See What’s Out There

One of my presentations at the Nonprofit Technology Conference (08NTC) was The Age of YouTube: Using Online Video to Reach the Masses.

Here is the session description:

Broadband is finally here and the organizations that are creating compelling and viral video content are reaping the rewards. Those gala dinner videos are no longer enough. Readily available digital video cameras and editing software allow your organization to capture stories and introduce a wider world to your mission. Video content can be seamlessly integrated into your website and provide the compelling hook for fundraising and advocacy. Portable media players enable you to embed your message in hundreds of sites. But, how do you capitalize on the opportunity?
Takeaways:

1. The benefits to using web video
2. Case studies of innovative uses of video
3. How to effectively use video in your e-campaigns

I opened the session looking at the world we live in — the environment nonprofit messages are competing with. Here is the video I showed at the start of the session:

Here is the slide deck I used for the session. Mostly, these are just illustrative of talking points.

| View | Upload your own

Here is are relevant links to the videos we talked about from the session:

The power of video to breakthrough all the clutter. Example: Yes. We. Can.

The dinner video.
Other pieces you can make from a dinner video. (American Jewish World Service Passover Video)

Bread for the World video we showed as an example of something easy you can do with your staff.

Videos from Amnesty International showing both the man-on-the-street technique and how you can use video in an online campaign and how you can make videos with very different tone out of the same source material.

The funny video.
The serious video.

The PSA type video. An example from Chicago Foundation for Women and a very edgy UK one from Greenpeace International.

A documentary-style video from Columbia College Chicago.

Care2 is an online community where you can promote a video and seed your list in order to reach new audiences. If you are interested, you can learn more by calling Clinton O’Brien
Vice President, Business Development
Email: partners[at]earth.care2[dot]com
Phone: 202-785-7308

AOL quietly offers a program of free banners for certain organizations. If you are interested you should call us at See3 and we can tell you more about it.

If I left something out of this list that I mentioned in the session, please let me know with a comment.

Steve Grove’s YouTube for Nonprofits Tip Sheet. (Steve did not make the session at the last minute, but we got his tips. I will ask Steve some of the questions and publish the answers.)

The Basics

• Reach Out. Post videos that get YouTube viewers talking, and then stay in the conversation with comments and video responses.

• Partner Up. Find other organizations on YouTube who complement your mission, and work together to promote each other.

• Keep It Fresh. Put up new videos regularly and keep them short—ideally under 5 minutes.

• Spread Your Message. Share links and the embed code for your videos with supporters so they can help get the word out.

• Be Genuine. We have a wide demographic, so high view counts come from content that’s compelling, rather than what’s “hip.”

Your Channel:

• Design Your Channel. Go to Channel Design, then choose a color scheme to match your logo or other materials, and decide which modules you’d like to display on your public profile.

• Add Banners and URLs. Go to Branding Options, upload your icons and banners, and enter any of the other options you’d like to use.

• Choose Your Top Video. The top video on your channel automatically plays each time someone visits your page—choose it wisely. Update this video regularly to keep it fresh, or keep your most important video there as an introduction.

• Get Donations Flowing. Sign up for Google checkout, then go to your Google Checkout Options, enter your ID and Merchant Key, and choose donation amounts. Once you’ve filled in the information, the button will appear on your public profile and all of your video pages.

Your Content:

• Direct Dialogue. Make videos that create a dialogue about your work and what you’re trying to achieve. Ask questions and solicit video responses.

• Call to Action. Harness the power of user-generated content by asking supporters to submit videos to your cause. Create a group to collect these videos together; find ways to give recognition to the best ones.

• Tell Serial Stories. Engage viewers with a series of videos that tell a story around a specific theme, and keep them coming back for more. Once you’ve created a few episodes, put them into a playlist. This allows you to develop several video narratives targeted at particular demographics.

• Respond to Current Events. Address relevant news stories by posting videos that explain your position. You can then embed them in emails to your supporters—a video message can be more effective than a text-laden email.

• Use Endorsements. Whether they’re from celebrities or people you’ve impacted, it helps to have supporters chiming in about why your work matters.

Networking and Distribution

• Tag and Title Well. Tag and title your videos with relevant keywords—that’s how users will find your content as they navigate YouTube.

