How staff case study videos helped Pinnacle boost recruitment and build their reputation
Your people are your best marketing asset.
When you’ve got colleagues doing brilliant work, staff case study videos are one of the best ways to bring their stories to the surface.
With a Creative Director who spent years as a BBC journalist, VideoHQ understands how to bring out real, natural stories in front of the camera.
The brief
Pinnacle manages over 70,000 homes across the UK and employs around 4000 staff. It’s a huge organisation, but few people outside it knew the stories behind their work.
Pinnacle’s communications and marketing team is just six people, juggling everything from bid presentations to crisis management, with little time left for content development. Communications Director Rosie Davenport wanted to change that and add case study videos to the mix.
“My concern was that we were perhaps appearing like a faceless contractor,” she says. Putting the people behind the business on camera would help build the company’s reputation and attract new talent into roles across its three divisions.
She’d worked with external videographers before who could shoot footage but couldn’t get staff to open up. “I’ve worked with people previously who haven’t really engaged with colleagues,” she says.
This time, she wanted someone who could complement Pinnacle’s in-house skills, encourage natural answers from colleagues, and travel to multiple locations. That’s where VideoHQ came in!
What I did
I filmed on location across four sites, capturing colleagues in roles ranging from grounds maintenance to specialist workplace facilities management. The finished package included:
- Eight full staff case study videos
- 20 short clips for socials
Pinnacle now has a bank of content to use throughout the year, instead of scrambling to create something new every time.
A videographer and former BBC journalist
My background as a BBC journalist helped me with every interview. Getting colleagues who aren’t used to being on camera to relax and speak naturally is a different skill to operating the camera, and it’s the one that can make or break a video case study.
Rosie noticed the benefit straight away. “It was really good to have Hannah come in and put people at ease, get them to answer the questions well, and her journalist background really added to the project,” she says.
“Having that kind of person with the skills who can throw in some extra questions that perhaps you wouldn’t have thought of, or really think about how that’s going to play out on video, was really helpful.”
Understanding what marketing teams need
The footage from a shoot doesn’t have to be used just once in a staff case study video – it can be reused and reshaped for other purposes.
Pinnacle already had an existing campaign called #ProudToBePinnacle, and it was my idea to ask every interviewee the same question and bring their answers together into one compilation video.
The original plan was to put that compilation together at the end of the project. But with a staff awards ceremony approaching, Rosie asked if I had anything that would work for the event. I suggested bringing the compilation forward so it would be ready for the awards.
It was a quick turnaround, but that’s the kind of thing I’m used to. Marketing teams work fast, and delivering at short notice is part of understanding what they actually need.
“Hannah was great at turning that around really quickly for us, and it made a big impact at the awards, and wasn’t something we’d done before. People really appreciated it.”
“When we saw the first drafts, we were blown away.”
The videos needed barely any changes. Rosie explains that almost every revision came from Pinnacle’s side, not the footage itself.
“When we saw the first drafts of the videos, we were all blown away by them,” she says. “It was so minor, the sort of revisions that needed to be made. 99% of those were our colleagues rather than anything to do with the videos.”
She gives an example: a colleague used the wrong term for a type of housing tenure, and it was easy to fix. “You’re not dealing with hundreds of revisions, or someone hasn’t quite seen your vision.”
Keeping a large project easy to manage
I developed a shared Google document so Rosie’s team could mark videos as approved or flag changes without long email chains, and stored every version in Google Drive so nothing got lost.
“That helped us keep track and make sure we weren’t getting lost in the volume of the project,” Rosie says.
Trusting Hannah to film independently
Rosie went along to the first few shoots herself. “I initially went out on the first couple of shoots with Hannah, because you have this sort of nervousness when you’re deploying an external person to work with your teams,” she says.
But that changed as the relationship built. “Then I just said, ‘Can you just come out and do this for me?’ She’s done that, met up with teams, and has that ability to easily get on with people and get out what you need. You can trust her to send her out.”
Adding staff case study videos to the marketing mix
Rosie presented the finished films to Pinnacle’s senior leadership team, some of whom had been with the business for 30 years.
“They hadn’t seen videos produced like this about our people,” she says. “They absolutely loved it. They thought it was a real step forward for the marketing and comms team, and it’s gone down really well on our socials.”
Boosting recruitment and supporting bids
The shorter clips have really helped improve recruitment on socials. When Pinnacle shares a video as part of a recruitment campaign, Rosie has seen click-throughs run at around six times what they’d normally get, with LinkedIn engagement well ahead of the previous year.
Pinnacle covers three very different divisions, and it’s not always easy to explain what the company actually does. The video case studies have helped change that.
The staff case study videos are useful for bids too, giving Pinnacle a way to show prospective clients the community impact of its work.
Hannah felt like part of the team
“It didn’t feel like Hannah was an outsider to the team,” Rosie says. “She got to know the different people in our team and what they might need.”
Partner with VideoHQ, and you get a videographer you can trust to go out, represent your business, and come back with exactly what you need.
Ready to tell your story through staff case study videos?
Looking for a videographer who can get your colleagues and customers talking on camera?
I’ll turn those conversations into video case studies you can use on your website and socials, and to support your recruitment and bids. Get in touch with VideoHQ today.
