See What’s Out 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!

We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with YouTube to present the 4th Annual DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards! The contest will award a total of $10,000 in grants, funded by the Case Foundation, to the best videos of the year found in the YouTube Nonprofit Program—a special program that YouTube designed to help nonprofits achieve their missions. 


Starting today, submit any video your organization made last year by March 19, when a set of nonprofit and media professionals will select 16 finalists to compete in a public vote among the YouTube community. Awards will go to organizations of all sizes, including a special award for Best Innovation in Video. 


“We are thrilled to partner with YouTube for the DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards. With this contest, we get to highlight important nonprofit stories and help organizations engage with the YouTube audience,” said Michael Hoffman, CEO of See3 Communications. “In addition, we are grateful to have such wonderful partners who have been trailblazing how nonprofits use technology, video, and social media.” 


Now is your chance to get your nonprofit video featured on the YouTube homepage, receive great prizes from Flip Video and Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN), and have your work showcased at a screening in Washington DC, hosted by Nomadsland.



Winners will be announced on April 10 at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in Atlanta.



Visit www.youtube.com/nonprofitvideoawards to enter today!


The great people at Working Films and The Fledgling Fund just announced IMPACT, a new series of videos that discuss how film campaigns can ignite social change. They ask the question we always grapple with: How do social issue documentary films do more than just raise awareness?

Below is Assessing Impact: A Funder’s Perspective, the first video in the series.

In the video, The Fledgling Fund Founder Diana Barrett and Executive Director Shelia Leddy discuss the impact of Born into Brothels and Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. You’ll get a close look at how these films supported the social change goals of their partner organizations and how they were tied to urgent actions. Diana and Sheila also lead you through their foundation’s transformation into one of the leaders in the field of supporting creative media and audience engagement.

For more information, go to http://workingfilms.org/impact and http://www.thefledglingfund.org/impact.

Today is Beth Kanter’s birthday. If you have anything to do with nonprofits, social media, fundraising, Twitter, Cambodia, foundations, NTEN, and haven’t been living under a rock, you know Beth. Beth is the single most important source of information for the nonprofit sector on web and social media — hands down. In fact, no one is even close.

If you haven’t read Beth’s blog, you should.

Beth has been getting some accolades from the NTEN community and others. And she deserves them all. She’s an amazing giver, someone who shares everything she knows and knows a whole lot. She constantly experiements with social media and then tells it like it is. She has no hidden agenda, she isn’t selling a product and all of us, the whole world really, is richer for it. We have been blessed with Beth in our community and we want to take this opportunity to wish her a very very happy birthday.

Thank you Beth!!!!! To support Beth on her birthday, give to her favorite cause, The Sharing Foundation.

Idealware is an excellent nonprofit that helps other nonprofits—especially smaller ones—determine which technologies and softwares are best suited to their needs. They cover everything from donor management systems to social networking platforms to email tools.

In order to continue to provide nonprofits with information about software choices that can transform their work, help Idealware raise $15,000 by making a gift to the Idealware Research Fund today:

The Idealware Research Fund will give us the flexibility to create the new, high-quality research that will most help nonprofits. By supporting the Fund, you will allow us to build on our base of more than four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of software research to provide the new resources that nonprofits need most, like information about social media tools, mobile text messaging, constituent databases, and more.

Read more about the initiative and donate today.

A good nonprofit video gives a sneak peak into an organization. It celebrates accomplishments. It digs deep into a global issue. But that’s not enough. It has to move viewers and give them the tools to take action.

What do you want your viewer to do? Share? Donate? Read more? Sign a petition? Volunteer?

More importantly, are you giving your viewer the tools to take action easily? YouTube is thinking about these questions, and they have already created tools specifically for organizations in the YouTube for Nonprofit Program that allow you to create annotations in your video that link to an external website.

Facebook Video clearly doesn’t have the flexibility of YouTube, but in the past couple months they’ve added a small video feature that’s worth mentioning.

If you upload a video to your Facebook fan page, a “Become a Fan” overlay button will automatically appear upon mouse over.

It’s a simple call-to-action that lets your viewer stay more connected in the long-term. If you want to increase your Facebook fans, you should be driving potential supporters to one of your Facebook videos so they can engage with your media and easily become a fan of your organization.

Watch one of our videos and become our fan!

Last year, when we uploaded our Guide to Online Video to YouTube, the quality looked like this:

And this:

We recently tried an experiment and re-uploaded the same exact videos to YouTube. We didn’t re-edit them or tweak the compression. We didn’t change a thing.

What a difference a year makes. Look at how crisp and clear the video is:

When we embedded these videos on our site last year, we decided to use Vimeo based on its superior quality. But with YouTube’s quality improvements and playlist functionality, we’ve made the switch to YouTube.

At the 2009 Convio Summit, Michael Hoffman was joined by Ramya Raghavan of the YouTube Nonprofit Program and David Neff of American Cancer Society for a session about online video.

We created a YouTube playlist of the session, which you can watch and share below. For more of our videos, check out the See3 YouTube channel.

Session description:

This session will cover how using videos to tell stories and drive support can be an effective strategy for nonprofit organizations. In this session we’ll discuss using constituent-generated videos to reach your audience on YouTube and your web site, walk through the great examples of using video on Convio-powered pages and share practical tips on integrating video strategically and technically.

This year, See3 is playing an active role in Tweetsgiving 2009, a global celebration that seeks to change the world through the power of gratitude. Last year, Tweetsgiving raised $10,000 to build a classroom in Tanzania. But as the story behind Tweetsgiving demonstrates, the real focus is not to raise money but to share gratitude all across the web.

Over the next few days, we’re encouraging folks to create a short video of themselves expressing what they’re thankful for this year. All you have to do is upload it to YouTube, tag it with “Tweetsgiving”, and include the tweetsgiving.org URL in your video description.

Watch the instructional video below, as well as three Tweetsgiving videos made by members of the See3 staff.

To see videos that others have created for Tweetsgiving, visit the Epic Change YouTube channel.

Any questions? Write in the comments below.

We’ve really enjoyed getting to know the folks at Flip Video Spotlight. They designed these custom Flip “trophies” for the 2009 DoGooderTV Nonprofit Video Awards, and they’re continually demonstrating their commitment to providing necessary digital resources to the nonprofit community.

So when Basho Mosko, Program Manager at Flip Video Spotlight, asked us to co-present with him for NTEN’s “Mission Video” webinar, we couldn’t resist.

Here’s what we covered during “Mission Video: How to turn your nonprofit’s story into an engaging video”:

Video is all over the interwebs. You recognize it’s power to tell a message by engaging the eyes and hearts of viewers. Your nonprofit has a story to tell. Converting from words to video is powerful but where do you begin? With its plethora of information about video, it can be hard to find what those tactical steps to creating a video for your nonprofit are. In this webinar, we will walk you through an adaptable template to create your organization’s introductory video and provide some quick tips for reporting from the field.

You can access the slidedeck and audio here.