• Embed, Embed, Embed. Broadcast your videos over the web by embedding them on your website and encouraging supporters to do the same on theirs.

• Click “Subscribe”. Subscribe to the YouTube channels you’re interested in to stay up-to-date on their content; they may return the favor.

• Engage and Interact. Draw attention to your work by interacting with both allies and adversaries through video responses, text comments, or joint projects/debates.

• Make Web Traffic a Two-Lane Road. Use your video description field and branded banner URL to drive users to your website, and link to your YouTube channel from your website to encourage people to interact with your video content here.

For video production tips, go to: http://youtube.com/video_toolbox

Firstgiving is a service that allows individuals and organizations to set up personal fundraising pages. They just added the functionality to allow users to embed YouTube videos on those pages — another step in the general recognition that video is effective for fundraising.

Here’s the release:

Somerville, MA (PRWEB) March 12, 2008 — Firstgiving, a leader in providing Web-based fundraising services for individuals and charities, today announced the ability for its users to add YouTube™ video and Flickr photos to their personal Web pages. Mark Sutton, Chief Executive Officer of Firstgiving stated, “Experience shows us that the more personal the appeal, the more successful the fundraiser. Therefore, we made it easy for people raising money on Firstgiving to add their personal videos and photos to their fundraising pages.” The end result he says is more people raising more money for their favorite charitable causes.

Firstgiving fundraisers can choose from among hundreds of thousands of U.S. certified 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations for which to raise money. Many individuals use the pages for event-based fundraising such as marathons or polar plunges. Others set up pages to raise money in lieu of birthday or wedding gifts or in memory of a loved one. Charities themselves can also use Firstgiving’s fundraising pages for events, special appeals or general donations. At any given point, there are 15,000 - 18,000 active pages on the Firstgiving Web site. Since 2003, they have helped over 100,000 people raise more than $50 million for more than 12,000 charities.

Experience shows us that the more personal the appeal, the more successful the fundraiser. Therefore, we made it easy for people raising money on Firstgiving to add their personal videos and photos to their fundraising pages.
Sutton noted that there is no “right” tone for the videos or photos that people post, but rather that it’s more important that they reflect the personality of the individual making the appeal. “Some are funny, others are serious and then there are those that are so inspiring they knock your socks off,” he said.

Sutton added, “Firstgiving’s goal is to make raising money for non-profits as easy and simple as possible for our users. By putting the right tools in their hands, we can help them make a positive difference for the charities they support.” For more information on how to set up your own Firstgiving fundraising page visit www.firstgiving.com.

The New York Times Magazine on Sunday was all about philanthropy.

Here’s what you need to read:

What Makes People Give?

This article is really about how some social scientists, economist types are looking at why people give. It turns out that much of what fundraisers think they know is right, but there is a lot of subtlety. The main example in the article is about matching programs. The research suggests matches lead to more giving, but the type of match — whether 1x or 2x or 3x the gift — had no impact at all. The article looks at the psychology of giving.

Some highlights:

For a long time, philanthropy was mostly ignored by social scientists. It’s not an especially large part of the economy, and most charities operate on a shoestring, without the resources to finance research projects. But this is starting to change. Americans gave $295 billion to charity in 2006, equal to 2.2 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, up from about 1.8 percent from the mid-’70s to the mid-’90s, according to the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. Most philanthropy still comes in the form of small gifts, but there is also a growing group of donors, like Bill and Melinda Gates, who are interested in bringing some of the quantitative rigor of big business to philanthropy.

Academics, for their part, have come to realize that charities provide an excellent laboratory for studying human behavior, in part because so many of them are desperate for the kind of free-of-charge consulting Karlan was offering. When charities are designing their donor appeals, they often go by nothing more than a few rules of thumb, some of which may be profoundly insightful and others a good deal less so. “I think some fund-raisers have developed terrific intuitions, passed on through the fraternity of fund-raisers,” says Paul Brest, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, Calif., which often works with charities. “But a lot of the intuitions don’t work. Look at how much junk mail you get.” Matching gifts were another good example. People figured that they worked, because — well, how could they not? They seem so sensible. …

…Last year, Princeton University held a conference at which List, Croson, Andreoni and others who study charitable giving got together with fund-raisers from Africare, the National MS Society and elsewhere. I spoke with three people who listened to the academics present their work, and all said they found it invigorating. “We all have different strategies and takes on how to reach out to potential donors,” said Nicole Eley of Africare, which sends development and relief aid to Africa. “Many of them work, some don’t — it’s a trial-and-error process.” It’s easy to imagine that the academic research may eventually serve as the building blocks for a unified theory of how to raise money.

