See3 Featured in Chronicle of Philanthropy
by Michael HoffmanTuesday, May 8th, 2007
There was a lot of buzz about See3 at the annual nonprofit technology conference this year and the buzz continues. See3 has been featured in the Nonprofit Times and the Chronicle of Philanthropy in recent days. Here’s an excerpt from the Chronicle:
The widespread adoption of broadband opens up new possibilities for charities to use video to communicate with supporters, but for charities to make the most of those opportunities, they need to break out of the “video project” mind-set, said Michael Hoffman, chief executive officer of See3, a consulting company in Chicago.
Most charities’ only experience with making videos has been creating them for a special event, like an annual fund-raising dinner, he said.
“You may have four days of shooting in that budget, but those four days are random days, so what can you get?” asked Mr. Hoffman. “You can get talking heads talking about your program.”
A more effective strategy, he said, is to start building an archive that documents what your organization does every day. That archive could include video — shot either by professionals or trained staff members, photographs, and audio recordings of speeches and lectures. The information could be used and reused for different purposes.
“We were making the dinner video,” said Susan Rosenberg, director of communications at American Jewish World Service, in New York. “We had one video that we had made six years ago that we showed three times, and spent a lot of money making it.”
But the organization has begun taking a new approach.
American Jewish World Service provides grants to organizations that fight poverty, hunger, and disease in developing countries and offers its supporters volunteer opportunities working with the groups. Late last year, the charity, working with a professional camera crew, filmed 20 groups that it supports in El Salvador, India, and Uganda.
The organization plans to use the footage for a video it will show at its annual dinner, but also to create short informational pieces for its Web site, fund-raising appeals, and grantee profiles that the groups can use to promote their work.
Just before the Passover holiday this month, American Jewish World Service sent donors a fund-raising appeal featuring a young girl in Uganda who lost her parents to AIDS and now receives services from one of the groups the organization supports, along with volunteers talking about what their service has meant to them.
It was the first solicitation created with the new footage. Ms. Rosenberg said that it’s too soon to know how much money the video brought in, and that the eventual figure might not be the most important measure of its success.
“Whether we raise a lot of money from these first videos is not the test for me,” she said.
“We are hoping that this is an engagement tool, that this is a way of talking with our supporters much more directly and bringing the work that we’re involved in much closer to home.”
The full article is available online to subscribers or non-subscribers for the next few days here.
