It was just a few months ago that we announced the winners of the DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards on the YouTube homepage and live at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in Atlanta. Now, we’re looking for one fine person to run next year’s contest.
Please share this opportunity among your networks!
————————————————– AWARDS PROGRAM MANAGER
See3 Communications is seeking an experienced Awards Program Manager to run the 5th Annual DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards, an online competition highlighting the best nonprofit videos of 2010.
The Awards Manager will handle a variety of responsibilities, from working closely with our team and our partners at YouTube to establish a strategy to planning, design, marketing, and logistics.
Responsibilities:
• Create awards program strategy and establish cross-sector partnerships with major media platforms
• Plan and execute awards from start to finish
• Manage (See3’s in-house) design, web and video teams to produce awards microsite on YouTube platform
• Handle all partner, judge, and entrant communication throughout awards
• Coordinate marketing of awards, including email program, online advertising, partner promotion, social media outreach, blogger outreach
• Tracking and monitoring the success of awards ( i.e. impressions, reach and influence), and providing reports for partners
Requirements:
• Bachelors degree in Public Relations, Marketing or Communications with at least 3 years social media, new media or online communications experience
• Experience with online contests, nonprofits, and/or film/media festivals
• Interactive, Web and Public Relations skills
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Organized, independent worker with strong attention to detail
Logistics:
• Position starts at part-time contract position, roughly 3 days per week from August 2010 to March 2011, long-term employment possibility
• Chicago location preferred, but will consider candidates nationally.
To Apply:
Please send a cover letter and resume by email to jobs (at) see3 (dot) net. Please include “Awards Program Manager” in the subject line.
For more information about See3, visit http://www.see3.net and http://www.youtube.com/nonprofitvideoawards
It used to be that everyone was asking us for a “viral” video. Now everyone is asking us how to measure video Return on Investment (ROI).
Video ROI is a topic we think a lot about at See3 and, unfortunately, there isn’t a simple answer or one that fits every organization.
Generally, we think video should be measured in similar ways that you measure other content investments by connecting the ROI of video to broader organizational goals. Views are fine—just as website visitors are fine—but it only gets you a sense of the total amount of engagement.
Here are 5 questions to ask yourself when evaluating your organization’s video ROI.
1. Does Video Move the Needle?
Let’s say you make a video designed to influence a small group of elites (lawmakers, corporate decision makers, etc.). In that case, video views don’t seem so important at all.
Like in any communications effort, your key metrics should reflect your key objectives. A video that we created for the Maryland State Teachers Association only received a couple thousand views, but we consider it a big success.
Why? Because the goal of the video was to influence a debate about education funding and the state-level policymakers and journalists that matter in that debate all heard about the video, passed it on, and watched it. It worked.
2. Does Video Help Your SEO Strategy?
Many people forget about this fact, but SEO is a huge part of your video strategy.
YouTube is the second most popular search engine. That means more and more people are discovering content on your issue through YouTube—if you don’t have content that’s strategically titled, described, and tagged, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.
Video can also jump you up in Google rankings.
In fact, a Forrester study found that “any given video stands about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page that Google has indexed”. Make sure to submit a Video Sitemap to Google and chart how it affects your rankings on target keywords.
3. Does Video Improve Your Conversion Rates?
Video is now used widely on websites, landing pages, and even as a hook in emails. Are you testing these conversion rates with and without video? When does it work and when not?
The answer isn’t the same for every organization, so make it a point to test how video affects conversion rates for each use.
4. Does Video Help Spread Your Message?
We often find that video helps in blog and social network outreach.
Facebook fans respond well to multimedia content and are accustomed to sharing videos among their own networks. Similarly, we’ve noticed that online campaigns with embeddable video gets picked up by bloggers more easily. Do you have a similar experience? If you’ve had trouble building relationships with bloggers, video may be the element that greases the wheel.
5. Does Video Engage Your Constituents?
YouTube and TubeMogul both offer analytics tools that help you assess viewership and engagement.
These tools let you see spikes and trends in views, where your video was embedded and viewed, and how long viewers tend to watch each of your videos. Take a look at this data and see if you can gather any insights about which video content works best, what is the optimal length, and how much coverage your video received beyond your own network.
Final Thoughts: We are moving toward a world where a website and a TV channel morph into the same thing. Determine your organization’s video ROI is a central question you have to answer in order to take full advantage of this new world.
Your nonprofit or foundation could be one of this year’s Getting Attention Nonprofit Tagline Award (a.k.a. The Taggies) winners! And this year, for the first time, you can submit your organization’s program, fundraising campaign and/or and special event taglines, in addition to your organizational tagline. So enter here now.
A strong tagline does double-duty—working to extend your organization’s name and mission, while delivering a focused, memorable and repeatable message to your base. It’s one of your most basic, and effective, marketing tools, but a GettingAttention.org survey showed that 72% of nonprofit organizations don’t have a tagline or rate theirs as performing poorly. The awards program is designed to help close this gap by providing both motivation and models.
All entrants will receive a free copy of the fully-updated 2010 Nonprofit Tagline Report in late 2010. It’s the only complete guide to building your organizational, program, fundraising or special event brand in 8 words or less—filled with how-tos, don’t-dos and models.