The Celebrity Solution

This article is about celebrity involvement in philanthropy and specifically looks at Natalie Portman, someone who has become the spokesperson for the growing field of micro-lending.

Some highlights:

In 2004, Natalie Portman, then a 22-year-old fresh from college, went to Capitol Hill to talk to Congress on behalf of the Foundation for International Community Assistance, or Finca, a microfinance organization for which she served as “ambassador.” She found herself wondering what she was doing there, but her colleagues assured her: “We got the meetings because of you.” For lawmakers, Natalie Portman was not simply a young woman — she was the beautiful Padmé from “Star Wars.” “And I was like, ‘That seems totally nuts to me,’ ” Portman told me recently. It’s the way it works, I guess. I’m not particularly proud that in our country I can get a meeting with a representative more easily than the head of a nonprofit can.”

Well, who is? But it is the way it works. Stars — movie stars, rock stars, sports stars — exercise a ludicrous influence over the public consciousness. Many are happy to exploit that power; others are wrecked by it. In recent years, stars have learned that their intense presentness in people’s daily lives and their access to the uppermost realms of politics, business and the media offer them a peculiar kind of moral position, should they care to use it. And many of those with the most leverage — Bono and Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt and George Clooney and, yes, Natalie Portman — have increasingly chosen to mount that pedestal. Hollywood celebrities have become central players on deeply political issues like development aid, refugees and government-sponsored violence in Darfur.

For Good, Measure

This article is about how foundations have found Jesus in metrics.

Some highlights:

The question that troubles many of the newest philanthropists, though, is whether their bequests will have a notable impact. Much of their money either goes into or comes out of private foundations, those largely opaque institutions with huge endowments that, in the jargon-rich environment of philanthropy, differ from charities like the Red Cross in their tendency to engage in long-term “strategic grant-making.” Such foundations do not exist to give emergency aid during crises arising from war or natural disaster; instead, their purpose is to attack social and scientific problems at the root, a process that sometimes requires substantial allocations of grant money over 5, 10 or even 20 years. That’s a long time to wait before you know whether your money is doing any good. As Judith Rodin, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation since 2005, puts it: “Critics have talked about the field of philanthropy and said: ‘Has it really made a difference. And how would you know?’ ” To Rodin, these are perfectly legitimate questions, even when they’re posed indiscreetly by business titans who only recently entered the genteel world of charity. “If we really want to do work that makes a difference, work that has some effect, then we have to know whether it is working,” she told me recently. “And if you really do it well, you don’t only want to know what works; you want to know how it works.”

Faces of Social Entrepreneurship

You can learn about and see some social entrepreneurs.

Michael Gainer started Buffalo ReUse to creatively salvage materials from the 10,000 abandoned houses the city is demolishing over the next 10 years.

Other Articles worth reading include:

Self-Made Philanthropists

This is a profile of Herb and Marion Sandler

How Many Billionaires Does It Take To Fix A School System?

“Last month, The New York Times Magazine invited five interested parties to lunch to discuss the new world of educational philanthropy. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.”

Once again Beth Kanter and her friends at the Sharing Foundation won the latest philanthropy competition. (If you didn’t help Beth win, you can still give $10 or more to the Sharing Foundation online and help kids in Cambodia.)

The whole giving competition thing is complicated and I am not sure it’s healthy. There is a mad scramble to get donations in a certain time period. Organizations push on their network, “Give now!” “We need you!” “We want to win.” But unless you are an expert like Beth, you don’t usually have much of a chance.

Beth has written about her win and here is the response I left for her. You can read more about it on Beth’s blog.

Beth, you are really great at this. Mazal Tov yet again on a job well done.

This whole competition thing has been a good model for your strengths, and I have given to this worthy cause every time you asked.

But I wonder about all the orgs who went down this road because of the publicity but were so less equipped than you to be successful. I saw lots of questions about this on the PX list and elsewhere and thought to myself, these poor suckers, they are going to spend lots of time putting this together, will get little response, and people like Beth — with big and active networks — will eat their lunch. They don’t have a chance.

