It was just a few months ago that we announced the winners of the DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards on the YouTube homepage and live at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in Atlanta. Now, we’re looking for one fine person to run next year’s contest.

Please share this opportunity among your networks!

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AWARDS PROGRAM MANAGER

See3 Communications is seeking an experienced Awards Program Manager to run the 5th Annual DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards, an online competition highlighting the best nonprofit videos of 2010.

The Awards Manager will handle a variety of responsibilities, from working closely with our team and our partners at YouTube to establish a strategy to planning, design, marketing, and logistics.

Responsibilities:
• Create awards program strategy and establish cross-sector partnerships with major media platforms
• Plan and execute awards from start to finish
• Manage (See3’s in-house) design, web and video teams to produce awards microsite on YouTube platform
• Handle all partner, judge, and entrant communication throughout awards
• Coordinate marketing of awards, including email program, online advertising, partner promotion, social media outreach, blogger outreach
• Tracking and monitoring the success of awards ( i.e. impressions, reach and influence), and providing reports for partners

Requirements:
• Bachelors degree in Public Relations, Marketing or Communications with at least 3 years social media, new media or online communications experience
• Experience with online contests, nonprofits, and/or film/media festivals
• Interactive, Web and Public Relations skills
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Organized, independent worker with strong attention to detail

Logistics:
• Position starts at part-time contract position, roughly 3 days per week from August 2010 to March 2010, long-term employment possibility
• Chicago location preferred, but will consider candidates nationally.

To Apply:
Please send a cover letter and resume by email to jobs (at) see3 (dot) net. Please include “Awards Program Manager” in the subject line.

For more information about See3, visit http://www.see3.net and http://www.youtube.com/nonprofitvideoawards

It used to be that everyone was asking us for a “viral” video. Now everyone is asking us how to measure video Return on Investment (ROI).

Video ROI is a topic we think a lot about at See3 and, unfortunately, there isn’t a simple answer or one that fits every organization.

Generally, we think video should be measured in similar ways that you measure other content investments by connecting the ROI of video to broader organizational goals. Views are fine—just as website visitors are fine—but it only gets you a sense of the total amount of engagement.

Here are 5 questions to ask yourself when evaluating your organization’s video ROI.

1. Does Video Move the Needle?

Let’s say you make a video designed to influence a small group of elites (lawmakers, corporate decision makers, etc.). In that case, video views don’t seem so important at all.

Like in any communications effort, your key metrics should reflect your key objectives. A video that we created for the Maryland State Teachers Association only received a couple thousand views, but we consider it a big success.

Why? Because the goal of the video was to influence a debate about education funding and the state-level policymakers and journalists that matter in that debate all heard about the video, passed it on, and watched it. It worked.

2. Does Video Help Your SEO Strategy?

Many people forget about this fact, but SEO is a huge part of your video strategy.

YouTube is the second most popular search engine. That means more and more people are discovering content on your issue through YouTube—if you don’t have content that’s strategically titled, described, and tagged, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.

Video can also jump you up in Google rankings.

In fact, a Forrester study found that “any given video stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page that Google has indexed”. Make sure to submit a Video Sitemap to Google and chart how it affects your rankings on target keywords.

3. Does Video Improve Your Conversion Rates?

Video is now used widely on websites, landing pages, and even as a hook in emails. Are you testing these conversion rates with and without video? When does it work and when not?

The answer isn’t the same for every organization, so make it a point to test how video affects conversion rates for each use.

4. Does Video Help Spread Your Message?

We often find that video helps in blog and social network outreach.

Facebook fans respond well to multimedia content and are accustomed to sharing videos among their own networks. Similarly, we’ve noticed that online campaigns with embeddable video gets picked up by bloggers more easily. Do you have a similar experience? If you’ve had trouble building relationships with bloggers, video may be the element that greases the wheel.

5. Does Video Engage Your Constituents?

YouTube and TubeMogul both offer analytics tools that help you assess viewership and engagement.

These tools let you see spikes and trends in views, where your video was embedded and viewed, and how long viewers tend to watch each of your videos. Take a look at this data and see if you can gather any insights about which video content works best, what is the optimal length, and how much coverage your video received beyond your own network.

Final Thoughts: We are moving toward a world where a website and a TV channel morph into the same thing. Determine your organization’s video ROI is a central question you have to answer in order to take full advantage of this new world.

