Thanks to the hard work of John Kenyon, the nonprofit technology community now has a professional code of conduct. In the next few months look for the launch of a logo and way for all nonprofit tech professionals, like us here at See3, to formally adopt this code.
Non-Profit Technology Professionals Principles/Code of Conduct
We, as technology professionals serving nonprofit organizations, pledge to:
1. Do No Intentional Harm to Data or Devices Containing Data
2. Appreciate, Respect and Adapt Our Approaches Appropriately an
Organization’s Culture, Mission, Context and Resources
3. Focus On Solutions Appropriate in Both the Short and Long Term
to An Organization¢s Culture, Mission, Context and Resources
4. Explain/Demonstrate Technology Strategies and Tools Using Clear,
Non-Technical Language
5. Understand and Communicate the Applicable Excellent Practices,
Legal and Technical Requirements Related to Our Work
6. Engage in Continuous Learning Practices to Maintain Our Skills
and Knowledge
7. Regularly Participate In and Share Our Knowledge With Our Community
8. Maintain Ethical Practices and Declare Any Conflicts of Interest
9. Provide Recommendations and Not Directives, Communicating the
Reasoning Behind those Recommendations, Ensuring the Decision is
Always the Clients
10. If We Charge for Our Services, to be Transparent About Product
Pricing and/or Project Costs
1. Tell a story.
If you want your audience to identify with your mission, you need a compelling story that connects your work to real people. If a story moves you, it will likely move others as well—and become the foundation for deeper involvement.
2. Be relevant.
People respond to what’s going on around them, so try to relate to the news or the calendar as much as possible. You’ll also have a better chance at success if you’re pitching your video to bloggers or other websites—they’re always looking for something current and fresh.
3. Tell them what you want.
You have their attention, now tell your viewers how you want them to engage, whether it’s donating money, visiting a website, or volunteering. They won’t know to give unless you ask for it.
4. Be brief.
Few people are watching your 7-minute online video—that only works when you have them locked in a room. Try to get everything out in 2 minutes or less.
5. Videos don’t raise money by themselves.
Your organization should think of online video as one of many tools to fit into your fundraising program. Adopting video into your organization is critical, but it has to be a means instead of an end.
6. Embed video on your donations page.
The distance between the “play” button and the “donate” button should be short. Also, give your viewer the right web tools. Can the viewer forward the video to a friend, subscribe to your RSS feed, get involved, and sign up for your newsletter right there on the spot? If not, they should.
7. Put video at the center of a campaign.
Video is often best used in the context of a campaign. A campaign can be raising money for a particular village, trying to reach a specific goal, or giving limited to a specific timeframe.
8. Empower your viewers.
Ever heard of peer-to-peer fundraising? Encourage your audience to pass your videos along. Make the embed code easily accessible within your page so your video can reach a broader audience.
9. Create a media library.
Start gathering your footage now—you might have all the ingredients already! Building a media library is a valuable long-term asset for your organization. Have a camera ready for every important event. Ask volunteers to document their work and make it available for future events, trainings, and online use. Using existing footage you get more bang for the buck.
10. Test.
You don’t know if something works unless you test it. Send out emails with video and some without, and measure the results. Each nonprofit will have different nuances, and you’ll want to know when using video is most effective.
11. Know when not to use video.
Truth is, your strongest donors will likely donate with or without online video. They have been already, right? They don’t need any extra convincing. Use online video for attracting new audiences, for driving specific campaigns, for empowering your membership to spread your story or for deepening or expanding existing relationships.
The next big thing in nonprofit marketing will be mobile. But it won’t be the only big thing. Gaming platforms are becoming home entertainment centers and these centers will have all kinds of content. I can imagine PSA’s from nonprofits while games load or before movies play. I can imagine nonprofit messages built into the games themselves.
Here’s a blurb on the gaming system as a platform for video from Reuters.
Sony, the once dominant market force, showed how the PlayStation 3 could do more by introducing a new video service.
The company said it would rent and sell movies and TV shows over the Internet for the PlayStation 3 and double the hard drive capacity of its main PS3 model.
The new video distribution service will attempt to close the gap with Microsoft’s Xbox Live service and feature movies and TV shows from major studios, including its own Sony Pictures, Warner Bros. and News Corp’s (NWSa.N: Quote, Profile, Research) 20th Century Fox.
We are finishing up a campaign for the Sierra Club this week with national house parties for fun and advocacy.
[A strange thing has happened with YouTube on this campaign that I will write more about soon. They only counted total video views on the first video. We know from our own site stats we have tens of thousands of views on each of the other two videos, but YouTube has a bug and it's count is like 1% of the right number. If you have seen this before please let me know.]
