See What’s Out There

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.

“Fair Use” is a legal term that is getting a lot of play lately. I have written about this before because it is so important to those of us making media. Fair Use is a carve-out of copyright law that says that though someone may own this TV show or movie or song, you can use it, or part of it, in certain ways without having to pay them if it falls under the Fair Use principle. Criticism, for example, is fair use. If I want to write a book review and I print an excerpt from the book, that is fair use. Same for a movie review.

Another area of fair use is parody. I can make fun of something and not need to pay them. So the record company tried, but failed to get paid for this funny video using “I Will Survive”

The problem with Fair Use is that there is no totally clear standard. The good news seems to me to be that while media companies send out a lot of cease and desist letters these days, they also back down when someone chooses to fight them. The worst case for them is to lose in court and then have legally created a stronger fair use standard.

The folks at American University’s Center for Social Media are hosting a dialog on Fair Use with OneWorld. You can “Ask the Experts” online. Patricia Aufderheide, the Center’s Director and a good friend of See3 and DoGooderTV, was interviewed this morning on NPR on the issue of fair use. You can listen to the story here.

As my long time readers know I am very interested in the issue of corporate social responsibility as well as what Muhammad Yunis calls social enterprises, which are profitable companies that exist for the purpose of doing good. Two interesting articles in the Friday Times. One is about how Norway, with more than $300 billion in oil wealth, has decided to put a social filter on their investment decisions. This is a lot of money and it’s not making Wal-Mart or the American government happy, because of who is on their list.

The second article was about the Robin Hood benefit. If you don’t know the Robin Hood Foundation, they have a great message, ending poverty in NYC. That’s it. What they also have are hedge fund managers as supporters, among others. And so while American Idol raised $60 million by beating all of America over the head on national television, Robin Hood raised $71 million in a few hours with a bunch of very wealthy people. This event comes on the heals of the annual release of info about what these hedge fund guys make. I think I read that right… the top 25 hedge fund managers make $14 billion this past year. So yeah, it’s nice to give $71 million… but let’s keep it in perspective.

At See3 we create compelling media content for organizations to tell their stories. We create original video, we repurpose existing material and we help build organizational capacity so that nonprofits can integrate a culture of documentation and media development into their daily business.

But we don’t work in a vacuum. The priority of organizations is to advance their mission and to have enough resources to survive and thrive. So we frame our work in terms of its impact on program and on fundraising. The link is not always direct and so we have been thinking and collaborating on how to make donor programs more integrated with video and digital storytelling. How can organizations best maximize their use of compelling narratives to have a direct impact on their fundraising?

We just moved this initiative forward in a big way with our formal partnering with Norman Rosenberg. Norman is one of Washington’s most respected nonprofit professionals. With 30 years of experience leading major public interest organizations, Norman knows every aspect of nonprofit management. Now a consultant, his focus is unique in that he is not shying away from directly addressing major gifts programs and helping organizations build fundraising capacity. He knows what he is talking about, having raised hundreds of millions dollars from high-net-worth individuals and family foundations over his career.

I recently interviewed Norman about his work and his thoughts on collaborating with See3. Here’s the first in a series.

Something I meant to report last month… The Onion has gone video. It looks great. It’s funny. And they did a nice job with the integration. I will try to find out which provider they are using for the video feed. Here’s a story on immigration.

Immigration: The Human Cost

Our fearless leader Katrin Verclas, the Executive Director of the NTEN, the nonprofits and technology association, was on ABC News and got a whole 7 minutes to talk about nonprofits and technology. It’s a big topic, but notice how much time she spent on web video! Unfortunately, Katrin neglected to mention DoGooderTV, but we know that next time she will give DoGooderTV, which hosted the NTEN - See3 Nonprofit Video Contest, a big plug.

You can watch the video here.