Building nonprofit board diversity presents challenges. Last month, The Boston Foundation hosted its fourth forum on the subject of nonprofit diversity, equity and inclusion. This forum focused on the Leading with Intent report that was published by BoardSource. While the report addresses a wide range of issues related to the functioning of nonprofit boards, the TBF event was mostly examining...

 The mission of Reach Out and Read (ROR) is to incorporate books into pediatric care and encourage families to read together. For our first project with ROR a year ago, we filmed a series of videos with families that had children of different ages, from infants to toddlers. In our most recent project, ROR wanted to do another series but with children with different disabilities, including hearing...

  The neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) at Boston Medical Center wanted to create a series of videos to educate and also inspire families with children born prematurely. One of the NICU doctors was heading up the project on the client side, and, more so than other clients, she relied on us to help her through the preproduction phase of the project. This was because the project carried one or two extra...

A few months back, we had a client who wanted several training videos. The only location they had available to them was in their rather uninspiring conference room, and so no one was particularly enthusiastic about how that was going to look. Their previous videos had been filmed against one of the room's white walls, which had worked reasonably well, but I thought we could give ourselves a little...

The mission of Music & Memory is to bring personalized music into the lives of the elderly and infirm. "Personalized music" is the key element. Plenty of research exists on the general health benefits of music, but Music & Memory focuses on helping this population access music from their past that has personal importance to them. Many individuals suffering from dementia show little engagement...

We were filming at Floating Children's Hospital last weekend, and when we came through the door with all of our gear, one of the doctors said, in so many words, "Holy cow! That's a lot of equipment." Relatively speaking, it actually wasn't all that much, but her response is a common one among folks who haven't experienced video production before.  Throughout the weekend, she also commented...

Harvard Hillel recently embarked on a major campaign to raise money for several initiatives related to programming and capital improvements. The campaign included an event to celebrate the 90th birthday of Henry Rososvky, who served Harvard for many years as a professor, dean and even twice as acting president. The event was also used as an opportunity to re-publish a catalogue that accompanied a 1986...

When we enter into a "difficult" conversation with family, friends, and colleagues, most of us understand what we should do. Listen carefully, show respect, speak diplomatically, etc. Just about all of us, though, fall considerably short of these standards, even when we enter into a conversation with the best of intentions. We may have a vague sense of how things went off the rails, but we're...

We initially embarked on our Smiles video series mostly for our own pleasure - it was nice to compile a montage of happy faces!  We shared it and people seemed to enjoy the video as much as us. So we have continued. If you really feel the need to get an extra dose, feel free to go back to previous versions (and let us know which is your favorite): 2016 Smiles 2015 Smiles 2014 Smiles 2010...

Silent Spring is an organization that researches the causes of cancer (versus the cure), with a particular focus on breast cancer. The founding of the organization was inspired by Rachel Carson and her book, Silent Spring. Carson was one of the first scientists to study the environmental causes of cancer, especially the chemicals we are exposed to in our everyday lives that are carcinogenic. (Think:...