See What’s Out There

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.

As part of the new YouTube for Nonprofits, Google has integrated Google Checkout donation processing for organizations in the program. What this means is that if you are in the program, viewers will see a “Donate” button both on your channel page and when your video is playing in a standard page.

Here’s an example in the channel page:
24 Hours for Darfur Channel

Here’s an example on the standard video page:
24 Hours for Darfur standard view

If you are a 501(c)3 it’s a no-brainer to sign up. Why not?

What we don’t know yet is whether it will work. If a decent percentage of people who view a nonprofit video actually give, then we have a revolution on our hands. The viewers/donors might look similar to what we see on Facebook causes but we will wait until we have some real data before speculating further.

What we at See3 would like to propose to Google is an addition to their nonprofit program that could greatly enhance the value to organizations. We all know that a newsletter sign-up or advocacy ask is an easier ask than a donation. Imagine if next to the Donate button we had a “Join This Cause” button. And when a registered YouTube user clicked on it, the email address (and other info) of the user was transfered to the nonprofit. (Like with comments, the system could tell a non-registered user that they needed to register.)

Another approach — not as good for the nonprofits but maybe more acceptable to Google — would be more like the Facebook approach. Don’t give me their email, but connect me to them through the social network. I think there has to be something more than Subscribe — which they already have. There has to be a way to say, “I am a supporter, but this doesn’t mean I have to watch every video you produce all the time.” A one-click to Join would have the most benefit if it enabled the nonprofit to message the viewer on a regular basis beyond pushing out new videos.

Facebook has taught us that people will opt-in to support the cause far more than they will donate. You can see the evidence in the mostly small donation totals in the Causes application.

Maybe we can make this request to Google through out friends and partners at NTEN. What do you think Holly?

Some final thoughts from my trip to the Convio Summit this week:

1. Some commentators misread notwithstanding, the Convio Open initiative is significant, and the Facebook application builder, while not nearly perfect or complete, represents a great short-cut to building a custom application for Facebook for most Convio customers. Having content go directly from your CMS to your Facebook application pages makes having a Facebook app much more manageable to most and keeps the interactions with Facebook users within your primary CRM tool.

2. I am not sure going public will be a good thing for Convio. On the plus side, raising $80+ million can go a long way toward building out a more robust product, buying competitors, beefing up marketing, etc. On the downside, there will be new pressures for short-term performance that might not always be in the customers’ best interest.

3. The founder of GetActive, the software company that merged with Convio earlier this year, is leaving. Sheeraz Haji became the President of Convio when the merger was announced, but at the summit in Austin, through a video message, Sheeraz said he was leaving. (He just had a kid, so he couldn’t make the trip.) My guess, the whole merger was a way for Sheeraz to exit and find the liquidity in an IPO they could never have achieved alone. Lets hope Sheeraz decides to do something innovative in the nonprofit space. And lets hope that enough of the great spirit of GetActive survives in Convio.

4. I have heard that many GetActive customers have received a lot of hand-holding and positive experience with the whole migration issue to the Convio platform. What I heard at the summit was that this is not the universal experience. To have a successful IPO, Convio must be successful in the migration of GetActive customers. If enough of them bolt, the public market will have issues with this offering.

5. Convio is growing annually at more than 50%. Given how small they are relative to Blackbaud (which has over $200 million in annual revenue and a billion dollar market cap), it’s not enough for them to be a successful public company. I don’t see how Convio can get enough top-line revenue with their existing product in their existing market, without taking every Kintera customer — and that’s not going to happen. Threats are everywhere — for example… Salesforce + third-party applications being one, and an increasingly robust Drupal + CiviCRM being another, plus all kinds of low-end players. So, expect to see Convio adding some new products or reaching out to some new markets to get the growth they will need.

6. Quentin Tarantino is the man. He came into the Tex Mex place I was in on Wednesday night in Austin. (Guero’s Taco Bar, for you Austin people.)

7. The team at Care2 are great. I enjoy hanging out with them. While lots of people run in lots of Web 2.0 directions, the folks at Care2 are focused on giving nonprofits clear ROI for their fundraising and advocacy dollar. If you are a progressive organization, an environmental organization, an animal organization or a medical organization, you should talk to the folks at Care2 and see how they can help you grow your list.

I just left session about Convio open. I will write more about the API later, but everyone is really there to see the Facebook opportunity.

Convio has built a Facebook application builder as part of their Open initiative. For organizations on the Convio platform, the Facebook application is a no-brainer and a HUGE improvement from Causes.

The main difference between Causes and the Facebook application powered by Convio is that with Convio your application on Facebook will have all of your content delivered directly from your Convio database and CMS. So the pages of your app have your content and to change this content all you have to do is use the Convio backend in the way you would normally do. Causes uses information created within their program and data from Guidestar. It doesn’t allow people to take your organizational actions or sign-up for your newsletters the way Convio’s application does.

They have also made it easy to build.