Here are the three main videos we did for this campaign:
Brian Reich and I often speak on the same subject — how nonprofit and causes can use social media effectively. Brian wrote a book called Media Rules! which goes over the big issues that have lead to an online communications revolution.
I have my way of explaining these things. I talk about massive media fragmentation, permission marketing and how the infrastructure of TV and the web are coming together.
Brian covers the same ground, but in a different way and I want to share it with you. This is from an email he sent to folks who attended his talk at the Cause Marketing Forum, where See3 was a sponsor.
Here’s a quick explanation of the new world we are in, from Brian Reich:
In my book, Media Rules!, I address this in the context of three big themes:
Everything is fragmented and blurred: It is necessary and expected that our society will evolve and the impact of those changes will be felt by all organizations. But never has our society changed so quickly or and never have organizations been so dramatically impacted. We are all challenged to adapt in ways, and at levels, not previously imagined. And with little sense that the chaos will settle down any time soon, it is important, new frameworks for operating – and succeeding – must be developed and manage along the way.
Small Can Be Big: Our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As a result, what you sell is different. How you sell is different. The services you offer have changed. The expectations of those who shop, and share, and create are shifting as well. New markets have been created, for products and ideas alike, and organizations must determine whether to participate, and if so, how.
We Are All Connected: Technology has fundamentally changed our culture. The online world is about connection, community and conversation. And as the online world goes, so goes much of what the rest of the world thinks and acts on. What we know about each other is changing, or in some cases just being learned. How we think and the decisions we make are increasingly driven by many voices not few. Total control has been replaced by complete understanding and participation.
At first, I thought we were all nuts. A year or so ago, Twitter was described to me as text messaging what you are doing every minute of the day to your friends and then getting text messages of what all of your friends are doing, every minute of the day.
Buzzz
“I am eating ice cream.”
Buzzz
“I am doing nothing in particular.”
Buzzz
“I am wasting your time making you read this.”
Buzzz
“Are we nuts?”
Twitter is like a combination of micro-blogging and social networking. Micro-blogging, meaning blog posts of no more than 140 characters. Social networking means connecting these micro-blogs directly to your friends.
I started to like Twitter the minute I turned off the alerts on my phone. No more buzzing.
Now, I open a browser tab with Twitter and it looks like this.
Why do I like it? The same reason I like reading blogs — I get interesting information. But the best part is that each of these info tidbits are no more than 140 characters long. Long thoughtful blog posts are nice, but so is something that says:
Hear free teleconference w/Andy Sernovitz on getting started with word of mouth. Use code ‘wommafreebie’. http://tinyurl.com/5na6gm
That’s a tweet from @Nedra (Twitter-speak for username Nedra who is social marketing guru Nedra Weinreich.)
She’s telling me about the Word of Mouth Marketing Association free teleconference with Andy Sernovitz. And she told me in 131 characters, including the URL.
With Twitter you can build a following for your organization and send updates, with links. It’s a smart way to communicate. You can send Twitter updates from a mobile phone, so someone in the field in Uganda could send mobile updates that your Twitter followers can learn from.
No, don’t drop everything and have 10 employees Tweeting full time. But you can start playing with it, see what it’s about and you might find it proves to be useful.
Congress is actually starting to pay attention.
From CNN:
Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, is at the forefront of a new effort to reach constituents by using services such as Twitter.com, Qik.com, and Utterz.com. Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows users to publish short text messages known as “tweets.” …
Word quickly spread last week via Twitter.com that regulation of congressional use of the site might be coming. It prompted the Sunlight Foundation, a non-partisan organization advocating for greater use of the Internet in order to make information about the federal government more available to the public, set up a Web site as well as a Twitter-based petition.
House Franking Commission Chairman Mike Capuano, D-Massachusetts, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi each weighed in on the matter and sought to make it clear that any new regulations would be limited for now to use of online video sites such as YouTube and Qik.
In my first job as a political consultant based in San Francisco I wrote Congressional Frank Mail for a half dozen Members. Frank mail are those free newsletters that are sent at taxpayer expense and tell you how hard your Member of Congress is listening. With Twitter — and YouTube and MySpace and Facebook et al. — we’ve come a long way since then.
One of the things that I often say in my talks is that direct mail prospecting is not working the way that it used to. Organizations that have used direct mail as a reliable way to continue to replace old donors have notices a drop off in the impact of direct mail. Already dealing with low margins, a small change in the return on direct mail solicitations can put your campaign under water.
We see this as a big reason for the growth of See3 – people are coming to us looking to build online capacity to identify and capture new supporters.
The Republican direct mail firm BWM Direct seems to buck the trend. It seems they use straw-men/women candidates to raise large amount of money from older Republican donors – then keep all but a single percentage for themselves. Here’s Joshua Micah Marshall talking about this story:
