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.