There are a couple of limitations to this. First, you can only create one Facebook application. So if you have different initiatives going on, you can’t create different applications for each using this tool. My assumption is that you could custom build a Facebook application using the API, but if you wanted to use their Facebook connector, you would have to only have one. Another thing mentioned in the session is that using conditional content is complicated. So it might not be so easy to deliver specific messages to specific people within Facebook the way you might elsewhere.

It will be interesting to see how many organizations roll this out in the coming months and to track the success with it.

Some video I shot with my Flip:

Intro to Facebook and their application builder:

Why Convio’s Facebook app builder is better than Causes

Today is the first full day of the Convio Summit. More than 700 people are here in Austin, both clients and partners, to learn about what Convio is up to, and to learn from each other about best practices for nonprofits online.

This morning’s keynote address was from Convio CEO Gene Austin. He made an engaging presentation, the highlight of which was his demo of their Facebook application. He started by putting on a baseball hat backwards, saying he needed to get into his Facebook clothes. He then described (in a very funny way) how upset his college-age kids were by being “friended” by their father on Facebook.

I am genuinely impressed by what I am seeing here. The main thing for me is the level of transparency they show in terms of issues. Gene Austin talked about issues they had this summer with their infrastructure, he talked about their “patient investors” and the IPO as a way to reward them in addition to being fuel for further grown, and he talked about the GetActive merger in a very transparent way, admitting that some things were good from Convio and some things better from GetActive and that it took a couple quarters for them to figure out where they were taking it.

The biggest buzz here is about the API and the initiative they call Open. “The proof” of the success of the Open initiative, Gene Austin said, will be 12-18 months from now — when we see what people are doing with it. The other thing he did that was interesting was take a big swipe at Blackbaud. He said, “we got religion” on the issue of openness. Our product can stand on it’s own and we are confident. Blackbaud, in contrast, wants you to only use their products and only live within their system. “We don’t think that’s good for the environment.”

In addition to conections to Facebook, they have built connections to Raiser’s Edge (without the benefit of a Blackbaud API). They have also built connections to Flickr, a Plaxo tool for importing contacts and Salesforce. He described how much easier it was to work with Salesforce, with a published API, than to work with Blackbaud.

More to come from the Convio Summit 2007

Convio is announcing the launch of their API and open platform, called Open. They join Kintera and the gold standard of open API’s Salesforce.com in allowing outside developers to tap into their data and extend the functionality of their applications.

How is this useful?

Imagine you run one program for your main donor database and another program for your email and online data. Until recently, the main way to deal with this was cumbersome import and export of data from one system to another. With an API, you can write new software code that hooks one application into another. Or, more likely, you can use code developed by a third-party that does what you need.

Convio’s system is looking really cool. And in addition to the typical API, they also announced a Facebook application builder. This will let an organization create a Facebook application by tapping into the functionality and content they are already using with Convio. I will learn more about this this week when I attend the Convio user group meeting in Austin.

In the meantime, read the terrific write-up about this from Michelle Murrain at her blog Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology.

There is an entertaining article about Second Life in Good Magazine. The title is Get a Life: The Hollow Promise of the Internet’s Next Big Thing.

As I have written here in the past and as I tell audiences of nonprofit professionals on a regular basis, Second Life should be down (at the bottom) on the list of communications, fundraising and marketing priorities. There is no reason to be an early adopter in Second Life when I am certain you have what to do with your email program, your website, your use of video, and your activity on Facebook and other social networks. When you contrast the number of people engaging in online video — more than 80% of everyone online! — with the tiny community of active users on Second Life (peak time active users reach 40,000 in the whole virtual world), you can make an informed judgment about the likely return on your investment of time and money.

Here’s a quote from the article:

The paradox of a virtual world is that it adds human interaction to the online experience, while at the same time making sure you never have to actually interact with anyone. Now, instead of merely buying a book on a website, you can browse a virtual bookstore along side other virtual patrons, without ever leaving your home. This logic—that you’d want to give up both the speed of online shopping and the social experience of actually shopping, that you’d want to spend time in a bookstore but not actually go to one—is depressing, to say the least.

At See3, we have been building our capacity to support web projects running on Drupal. Drupal is an open-source content management system with lots of great functionality. One issue that comes up when we talk about Open Source software is a kind of fear of the unknown among people who were taught software by Microsoft.

The Nonprofit Open Source Initiative has just published an updated primer on choosing free and open source software for nonprofits. What do you need to know before choosing to move to Linux or use Drupal or any of the hundreds of popular FOSS products? Michelle Murrain, a great contributor to the NTEN community and the nonprofit tech community generally, has clearly worked hard to bring this out. It’s worth a look. You can see it live here or get a PDF version here.

From the conclusion:

FOSS is, on many levels, a good fit for nonprofits. FOSS can provide less expensive, easier to maintain, more extensible, more secure implementations of software than proprietary alternatives. FOSS development and FOSS communities often work in ways that are consonant with nonprofit mission (in fact, many FOSS projects are nonprofit organizations themselves.) The development of FOSS specifically for the nonprofit sector provides the possibility of freely available community-driven, community-owned software, that can change and grow with organizations as they grow and change.

Free and open source software still, after all these years, provides real promise for the nonprofit sector. Our challenge is to find ways to work together to further and more fully realize that promise.