Here are the winners of previous Nonprofit Tagline Awards (selected by more than 4,800 voters in the field in 2009). This could be you in 2010! Please take 3 minutes now to enter your nonprofit’s taglines today while it’s on your mind.
We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with YouTube to present the 4th Annual DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards! The contest will award a total of $10,000 in grants, funded by the Case Foundation, to the best videos of the year found in the YouTube Nonprofit Program—a special program that YouTube designed to help nonprofits achieve their missions.
Starting today, submit any video your organization made last year by March 19, when a set of nonprofit and media professionals will select 16 finalists to compete in a public vote among the YouTube community. Awards will go to organizations of all sizes, including a special award for Best Innovation in Video.
“We are thrilled to partner with YouTube for the DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards. With this contest, we get to highlight important nonprofit stories and help organizations engage with the YouTube audience,” said Michael Hoffman, CEO of See3 Communications. “In addition, we are grateful to have such wonderful partners who have been trailblazing how nonprofits use technology, video, and social media.”
Now is your chance to get your nonprofit video featured on the YouTube homepage, receive great prizes from Flip Video and Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN), and have your work showcased at a screening in Washington DC, hosted by Nomadsland.
In the past year we have gotten quite a few calls from existing and new clients asking to make a “girl effect” video. For those of you have yet to see “The Girl Effect” you can scroll below and see it.
This style of storytelling using simple graphics, sometime just words, together with a moving sound track (mostly piano) has be copied and knocked off so many times that even we at See3 were tempted and spoofed it in our last years holiday card.
Because it has been so overdone, we generally steer clients away from this approach towards something that will stand out from the crowd.
But last week, after yet another request to “girl effect,” I went back to watch the original and, even after all this time, I was impressed at its effectiveness. Let’s not forget that this clip has been seen by hundreds of thousands and generated tons of buzz and awareness about the issue—not to mention donations.
So what is it that I think makes this work?
Its frighteningly simple: It practices what it preaches. This is a video about the empowerment of girl and it makes the viewer feel empowered. So many nonprofit messages get mired in the weeds—in the complex issues, the sobering realities of our world or the organizational services. This is what the org wants the viewer to know. More important than what you want them to know is what you (the org) want the viewer to do. At See3, this what we focus on—moving the audience for passive viewer to active participant.
This is why the “girl effect” is so effective. In the first 13 seconds it tells us that the world is a mess and asks so what? It then pivots to the positive: “What if there is an unexpected solution?” and then spends the rest of the clip (2 minutes) visualizing what girls, if empowered, can do for themselves, their communities and for us, the viewer. By the end, we are moved by the solution (what they want us to know), but also moved to feel that our participation in the campaign can mean something (what they want us to do).
This is the effect that, as nonprofit communicators, we should learn from.
Shirley Sexton, our Director of Interactive Marketing & Fundraising, recently hosted a webinar, “What Donors Want This End of Year Season”.
Below is the slidedeck to the presentation, which you should feel free to share within your networks. We will be adding the audio portion shortly, and in the meantime, feel free to send an email to info (at) see3 (dot) net with your questions.
I recently put together a webinar about how nonprofits can use YouTube effectively. This issue has become much more important than it once was. When YouTube first started, all of 4 years ago, the quality of the video was bad, the audience wasn’t so huge and messages about changing the world just seemed totally out of place amid the poor amateur video that was appearing on the site.
My, how the world changes quickly. YouTube has improved so much in the past few years that looking at the early version would be hardly recognizable. The changes are too numerous to mention but the quality has improved, user control has improved and what people expect to find on YouTube and how they interact with it has also changed.
I have pasted my entire 1-hour webinar below. It has both audio and the slidedeck and I was told it was quite packed with useful info.
If I had to choose a few key takeaways, this is what I would tell you:
1. Search is critical. Not only are YouTube videos showing up in Google first-page results, but YouTube itself has become a top destination for searches. So if you don’t have YouTube videos for your key search terms you are missing out. YouTube is now a CENTRAL part of an effective SEO strategy.
2. The YouTube Nonprofit Program is The Bomb. If you are a US or UK registered nonprofit, and you are not religious or political in nature, apply for the YouTube Nonprofit Program, today. Right now. It gives amazing benefits to nonprofits in terms of branding and functionality.
3. The best part of the YouTube Nonprofit Program is linkable annotations—the ability to put links, anywhere in a video, that actually go to your website. “Donate Now”, or “Sign the Petition” become links that really work. Finally, YouTube has the potential to drive engagement. (You can watch how this works here).
4. No excuses. Even if you don’t have a budget and are stressed for time you can create a channel on YouTube and put videos in it. You can use existing video assets, repurposed video assets and make simple videos using a Flip Video camera or other low-cost consumer product.
5. Spend some time browsing nonprofit videos for ideas about what you can do. Most likely you will come across something with a style or tone that you think is perfectly appropriate for your message. Flatter them and copy their approach.
6. Fill your YouTube Channel with Favorites from complimentary organizations. There are great videos already online that speak to your message. Leverage those also. With the new YouTube channel designs, you can use these as a playlist on your channel.
Here’s the complete webinar. We are collecting questions about YouTube for future posts, so if you have questions, send them to info@see3.net
