Collect stakeholder feedback

What this is about

Corporate video collects reviewers the way a project collects weeks. Marketing wants the message tighter, legal wants a disclaimer, the works council wants faces blurred, an executive assistant forwards a comment from someone who was not in any meeting. Each contribution may be reasonable on its own; together they are a demolition order. The job is not to suppress input but to convert it: many voices in, one prioritized and contradiction-free list out, with a named person who owns the final call when two voices point in opposite directions.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• Decide who is asked before the cut exists; a reviewer who appears in round three restarts the project
• Distinguish input from authority — most people give input, exactly one person decides
• Legal and compliance notes are not preferences and belong in their own, non-negotiable bucket
• A shared link with open commenting produces threads; a structured form produces a list
• Silence by the deadline is agreement, but only if you wrote that sentence before the deadline

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Map the reviewers before the first cut goes out: who must approve, who may comment, who only needs to be informed. Write the three groups down and share them with the client lead.
2. Name one decider by role, not by seniority. That person resolves conflicts and signs off; everyone else contributes. Without this, the loudest inbox wins every disagreement.
3. Send the cut with a framing note: what stage it is, what you want feedback on, what is deliberately unfinished, and the exact deadline after which silence counts as approval.
4. Collect through one channel with a fixed structure — timecode, observation, requested effect, name. Free-form email replies cost an hour of retyping and lose half the timecodes.
5. Consolidate before the editor sees anything: merge duplicates, translate wishes into problems, and mark every legal or compliance item so it is never traded against a taste note.
6. Resolve contradictions with the decider in a short call, not by email. Two people wanting opposite openings is a five-minute conversation and a two-week thread.
7. Send back the consolidated list to all reviewers before implementation, showing what will be done, what will not, and why. Rejected notes stay visible so they do not return in round two.
8. Log the approval with a version number, a date and a name. An approval attached to 'the version you sent last week' is not an approval you can rely on.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Forwarding raw comment threads to the editor and calling it a briefing
• Discovering a mandatory reviewer in round three who was on holiday in round one
• Implementing every note because refusing one feels politically expensive

With TillyGen

TillyGen holds the agreed goal, audience and core message from the start of the project, so a late stakeholder wish can be measured against what was signed off rather than against how strongly it was expressed.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.