Atlantic Council drives public policy discourse using video clip moments

The Atlantic Council’s top video ever is from this January, featuring Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte discussing Germany sending Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine to help with its war effort. Over 220,000 people watched the video, and it received over 2,400 likes on Twitter. In another moment, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg made news declaring that a cyber attack on one NATO country can be considered an attack on all, bringing in more than 112,000 views. 

The Atlantic Council aims to spark conversations about the world’s most important issues. Through these video clips made with Snapstream, the news and ideas made in these events now reach way beyond the room of people attending in person. That much wider visibility brings a significant business impact, helping non-profits like Atlantic Council grow by landing more funding, partnerships and contracts with major foundations, corporations, government agencies, and individual philanthropists. 

“We want to bring folks together to come up with solutions that are new and interesting and important, and they can be new and interesting and important, but if nobody hears about them, what’s the use? The point is to try to get the information out there in the public sphere as quickly as we can,” says Richard Davidson, director of strategic communications at the Atlantic Council.  

Davidson says SnapStream has been crucial to getting videos out quickly and to a large audience. They’re also able to quickly share these videos with journalists who may not have seen the event so they can hopefully be used in their news coverage or cited elsewhere in their work. Davidson says SnapStream’s transcription tool also allows them to quickly share transcripts of these discussions with journalists.

An easy-to-use product that has democratized video

“I think having the auto-transcription is really, really useful," says Ashley Semler, a senior producer at the Atlantic Council, about how SnapStream has helped transform the organization's video production workflows. "That’s a big feature. It allows us to do things faster than we would have been able to do them before."

"SnapStream is also user friendly, so it’s easy to train people on it,” Semler added. “Not everyone knows how to use Adobe Premiere or Final Cut to edit videos, and then it takes hours to upload and download. Being able to do things in real time is really amazing."

At the Atlantic Council, SnapStream is used by staff across multiple teams—editorial, video, digital, and even within the organization's research centers. The widespread use of SnapStream means requests for video clips are often answered with an invitation to join the Council's SnapStream instance, freeing up video staff to do more complex and valuable work.

Snapstream CEO Rakesh Agarwal (left) and Jackson Stryon, Atlantic Council Director of Audiovisual Services (right) are pictured in Atlantic Council's control room facility in Washington, DC.

Semler says the pandemic caused the Atlantic Council to need to do all of their events virtually, so they really relied on SnapStream to bring these discussions to their audiences. They built out a new production studio to make their videos as high quality as possible. That Semler joined the Atlantic Council coming from CNN helps demonstrate the degree to which the 60-year-old organization sees itself less as a think tank and more of a modern digital media organization.

“We’ve really upped our production value,” Semler says. “We’re thinking of ways we can expand our audiences and just give people access to some of these events and discussions without being there in person.” In the summer of 2021, the Atlantic Council prepared for the reopening of regular in-person events as the COVID pandemic by building new state-of-the-art studios at its headquarters in downtown Washington, DC. By moving their cameras up front to prioritize online audiences, the Atlantic Council’s public events now more closely emulate TV productions than they do live streamed think tank panels.