I also wonder if this whole competition thing is sustainable. How many of these could you do before you create fatigue in your network? And, is there a way to get the folks who gave with the urgency of this campaign to have a deeper engagement with the Sharing Foundation?

Would love your thoughts on all of this in another post.

Michael

In January, Barack Obama raised as much money, $28 million, as Howard Dean raised in his entire campaign last time around. And they have done it using $25 and $50 donors. Think about it. On the one side you have the traditional way to raise money — rich people asking other rich people to give. “Bundling” is when the partner asks all the associates to ante up the maximum to attend a local fundraiser.

An individual may give $2,300 per federal election. So if I give $2,300 to Clinton I am “maxed out” and the only way for me to do more is get $2,300 from my buddies. Lets say I am that law partner and by making a lot of calls I can get 50 people to max out for my candidate. That’s $117,300, including my own contribution. I become a Hillraiser.

The Obama campaign is raising money differently. They have raised lots of money from those small donors. For the Obama campaign to get to $117,300 from $25 donors mean they have 4692 people donating instead of only 51. Wow.

We care about this because we care about using the internet for fundraising and advocacy. What Obama is doing is a major milestone in the development of the web. The internet, only the internet, makes possible this kind of retail fundraising. There would simply be no other way to get people, excited in their own homes, across the country, inspired by speeches and videos, organized enough to get these donations flowing. People wouldn’t write the checks or fill out the forms, but they can click and give, just like they click to buy a book or a Pez dispenser or, in 2008, pay their parking tickets.

The Obama campaign says they have more than 350,000 donors this year so far. 350,000 donors! Holy smoke that’s a lot of donors. And they are talking about this many in just over a month.

What the internet makes possible, the candidate makes happen. The internet didn’t raise the money. Obama’s inspiration activated people and the internet made it possible to turn that excitement into dollars. As I have written before, the Obama campaign has been amazing at using video to make that excitement portable across the web, capturing those moments that get people juiced.

There is a lot to learn from this campaign and at See3 and among other nonprofit communicators we will be studying it for a long time to come.

MoveOn has been a leader in using the web, and email in particular, to get their message out. If you don’t know MoveOn, they started with a simple email during the Clinton impeachment — lets move on — and it grew and grew.

They are no strangers to using video either. They have had video contests, and have made lots of 30-second spots. They have used the web to fundraise for these spots.

Today I saw something different from MoveOn. Eli Pariser, the Executive Director of MoveOn.org Political Action did a direct response video. It came in an email with a little text and a large screen shot of a video player window. It said:

Dear MoveOn member,
I recorded a video message for you about this election year—it felt too important to put in a regular email.

Watch it here:

The here is this page on the MoveOn.org site.

The page is their standard fundraising page (the kind you get with services such as Convio or Kintera). In the video he even points down to the donation form from his YouTube box, asking the viewer to donate right now to kick of the 2008 campaign activities.

At See3 we’ve been exploring this direct response video technique for a while. We think that in certain circumstances it can work well and we will try to find out how this does relative to non-video landing pages.

Can you spare $10? It’s a dumb question because I know you can.

Beth Kanter, friend and blogger, is raising money for the Sharing Foundation, which supports kids in Cambodia. Watch the video Beth did with her son:

Now, if you give $10 you can help Beth raise $50,000 through a competition called America’s Giving Challenge. The fundraising page was set up on GlobalGiving by Michele Martin. Go to THIS PAGE right now and donate and make a big difference.

Parade magazine and the Case Foundation are partnering with GlobalGiving to launch America’s Giving Challenge — an initiative to inspire and reward greater giving through online technology. $500,000 will be awarded through the challenge to charities whose supporters have attracted the most unique donors to their cause using new and innovative online tools. The Challenge begins December 13 at 3pm EST and will close January 31 at 3pm EST.

The 1 Second Film is one of the best campaigns I have seen. It has:

* Video
* Charity
* Travel
* Art
* Optimism

and… last but not least… Oprah

Watch the videos and see how an idea blossomed and then grew some more. The site is well done and you can learn a lot from the small elements and how they put it all together.

Now, what can you do with your organization to harness this kind of creativity and passion? Imagine what it could do for you.

