Can you imagine a religious service with more than 200,000 people attending?

Well, if it’s online it’s no problem. As it gets easier to stream live video to the web, and as people get more comfortable with doing it, we are seeing new and innovative uses of the technology.

One example is the broadcast of the Kol Nidre (Yom Kippur eve) service by JewishTVNetwork.com.

The service will be broadcast online on the night of September 27, as we begin Yom Kippur, from Nashuva in Los Angeles, and is led by Rabbi Naomi Levy (who was in the first class at JTS to ordain women), who has been honored with numerous awards and honors (Top 50 Rabbis in America and Top 50 most influential Jews, and others). The service will be accessible (and you can view last year’s recorded service) here.

Who needs this kind of service, anyway? Here’s what they say:

Many Jews are unable to get to a synagogue – or, because of the economy, can’t afford membership – but want to be part of the larger Jewish community. By joining Nashuva online for Kol Nidre, through JewishTVNetwork.com, they engage in their Jewish identity and connect to the Jewish calendar in a way that is accessible, affordable, non-alienating and convenient.

People can also find it on Facebook here.

If you know more examples of religious institutions using online video in innovative ways, leave a comment here for everyone to see.

A few months ago YouTube announced that organizations that are in the YouTube Nonprofit Program would be able to use the overlay advertising feature to create donation links. They call the feature “Call To Action” and said that in their first test of this, Charity:Water raised $10,000 in one day.

At the Nonprofit Technology Conference in March while I was conducting a session about online video distribution, I mentioned to Steve Grove and Ramya Ragahvan—who runs the YouTube Nonprofit Program—that while this feature is nice, it is really limiting. In addition to only appearing in a very limited way on the video, it only works on YouTube and not when you embed the video on other sites. While Charity:Water raised a lot of money, I politely suggested that maybe it had as much to do with the video being featured by YouTube (and therefore getting a large amount of traffic) as with the new functionality.

But I knew they could make it much better.

In front of the NTEN crowd I challenged them: “What would be really amazing would be to allow for outside links in the annotations features.” The annotations feature is available to all YouTube video makers and allows for the user to put an overlay box on any part of any video. YouTube allows links to go in these boxes, but only links to other YouTube videos or YouTube channel pages. Ramya said they started with the overlay because the technology already existed and that they would be working on extending the annotations function.

I must admit that the cynic in me thought, “It’s really in YouTube’s interest to keep people on YouTube and not to allow them to leave.” In other words, I wasn’t holding my breath that they would create more ways that nonprofits could get people off of YouTube and on to engagement.

Imagine my surprise when Ramya sent me this email last week:

Hi Michael,

I’ve been meaning to drop you a note, because I remember that you mentioned that you would love the ability to externally link from annotations.

Happy to report that for nonprofits that are part of the YT Nonprofit Program, we have this functionality. All they’ll have to do, when creating an annotation, is click the “link” symbol and select “external link”. Then they’ll be able to link to external sites right from the annotation. Better still, these annotations should show up on embedded videos.

Please feel free to share with nonprofits you work with.

Best,
Ramya

Oh, share it I will!

Make no mistake, this is a game-changer. If you still aren’t sure what all of this means, it means that nonprofit YouTube videos can have buttons built into the videos that say DONATE NOW or SIGN THE PETITION and these buttons will work—they will link to any site you point them to. You can even go back to all your old videos that are on YouTube and make your logo into a clickable link, add annotations to donate with a link, and otherwise make your video into a center of engagement. This is now, by far, the most important reason to be in the YouTube Nonprofit Program.

People who watch videos on YouTube are very likely to do one thing when they are done…watch another video on YouTube. Not any more. With this new feature, YouTube can become a center for creating effective calls to action and engagement. Major props to Ramya and the entire YouTube team—you rock!

So that you can get see with your own eyes how this all works, we made this video (above) along with our partners at the Case Foundation as part of the Gear Up For Giving program. (Also, thank you to Beth for letting us shout about this news from the rooftop that is Beth’s Blog.)

Follow Michael on Twitter

[This piece was originally posted as part of “Video Week” on Care2’s Frogloop blog. Thanks to Allyson Kapin and the Frogloop team for inviting us to participate.]

