audio Archives - Rebecca Haugh

Storytelling – Three, Two, One

business, creative professionals, small business, VO tech, voiceover

Storytelling is a vital…

You probably already knew that storytelling is vital in your creative projects, for sure.

I still voice a lot of scripts that don’t do storytelling. I assume that’s because clients don’t believe it’s worth the effort? You tell me.

A vital piece of your creative content.

With a riveting story, you can lead your audience anywhere, and they’ll follow.

Here are some simple ways to see your content with stories:

Character Appeal

Get your audience on your characters’ side–whether it be a fictional person or a real life customer–and make sure their goals are clear and bold. They need to be appealing enough for audiences to root for them to achieve their goals.

Obstacle Tension

The obstacles in your characters’ paths inform the stakes and tension of the story. The quality of the challenges will dictate how much audiences are engaged in your characters because they get to show how resourceful and layered they are.

Bold Conclusion

Start strong, and end even stronger to leave a lasting impression. Even if the ending’s a foregone conclusion you can still make it affecting, moving, and even surprising with a captivating finale.

Let me know if you have any comments, as I’m always happy to hear from you.

Pro Voiceover: ROI in eLearning Courses

business, creative professionals, instructional design, small business, VO tech, voiceover

What Is ROI?

ROI is an acronym for ‘return on investment’. For example, hiring instructional designers is investing money into a business endeavor, an e-learning course. Calculating ROI helps everyone understand the value your course creates. Within e-Learning courses, are you asking about ROI for hiring a professional voice actor?

Let’s put this in the hands of the experts – the Instructional Designer. You are ready to develop your virtual reality, game-based, micro-learning or video-based eLearning course. You’re drafting design elements, and pondering…

Will you hire professional voice talent (VO)?

Using a pro voice actor has positive effects for your learners within an excellent instructional design. VOs work as hired actors, narrators, and characters of varying ages in mock scenarios.

But what’s your ROI with hiring a pro VO? Are these challenging questions popping up:

The budget is set… So leave out the VO and save on that budget line item?
Some colleagues pull aside an in-house person to save funds.
Others say it adds time to hire a professional VO.

What’s your ROI if you do or don’t hire a VO? Are there hidden costs? Apply top-level considerations to your unique project.

Pros and Cons of In-house Recordings

Is your project a short course with limited audience, limited use, and the audio recording quality is not an issue? Then it probably makes sense to keep it in-house. Whoever does the in-house recordings will do their best with the experience, time and focus they can offer.

On the flip side, there are a few typical issues that can cost more time or produce sub-standard audio quality:

Usually non-pros require more recording time, and fixing errors time, compared to pros. The average unskilled person needs about 4-5 hours of work to create 1 finished hour of audio. A pro can get it done in 2-3 hours.
Will they edit for you, or is that your chore? More demands on your time?
Using in-house doesn’t mean ‘free’. Their regular work is being delayed. Whose budget does that hit?
Audio can be distorted with office background noise, or from non-professional equipment, or both. Will you receive clean undistorted audio?
Vocal expression may not fit the course. For example, monotonous tone, or inability to engage the text vocally, or not sounding authentic or conversational. Will the spoken word recording be vibrant and appropriate?

Audio should enhance the instructional experience. The spoken word recordings should enhance the script you’ve developed. Audio should never detract from the course nor distract the participant. Still, a non-pro may be your only option. For some projects, if you can live with these results, then stick with in-house audio.

Professional Voice Talent Recordings

Is your course for a larger audience, with broader use, and high audio quality a requirement? You probably already know it’s time to consider using professional voice talent. A course like this is representing the brand of the company it’s created for.

Here are typical benefits of hiring a pro voice talent:

Spoken Word Experience
A professional voice talent offers many years of experience with all different types of e-learning projects. She understands what you expect.

Audio Expertise
Professional voice talent have pro studio equipment and deliver high-quality audio recordings of your script. She stays up with trends in her industry, from varying styles of vocal performance, to the latest technologies for recording. If you need audio edits after the initial recordings, your VO talent should provide new audio that seamlessly blends into the project.

Trained Actor
Pro VOs are experts delivering a performance in front of a microphone (as compared to on stage or in front of a camera), and speaking to the intended audience when recording, to generate and maintain audience interest. Additionally, gaming and scenario-based courses often incorporate re-enactments or dramatizations that require acting skills.

Professional Commitment
Pro VOs are a business people that will aim to quickly turn around your projects and readily accommodate your deadlines.

Your Brand
Consider the impact that a professional production will have on your brand identity. It’s a business investment signaling to participants of the course that you value quality. Professional audio can convey a brand’s message in mere seconds.

What’s the ROI?

The most common ROI formula is net return divided by the total cost.

The simplest way to think about the ROI formula is to add up the value of benefits (return) and dividing it by the cost.

If you say something has a good or bad ROI, then explain how you measure it. Each ROI case will be specific to the course you’re creating.

In conclusion, the choice of VO for e-learning projects is one of many crucial elements within the design process. The ROI will depend your budget, your experience with either in-house or pro VOs, and what the overall experience should be for your course participants.

Let me know if you think I’ve missed anything, as I’m always happy to hear from you.

Audio Trends, Branding, and the Client Experience

business, online vo sessions, production, VO tech, voiceover

Voiceover is part of many creative elements within a project serving a business need. It could be for internal onboarding or training of employees. It can be direct consumer advertising campaigns or part of a marketing mix. It’s sometimes embedded within products for sale, from audiobooks and podcasts to film. And that spans from Alexa to Disney, from Yahoo to the old ‘Got Milk’ campaign. Even with simple or sophisticated phone systems, the voice is still a part of the experience within the brand.

