Content Marketing

Find Out How AI Narration Can Boost Your Communications

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Audio consumption is booming worldwide. According to recent studies, over 464 million people globally are regular podcast listeners, and digital audio listenership is increasing by approximately 20% each year.

For social impact communications leaders, AI narration presents a powerful opportunity to expand their reach, enhance engagement, and efficiently repurpose valuable content.

However, traditional voiceover production can be expensive and resource-intensive. This is where innovative platforms like ElevenLabs can help, offering AI-powered narration solutions that deliver high-quality audio at a fraction of the cost and time.

Why embrace AI narration for your content?

AI narration provides immediate and tangible benefits for communications teams. It is:

  • Cost-Effective: Dramatically lowering production costs compared to professional voice actors.
  • Fast and Scalable: Quickly transforming reports, blogs, or newsletters into engaging audio narration.
  • Consistent: Maintaining a unified voice across different content types, which is crucial for institutional branding and long-form content.
  • Multilingual: ElevenLabs can translate and voice podcasts or other audio content into multiple languages, allowing you to reach global audiences more easily.

Real-world examples of AI narration

Multilateral institutions, corporations, and nonprofits are already experimenting with AI narration.

For this year’s Global Trends Report, UNHCR used an AI voiceover from ElevenLabs for the video summary. Their video producer, David Alexander, announced the move on LinkedIn and wrote:

“As we tread carefully with how, when, and why to use AI, this felt like a meaningful use case: transforming complex data into a compelling narrative.”

The UNHCR case study is a great example of how AI narration can help organizations bring long-form reports to life for social media and other short-form content platforms.

Another example is the nonprofit Life Heroes, an organization that introduces kids in Detroit to diverse careers. They used ElevenLabs to narrate various characters in their cartoon series “Life Heroes Universe”:

Real voices can be powerful.

When I worked for WindEurope, I produced a video introducing the association’s new brand with the voiceover of their CEO and Deputy CEO. It was a great way to add personality to the launch video instead of using an impersonal voiceover actor.

Now, you can efficiently clone the voice of your CEO, Spokesperson, or another personality (with their approval) to produce more personalized and impactful videos.

The sports brand Under Armour did this with boxer Anthony Joshua. In a creative campaign titled Forever is made now, they used ElevenLabs to recreate Anthony’s voice. The team was unable to record new audio due to scheduling constraints, so they trained the AI using existing interview clips. The result was a realistic, emotionally rich narration that met a tight four-week deadline, showcasing how AI can accelerate storytelling without compromising quality. This is a good example for any organization looking to work with busy influencers and public personalities.

AI narration is helping me “Engage with Impact”

When I published my book, “Engage with Impact: Five Steps to Transform Your Digital Communications For Social Impact”, many people were enthusiastic.

“It’s on my Kindle!” said one person. “It’s on my list!” said another. But many didn’t find the time to sit down and read it.

That’s why I decided to create the audiobook version, so it would be more accessible to more people. 

Yet traditional voiceover production can be expensive, so initially I tried to do the narration myself. I bought a pop filter, installed a recording software on my computer, and found a quiet time to record in my home office. It was awful! I found it difficult to speak clearly for hours at a time, and there were often hisses, clicks and pops in the recording. I had to review and edit the files completely, and it took me hours to record a 15-minute introduction!

So I decided to try out ElevenLabs. Before using them, I checked to see that they are following international guidelines for AI safety and EU standards. I was pleasantly surprised and found that their text-to-speech technology was much more expressive than other AI narration platforms. The studio quality allows you to have a clear, uniform voice for your entire project, which is important for a long audiobook. I was even able to clone my own voice so that my narration could be unique and personalized.

What do you think of the AI narration excerpt below from my book “Engage with Impact”? It took quite some time to finish, and I had to go through it line by line to review and edit the expressions and pronunciation, but I think it worked out well.

Listen to it below and let me know your thoughts!

Practical tips for successfully integrating AI narration

  1. Select the right AI voice: Choose a voice that reflects your organization’s identity—authoritative, friendly, or empathetic—to resonate effectively with your stakeholders. Alternatively, clone the voice of your CEO or Spokesperson to create intimate voiceovers for your videos and narrations. However, take your time to listen, experiment, and edit the voices so that the final product transmits the right intonation and professionalism. Don’t do like I did and produce a complete audiobook only to discover that you no longer like the voice you initially selected!
  2. Customize tone, pronunciation, and emotion: Leverage Eleven Labs’ emotion tags to ensure your messages have the appropriate impact and pronounce names and technical terms correctly. This way, your formal report summaries can be turned into empathetic storytelling for awareness campaigns.
  3. Repurpose your content: Efficiently transform existing text-based content—reports, blogs, or newsletters—into audio, increasing its reach and usability.
  4. Distribution and accessibility: Use AI-generated audio across multiple channels to enhance accessibility for visually impaired communities.
  5. Engage and measure: Track engagement metrics from audio content to refine your strategies continually. Survey your audience for their preferred formats, voices, and lengths.

The takeaway for communications professionals

While professional human narration still holds significant value, AI narration platforms like ElevenLabs can democratize audio content creation. This allows organizations, regardless of size or budget, to leverage the growing appetite for audio and deepen audience engagement through high-quality, accessible, and cost-effective audio content.

If you are a nonprofit, ElevenLabs has developed an Impact Program that partners with organizations to provide free licenses for projects in accessibility, education, and culture. 

Click here find out more about Engage with Impact.

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