Tiffani Barnes has spent 14 years in small church ministry with no staff and zero budget, so she knows what its like to have to create something from virtually nothing. These days she travels the country as the Education and Faith Evangelist for iStockphoto.com, does freelance writing, designing and video editing when she’s home, and works for a national AVL integration firm in Nashville, TN.
ECHO: What has it been like to represent an organization like iStockPhoto to church leaders?
TB: Its been such a great experience. I used iStock working in the church long before they asked me to come work for them so I knew what a good product it was and how useful I found it in accomplishing my creative goals for the church each week. So when they asked me to come on bored as an evangelist for them to the faith community I jumped at the chance. I like that I am an evangelist for iStock and not a salesperson. As an evangelist its my job to tell others about iStock and how much I love it and use it and to help them understand how it could help them do their job better.
ECHO: At Echo you’re going to talk about doing different kinds of creative work on a shoestring budget. Do you think a lot of people let a small or nonexistent budget scare them away from trying to create quality media?
TB: Yeah I think sometimes they think that it requires a big budget to do anything really great but today its just not true. Are there some things that are impossible? Sure, but you can do more these days with little or no budget than you think you can. Typically, it simply requires some resourcefulness on your part and often times just a lot of time. There are so many resources out there today that are cheap or free and we are going to spend our time talking about what those resources are and how to use them to create awesomeness.
ECHO: Is there anything (video production, for example) that it’s best to avoid if you’re on a shoestring budget? In other words, should you forgo a certain medium in favor of other media if money is tight?
TB: I don’t think video production needs to be avoided on a small budget but there are issues that come with trying to do video on a tight budget and that’s one of the topics we will discuss. Basically there are techniques that can be used to make videos look great without spending a lot of money and we will cover those in the session.
Having little or no budget does require that you prioritize those things you wish to accomplish because you can’t always do everything you want so you have to try and get done those things you want most. Because of that you may decide that video production either eats too much of the allotted budget and crowds out too many other things or that it’s not as important as other projects. Either way on shoestring budgets, often video is more rare than in churches that have more to work with.
One of the people who played an integral role in Echo was our Master of Ceremonies and keynote speaker Mark Steele.