Soundslides: the quick and cheap alternative to video for capturing your social enterprise work

Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow Howard Weinstein from Paula Castillo on Vimeo.

The above is my attempt to making a soundslide of Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow Howard Weinstein whom I recorded while he was presenting a brown bag in our office and then I added the pictures from his power point plus pictures I took from Flickr and music from Jamendo.

How I learned to make these:

My boss was invited to Harvard's Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism where she attended a workshop by Russell Contreras, a journalist for the Boston Globe, who said the future of storytelling is video. And as social entrepreneurs we know the importance of telling compelling stories to persuade donors and bring awareness to our causes. Unfortunately, not all of us can afford a video camera or a fancy editing team, so Contreras offers a cheap and quick alternative to video: soundslides, or in other words still pictures with sound. My boss later invited Russell to come to Ashoka and teach us how to make soundslides. 

Here are my notes from Russell's workshop:

Step 1: Edit your audio. You can edit your MP3 using previously recorded material using a free copy of Audacity. So easy, you can learn how to use it in less than 5 minutes. You can also add some flair by using open-sourced music. Russell says the key to a good soundslide is really good sound quality and sometimes even ambience noise that gives hints of where you are (NPR style!).

Step 2: Make your audio slide show or "soundlide". Utilizing the user-friendly soundslide maker. Where you upload your audio in MP3 and your pictures in JPEG (I love flickr for creative-common licensed images).

Step3: Post it on the net. On the soundslide maker, hit export to have the files ready to upload to your website. If you have the free version of Soundslides, upload your soundslide to a free website and if you wish to post your soundslide on to your blog you can also do that.