Trust: For better or for worse, outside talent is generally seen as more trustworthy by leadership than talent on staff. You might be a great marketer for instance with loads of ideas on how to build brand awareness and attract prospective students that get shot down by leadership. But if a consultant advises the same things, all of a sudden its worth listening to. In bureaucratic environments where getting things done is an uphill battle, sometimes bringing in outside perspectives will cut through the red tape a little easier.
Cons:
Unfamiliarity: Outside partners are going to have a more distant understanding of your brand, and depending on who you hire, may or may not dig as deep as you'd like them to in order to communicate your message as effectively as someone on the inside.
Inflexibility: You'll have to forgo the minutia. A lot of simple tasks like quick turnaround content repurposing that can be done by an in-house videographer are going to be more difficult to get from an outside partner when you're bound by a particular project scope.
Availability: The ability to drop everything and put out fires is more difficult with outside vendors. With in-house talent, your institution is their only client. But an agency typically has many clients they're serving at a given time and often can't sacrifice deadlines for another client in order to handle last minute revisions and requests for your institution.
B-Roll: Depending on who you hire, you may or may not get the raw b-roll included in the cost of a given project. Many video vendors charge extra for that (which I think is silly, but I digress). If you're wanting to build a b-roll library for future content needs, you'll need to make sure that you will have unlimited rights to the footage after the project wraps, and that that's explicitly written into the contract.
Process: Many video partners are unfortunately not in tune with the frustrations many marcom leaders experience of paying an outside vendor to produce a video, and then having to do all the grunt work like finding people to be in the video, and coordinating schedules, etc. The right partner will take that work off your plate, but many video agencies' websites promote the quality of their work, and not the quality of their process. So there can be some trial and error before you find the right partner that makes your life easier, not harder.
Boundaries: Project scopes have boundaries. A given project budget might limit you to one day of filming. If something important to the story is going to be happening outside of that day, you'll need to pay for additional filming time. Also, you generally can't request endless revisions from an outside partner without paying overages.
Striking a Balance
In a ideal world, why not do both?
There is a big benefit to having an in-house videographer and also bringing in outside help. Your in-house videographer can handle a lot of the day-to-day communications videos, event coverage, social media content, and assisting various departments with promotional needs, while an outside partner can tackle some of the specific, more produced projects like commercials, program overviews, and ongoing storytelling campaigns.
Often times what happens when institutions only rely on in-house talent is they slip into "random acts of video production" where they tie their videographer up in the day-to-day content needs while neglecting the strategic forward-pushing videos designed to inspire and influence prospective students at various stages of the student journey.
Smart institutions don't do one at the expense of the other.
If you have limited budget, it might be smart to think about the key forward-pushing video content needs across the fiscal year and outsource those projects to ensure they get done and done well. This way you're prioritizing your flagship content, and letting the social media team (if you have one) tackle the more low-fi content that can be shot on an iPhone. Just make sure you have a solid distribution plan to go with those flagship videos so they don't collect digital dust.
If you can afford to do that and also hire in-house video staff, develop a student-led content team, or bring on an intern or two, you'll be in great shape for executing a well-rounded video content strategy.
Want more insights on creating emotionally resonant content for higher ed?
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