If you’ve ever made an online video before, you know the level of work that goes into it. But creating a compelling video is just the beginning of the process. Getting your video seen—and by the right people—takes just as much work, if not more.

Crossing your fingers that your video will “go viral” is a bad idea for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that you learn absolutely nothing about what works and what doesn’t.

Here are some ideas for distributing and promoting your video online.

1. Optimize Your Video for the Web

If your video was made for an event, it might not fly online. Repurpose your video for the web by making it short and to the point, and by including a call to action. If you’re making a video for online use, consider how you’ll distribute the video before you make it. Building the distribution into the video itself may inform what kind of video you make.

2. Recruit Your Email List

When you link to your video in an email, include a screenshot of the video in a video player to raise interest. Ask your supporters to share the video with their friends and give specific instructions about what you want them to do—email a link, post to Facebook, leave a comment.

3. Get It On Your Site

This is an obvious one, but many organizations don’t know where to put their video. If you have enough content, you might consider creating a Video or Media section on your site. Otherwise, connect your video to other relevant content on your site, like a popular article or a call to action.

4. Create Relevant Tags

Tagging is crucial for SEO because it includes some of the only metadata that will help get your video into search engines. Look at your site analytics and determine which keywords people are using to find your content, then use some of those as tags. Also look at other videos in your field and see which tags they’re using.

5. Don’t Stop at YouTube

YouTube is by far the biggest video-sharing site, but it’s not the only one. Create accounts on sites like Blip.tv, DoGooderTV, Vimeo, Veoh, Viddler, and Metacafe to extend your reach. Besides serving as a hosting solution, those video sites also function as active communities where users discover new content. Sites like TubeMogul allow you to update and manage many different accounts effortlessly.

6. Reach Out to Bloggers

Find bloggers passionate about your issue and share your video with them. Bloggers are constantly searching for engaging content, and a video makes their lives a lot easier. Frame the video around a campaign or story from inside your organization.

7. Talk About it Offline

Your video may live online, but that doesn’t mean you can’t promote it offline. Talk about your video at conferences, show it at your next event, or include an easy to remember URL on your next mailing.

8. Run Online Ads

Truth is, sometimes you have to pay for distribution. If you have a Google Grant, try running a Google ad campaign around your video. It’s not the most cost-effective solution for every organization, but it’s absolutely worth testing.

9. Link Link Link

Consider all your touch points and include a video link when possible. That means putting it in your email signature, posting on Facebook and Twitter, including it in your next byline, and sharing it in forums, online communities, and comments.

[This piece was originally posted as part of “Video Week” on Care2’s Frogloop blog. Thanks to Allyson Kapin and the Frogloop team for inviting us to participate.]

I used to be quite the curmudgeon about online video back in the day—ask anyone I worked with in the late nineties at AppNet’s Nonprofit practices or later in the early 2000s as the head of the Internet group at Easter Seals. My reasons were simple… the technology just wasn’t ready yet. Too much could potentially go wrong, and I’m very careful (some might say paranoid!) about make sure there’s never any interruption in the donor’s online giving usability path.

1. Back then, a majority of our client’s constituents didn’t have broadband on their computers.

2. Problems abounded creating the right versions for cross players, browsers and accessible versions.

3. The video equipment was expensive and difficult to use.

But oh! what a difference a few years make! Now I’m a fan! And why?

1. US broadband penetration has now grown to 63%.

2. As the medium has evolved, support has come forth to stabilize online video formats.

3. The low cost Flip video camera and other new technology is democratizing video making.

So now that all those pesky technical obstacles are out of the way, now what?

Now it’s all about the content. And wasn’t it always, really?

Video is the next best thing to being there. How many times have you (or your development director) said, if only our donors could be here in our service centers, meet the people we’re serving, see the needs first hand. Video is a wonderful tool to help with that storytelling.

Storytelling with video can be a wonderful way of explaining a difficult or overwhelming concept. Watch the moving video above about one family’s experience with Trisomy 18 and see how it helps us understand the condition, the need for support and research, all through the story of this one little boy.