Your nonprofit or foundation could be one of this year’s Getting Attention Nonprofit Tagline Award (a.k.a. The Taggies) winners! And this year, for the first time, you can submit your organization’s program, fundraising campaign and/or and special event taglines, in addition to your organizational tagline. So enter here now.

A strong tagline does double-duty—working to extend your organization’s name and mission, while delivering a focused, memorable and repeatable message to your base. It’s one of your most basic, and effective, marketing tools, but a GettingAttention.org survey showed that 72% of nonprofit organizations don’t have a tagline or rate theirs as performing poorly. The awards program is designed to help close this gap by providing both motivation and models.

All entrants will receive a free copy of the fully-updated 2010 Nonprofit Tagline Report in late 2010. It’s the only complete guide to building your organizational, program, fundraising or special event brand in 8 words or less—filled with how-tos, don’t-dos and models.

Here are the winners of previous Nonprofit Tagline Awards (selected by more than 4,800 voters in the field in 2009). This could be you in 2010! Please take 3 minutes now to enter your nonprofit’s taglines today while it’s on your mind.

The deadline for entering is July 28.

We’re proud to be a sponsor of this year’s awards, in addition to Blackbaud, Event360, and Eventbrite.

P. S. Follow the tagline award news on Twitter via the hashtag #taggies.

Remember the touching Google Search Story about Parisian Love that aired during the Superbowl?

Well now you can create your own Search Story in less than 5 minutes. Just type in your search terms, select how you want the results to display (images, news, maps), choose your music, then wait briefly while the video renders. Preview, make edits, and upload directly to YouTube.

We tested it out and made this cute video about See3. What do you think?

We recently announced the winners of the DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards, but the contests don’t end there.

Our friends at the American Constitution Society have just announced a contest of their own. They’re looking for short videos that highlight the important role that courts play in shaping the laws that shape our lives.

The Quick Pitch:

This Contest encourages entrants to use their creativity to produce and film a digital video of four minutes or less that highlights the importance of our federal court system, the integrity and independence of judges, and the critical need to ensure a judicial nomination process that is fair, efficient and that helps cultivate a qualified judiciary operating at its full potential.

What They’re Looking For:

* Effectiveness at conveying message;
* Originality;
* Relevance;
* Incorporation of the Constitution and constitutional interpretation;
* Consistency with themes in Keeping Faith with the Constitution and the ACS Mission Statement;
* Production technique;
* Memorability.

The winner takes home $1,500 and a free registration to the 2010 ACS National Convention in Washington DC, where the winning video will be screened.

The deadline is May 15, 2010, so get your camera out and act fast! If you enter, be sure to let us know so we can watch.

More details here.

Last week, our friends at Case Foundation announced the launch of Case Soup, “an interactive hub of videos and live discussions centered around some of the big issues and areas of focus that are important to us here at the Case Foundation.”

They’ll be kicking off the series this Thursday, April 1 at 1PM ET/10 AM PT with “Steps to Successful Nonprofit Videos with YouTube and Flip Video“. Case will be joined by Ramya Raghavan of YouTube and Basho Mosko of Flip Video, who will answer questions that YOU submit via Twitter, UStream chat, or email (just send a note to CaseSoup at casefoundation dot org). So if you have a nonprofit video you’re dying to get answered, now is your chance to learn from the experts!

We’re looking forward to this session and all Case Soup sessions down the road. See you there!

It’s really the fine details that matter most when it comes to website design: the balance of text and images on a page, the user experience after submitting a form, how linkable text appears throughout the site.

But think also about how your website appears when shared on other sites, like when someone shares it as a link on Facebook. It’s important. When Facebook users scan a busy news feed, a strong image or a bold headline can make all the difference and lead to a better click conversion.

In many cases, a link shared will look something like this:

The image is random, the headline is muddled, and the description is non-existent.

But the good news is you can control how all these things appear. You can make it pretty like this (for the Girl2Woman website we built for Pathfinder International):

A bunch of our clients have asked how to make sure a web page shares beautifully on Facebook, so I thought we’d share this quick tip with other nonprofits as well. All you have to do is include the following meta tags in the head of the website or webpage you want to customize, and make sure the text and image match what you want.

Simple!