Video Outreach Campaign
Clinica Villa Paz is an addiction treatment facility headquartered in San Jose, Costa Rica, that offers a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to recovery. One of the most challenging stages of the recovery process lies at the very beginning. Self-identifying as an addict and seeking treatment is a hard-won milestone, and one that often results from an individual first hitting “rock-bottom.” Villa Paz employs research-based intervention strategies to facilitate help-seeking behaviors among their patients and potential patients.
The purpose of this project was to supplement those efforts with a series of brief videos that share simple, unbiased information, promote introspection, and de-stigmatize help-seeking.
This was project that I took on pro bono as I am a big fan of Villa Paz’s work. They gave me a great internship experience back when I was a fledgling psychotherapy student.
The four videos and corresponding activities cover the following concepts:
Self-Identification of addictive behavior. Activity: Addiction self-evaluation
The disease model of addiction. Activity: Impact mapper
Withdrawal. Activity: Withdrawal planning tool
Denial. Activity: Denial checklist
Information PLUS reflection
The series is entitled “Reflect, Recalibrate, Recover,” which describes the philosophical approach to the project. Each video is accompanied by a quick and powerful reflective activity in an effort to increase the learner’s interactivity with the material. Viewers are urged to jumpstart their recovery through the acquisition of knowledge (provided by the videos) and reflection on how the concepts are at play within their lives (provided by the activities). The PDFs can be presented in tandem with the videos or used as standalone tools.
Systematic design
Midway through the project, a status update meeting with the client revealed a fundamental change in the project’s main audience. What started as a methodically planned trip through the Design and Development stages of ADDIE, transformed into a less linear—but more effective—rapid prototyping cycle in order to accommodate the changes within the time constraints imposed by this course. I used the Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning as a guide for creating an effective and engaging multimedia project (Mayer, 2014). Regular consultation of the handbook was essential for designing well-balanced, pedagogically sound deliverables that were enhanced, rather than hindered, by multimedia use.
Free and low-cost tools
When I started this project, one of my goals was to use free and low-cost development tools in order to keep costs down for the clients. (The budget was … zero dollars). Knowing how to create a professional product at low cost has come in handy many times, especially for the work I’ve done in the public sector that has relied on a shoestring budget.
I developed the videos in PowerPoint, iMovie, and QuickTime. A shared folder in Google Drive was used as a repository for to-be-reviewed files.