As content marketing expands in all markets, in multiple channels, the opportunities for branding also multiply. Will the opportunities for voiceover bloom, as well?

There are exciting new trends in how audio is created or used in marketing and to enhance the client experience. It’s a new way of considering business, impacting audio and, yes, even voiceover.

Have you heard about sonic branding?

A strong trend to consider – sonic branding is a unique sound of your brand or company or even a specific product. We’re not talking about the ‘jingle’, although I’d say that fits under this umbrella. From what I understand, sonic branding considers not only the elements like music, effects, voice and theme but additionally who is the audience, what pleases them and draws them in.

You create a unique sound that is always included in a specific experience. I suppose it’s similar to using a company logo for any media. Insert the sonic brand wherever the audio fits, just like you would your logo. I’m hearing of multiple audio-only agencies sprouting up to assist companies with creating and managing their sonic brand. One, in particular, MassiveBass, created a new data-driven sonic branding tool using brand archetypes and values matched to music, to create unique sonic branding strategies. And recently one well-known brand, MasterCard, launched its own sound for all ads and purchase moments.

As the big companies embrace sonic branding, will your team as well?

Other exciting new audio trends…

There’s a whole new platform in audio-only called Clubhouse. An exclusive audio-only invite-only social app, gaining huge traction since launch March 2020. It features spontaneous and scheduled voice-only conversations centered around specific topics. Companies are sponsoring events here, so I’m told. As membership grows, and you get invited, invite me! Although I’m hesitant to add more social media, I’m very curious and would love to ‘get a hear’!

Podcasts are not so new, however, are rising in popularity for businesses. Podcasts with branded original content targeting B2B, B2C and internal audiences are growing. It seems to have taken a while for businesses to figure out how to embrace them beneficially. I’m noticing how podcasts are targeted to support onboarding, employee development, product usage and probably more. Some companies have invited me to voice specific product line trainings distributed via podcast, using other voices for different product lines. Another client is using my voice with internal business podcast intro/outros, matched with script and music to uniquely identify the specific sales topic. This company uses star performers’ voices, as well.

These are the biggest trends I see that also seem to have longevity built-in. Although I’m less sure about Clubhouse, unsure about the ‘trendy’ part of sonic branding, and quite sure about podcasts. Let’s check in after another year!

Guide your Voice Actor with this Simple and Powerful Method

instructional design, production, voiceover

Before Recording Educational Voiceover, Guide your Voice Actor with this method.

To my friends in Instructional Design and to the CD’s and EP’s at Media Production companies, your educational course or study is powerful, with well-considered and thought-out design at its core. The spoken audio ‘heard’ by a course participant can support or strengthen course modules, as well as help retention. Longer form audio that is scripted into online courses is a very viable medium for a voice actor to bring their acting ‘chops’ to the collaboration, aside from their stamina and microphone technique.

In this article, I’m focusing on a simple and powerful method for the Instructional Designer or Media Company to prep the voice actor (VO) for the recording session. I call it the ‘VO Logline’.

As a voice actor, my role is to make the words I read sound real, authentic and conversational. During my collaborations with Instructional Designers and course study Writers, I’ve adapted my acting technique to breathe life into learning – educational courses. I just renamed this method as the VO Logline. With a simple and powerful VO Logline for your project, a VO can grab ahold of that ‘essence’ while they record for you.

What is a logline anyway? Usually that’s a term used for TV, defined as a one-sentence summary of your TV story. A logline answers the question: What is your story about? It’s the kind of thing that TV Guide writes up about a program. So, a VO Logline for any kind of learning course informs the VO who they are speaking as, to whom they are speaking, and the context of that dialog. In essence, the ‘learning story’.

Now, all those of you who are familiar with a TV logline might immediately think ‘ah ha’! Nice idea. Those of you who aren’t, let me explain. You’ll use the simple steps below to create elements of the VO Logline – the single sentence providing insight to the VO before they record for you. It’s a simple way to guide your voice actor using what you already know.

**Create a VO Logline using these 3 steps before the script is recorded.** Then share the VO Logline with the person recording your script. This dials them into the vocal attitude and tone to match your objectives, like a shortcut.

1. Define “Who” Is Speaking.

Think of the written words to be recorded.

‘Who’ would say this to the course participant? What is their job title, role in the organization, and level of experience?
What is their role with the course participant?

You’ve just defined who the VO is speaking as. Nice!

2. Define the course participant.

What is their job title, role in the organization, level of experience?
Who are they hearing from: a peer, a higher-up, a Subject Matter Expert (SME)?

You’ve just defined the person that the voice actor is speaking to. Great.

3. Write your VO Logline as a simple sentence about the participant, speaker and course value.

Here are real-world samples from courses I have personally recorded:

An experienced senior foster care social worker is teaching new social workers the State rules they’ll need to follow for their job.
An expert sales manager motivating and demonstrating to the veteran sales team how to use and maximize a new CRM.
A retail clothes buyer teaching a new company-wide inventory and sales system to her peers, so they all run it effectively.

What is your VO Logline? Write me and share it.

Now it feels like a story about the people who are touchpoints within your learning course.

VO Loglines create dramatic context for an actor.

‘Dramatic’ in the sense of how an actor can approach your script. Many course designers already know these definitions or can figure it out because it’s inherent to the course design process. Providing this single sentence, the VO Logline, to your voice actor or narrator will create a tangible context for them. This is a wonderful tool to provide your voice actor.

Did you already know all this? Or was this something new for your consideration? Let me know.

As a trained actor, I create narrative ‘worlds’ to contribute to successful educational projects. Thank you for taking the time to review these ideas, and please reply back with your inspired thoughts and advice.

Rebecca Haugh Female Voice Actor

Storytelling – Three, Two, One