Case Study: SOSE Youth Advisory Forum Member Recruitment Campaign

Case Study: SOSE Youth Advisory Forum Member Recruitment Campaign

This summer it has been a pleasure once again to have been asked to help South of Scotland Enterprise (SOSE) with their latest member recruitment campaign for their Youth Advisory Forum.

At the end of 2023 and into 2024, I was approached by SOSE as they were seeking a creative to produce a video and a series of photographs for their recently launched Youth Advisory Forum. It would be a way to inform prospective new members about the Forum and what to expect if they successfully joined.

Fast forward to 2025 and the Forum was now in it’s second year, with a number of projects consulted on and new members joining from the Scottish Borders - a region SOSE were really keen to engage with and encourage applicants from.

Having already worked with Melissa Gunn and Garry Legg from SOSE on the previous campaign, as well as having established rapport with the members, it put us in an advantageous position for working with SOSE once again as the brief went out to tender.

Being easy to work and get along with is something I strive for with any client and having them return is easily the biggest compliment for any photo and video production brief.

In comparison to the 2023/24 brief, 2025 would see more emphasis on social media and short form content.

As well as the larger, main video, which ended up being more of a “mini documentary” simply as result of the sheer volume of content captured, there were to be individual case studies on members, employers and external partners as well as extracts for short form social media content.

Knowing the requirement for this, we adapted our approach to filming and chose to film most of the material where possible in 3:2 and 4:3 Open Gate modes on our Lumix camera bodies.

This would give us the flexibility to output both horizontal 16:9 videos as well as vertical 9:16 videos while retaining similar composition and positioning of subjects in the frame.

I really wanted to level up and improve upon the production value from the 2023 campaign, so a lot more careful consideration was placed on lighting and composition for interviews and B-Roll was much more carefully considered.

Access to studio space for the interviews with the SOSE team was also a great asset this time around.

All footage was filmed in 10-Bit V-Log and colour graded with Phantom LUTs with extra adjustments for colour balance and camera matching in Davinci Resolve.

Finally the all important captions were added, conforming to SOSE’s existing branding guidelines. 

Melissa from SOSE said: “We were keen to grow the membership of the SOSE Youth Advisory Forum and we recognised that social media would play an important part in this.

We needed a set of high quality photographs that would provide a sense of what our Forum meetings are like and a video that explained the background and the story so far of the Forum and the successes it has achieved. We commissioned Dan for the second year running and the results provided a realistic insight to the Forum, gathering thoughts from each of our members as well as stakeholders and views from the SOSE team itself.

So far there has been a very popular response to the content we have released, resulting in a number of new applicants from Dumfries & Galloway and the Scottish Borders which is exactly what our goal was.”

Getting stuck in to a project of this nature is something I really enjoy, I feel very proud seeing the resulting content being put to effective use across the various platforms.

I’d encourage businesses and organisations across the UK to really consider how effective video production can be used on their next campaigns and make it work across various platforms.

Get in touch to see how you can use video and photography to help with your next marketing campaign.