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March 21, 2005 (Computerworld) -- A mother who has just lost her son in the recent tsunami in Sri Lanka wails into the lenses of rolling cameras. In another scene, in hushed tones, a little girl explains, "Mother went to the shore and didn't come back."
These images from relief organization World Vision International in Federal Way, Wash., were part of a minimovie shot in Southeast Asia within days of the December tsunami disaster there and sent as a video e-mail to a half-million subscribers and donors thanking them for their support.
Called the Asia Tsunami Video Update, the three-minute roundup of the organization's rescue and support operations in Sri Lanka, India and Thailand showed original footage of the waves, the victims and the aftermath of the disaster.
The day the tsunami hit, many of the 3,700 relief workers already in the affected regions mobilized into teams to offer shelter, food and clothing. Some were already armed with video cameras and filmed for hours. One cameraman was sent from the organization's headquarters to help with the shooting.
According to Brad Cooper, World Vision's division director of Internet development, once the footage was transmitted electronically, video editors and producers on the creative content team worked around the clock to select precisely the right clips that would communicate what the workers were doing. Working with New York-based e-mail vendor Bigfoot Interactive Inc. and Irvine, Calif.-based VitalStream Inc. for streaming video technology, the organization transmitted a series of messages to donors within three days of the disaster.
The clips were uploaded into servers, digitized and then transmitted, says Cooper. Using Macromedia Flash and Microsoft Windows Media formats, home users saw what relief workers had encountered.
Designed as a thank-you letter, the video was so effective that recipients continued to give donations online, says Cooper. To date, contributions to World Vision have topped $250 million worldwide.
"The feedback we got from this was great," Cooper says. "Video reinforced what our people were doing in the field." According to Cooper, five times as many people viewed the video e-mail than the messages that had only text content.
"There was just no better way to understand the impact of the devastation than with video," says Cooper.

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