In the most recent issue of the Chronicle of Philanthropy I am quoted in an article titled “Telling Moving Stories.” The article features the case study of our client the American Jewish World Service. (Click here to view the front page of the issue.)

You need to subscribe to see the whole thing, but here’s an except:

When the American Jewish World Service used to talk about using video to illustrate its overseas aid projects, it usually meant gathering enough footage for a seven-minute spot to be shown to the people who would attend its annual fund-raising dinners.

But the Internet has changed all that.

The New York organization last year collected more than 60 hours of footage of the organization’s workers and volunteers helping AIDS patients in Uganda, tsunami victims in India, and poor residents of El Salvador, and it soon plans to use that extra footage for an extensive online video campaign. The collection of two- to three-minute spots will run on the group’s Web site, and the charity will also post video clips of interviews with volunteers on the popular online video site YouTube. The organization is also creating DVD’s of some of the videos to send to prospective donors.

What’s more, the charity has trained some of its staff members to shoot video using inexpensive cameras, with the goal of creating a library of footage that it can use to create fresh online videos for years to come. The cost for this effort — which included the purchase of four cameras and video-editing equipment — was about $2,000.

Susan Rosenberg, American Jewish World Service’s director of communications, says these projects are important to the organization because video, more than any other medium, can tell powerful, emotional stories that move supporters and donors to take action. Instead of simply telling potential donors about the organization’s overseas outreach work, it can show them the people it helps and allow them to hear volunteers and those they help in their own words.
“Increasingly, audio and video on the Web are critical tools [for nonprofit groups] for communicating to people about the work they’re doing, and I only see that intensifying,” Ms. Rosenberg says.

With YouTube’s announcement in September that it plans to dedicate a portion of its video-sharing site exclusively to charities, experts say many nonprofit groups are likely to follow American Jewish World Service’s lead.
…
Because of these factors, groups that attempt to use their internal, benefit-dinner videos for an online audience will find their efforts largely ignored, says Michael Hoffman, president of See3 Communications Company, a Chicago consulting group that helps charities produce online video campaigns. See3, for example, helped the American Jewish World Service create its documentary-style videos for YouTube and other Web sites, including the company’s own video portal, DoGooderTV.

“You can’t produce that dinner video over and over, three or four times a year, because most organizations don’t have the budget to do that,” Mr. Hoffman says of those richly produced videos, which typically cost between $20,000 and $75,000.

Instead, he encourages nonprofit groups to produce documentary-style videos that show their work and cast their workers as real people. Such videos can be done inexpensively — requiring only the investment in a digital video camera, video-editing software, and staff time.
Because many digital cameras and editing software are inexpensive, that investment can be less than $1,000.

“The model of continuous documentation is so important,” Mr. Hoffman says.

“If you’re shooting on a regular basis and capturing your work on a regular basis, there are great opportunities to show the kid who walks into your program timidly on the first day and three years later is the leader of a group,”he says. “To have the documentation of the transformation gives you material for powerful stories.”

I diluted my own opinion in my last post. What I said I wanted was a way for people who are part of YouTube’s nonprofit program to be able to collect email addresses and not just donations. YouTube doesn’t do that. You will only get someone’s email if they actually donate. I then said, well… maybe it would be OK if they allowed you to connect like in Facebook.

The problem is, YouTube isn’t Facebook. While there are people who use YouTube as a pure social network, the majority of YouTube users are passive viewers of video. So connecting through the traditional social networking type of connections doesn’t have the impact on YouTube as it would on Facebook.

So, back to my original request. YouTube knows the email addresses of every registered user. With a single click, a user could give their information to the nonprofit, through YouTube. That would be a huge benefit to the nonprofit and I think it would prove to be much more valuable than the donation functionality they have given. It could be a double opt-in — meaning the individual would first have to click on the opt-in on the video page to give their name to the nonprofit, then they would get an email from YouTube giving them a link to confirm that this is what they wanted to do. In this way, no one would mistake their opt-in for spam.

We can thank Google for giving nonprofits access to Google Checkout. But a cynic might point out that Google is trying really hard to get people used to using Google Checkout and so this gift has a self-serving feel to it. Add to their functions the ability to really give the nonprofits something of value — a relationship with individuals on their own terms — then we could really celebrate the Google/YouTube Nonprofit initiative.