Carmel Owls' Digital Backbone
Reaching potential platform adoptees without needlessly spending organizational funds demands both creativity and discipline. Carmel Owls meets that challenge by leveraging leading-edge AI tools—including ChatGPT, Kling AI, ElevenLabs, and Grok—combined with hands-on expertise in Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Hostinger’s AI web hosting platform to rapidly produce and distribute high-impact public service announcements (PSAs) videos, engaging web content, and click-intensive social media posts. These engaging PSA videos feature text-to-voice, lip-synced animated rats, mice, and owls that spotlight the dangers of rodenticide use. The PSAs are shared across Nextdoor, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to maximize community awareness and engagement.
If anyone plans to edit videos on a Mac platform, Premiere Pro—at about $263 per year—is a powerful but often overly complicated option. You can easily spend an hour hunting through descending dropdown menus just to find the button you need for a simple task.
By contrast, the free Premiere Pro app on iPhone (with an Android version still in development) is remarkably easy to use with just your finger. All of Carmel Owls’ videos were edited on a cellphone—importing AI-generated video clips, free MP3 sound bites, and Photoshop-created title and logo overlays.
The iMac Photos app was then used to crop the video to the required aspect ratio before final export.
Behind the scenes, HubSpot ($9/mth) has transformed our operations from a growing, haphazard stack of printed inquiries into a streamlined, opportunity-driven, automated web form-to-lead system. What was once paper-based is now an organized digital pipeline—tracking interested homeowners, tree-qualified sites, in-person assessments, signed liability waivers, and ultimately, installed owl platforms.
Salesforce quickly fell off the list. Their Starter Suite ($25/month) does not include web-to-lead ingestion from a website into their CRM. To enable that feature, you have to upgrade to the Pro Suite at $300/month, which makes it a total non-starter.
Slack is also under consideration as a possible addition to our digital headquarters. In theory, it could help team members reduce email clutter and collaborate more efficiently—whether coordinating table booth outreach, managing and tracking the distribution of STEM Owl Pellet Dissection Kits to local schools, or refining video PSA messaging and production.
However, Slack may ultimately prove to be the elephant in the room—another promising tool that could end up a non-starter, much like Salesforce.
Phase 1, 2 and 3 owl platform deployments
As an update, Slack has been kicked to the curb—at roughly $60 per month per user, it simply isn’t within the Carmel Owls budget with a team of five to seven volunteers.
Alternatives such as ZenZap, RocketChat, Chanty, and Pumble all supposedly offer free tiers for small teams of up to seven volunteers, which makes them more realistic options for our organization. The remaining question is whether their free plans will provide the features we need to support our collaboration and coordination...
