See What’s Out There

The great people at Working Films and The Fledgling Fund just announced IMPACT, a new series of videos that discuss how film campaigns can ignite social change. They ask the question we always grapple with: How do social issue documentary films do more than just raise awareness?

Below is Assessing Impact: A Funder’s Perspective, the first video in the series.

In the video, The Fledgling Fund Founder Diana Barrett and Executive Director Shelia Leddy discuss the impact of Born into Brothels and Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. You’ll get a close look at how these films supported the social change goals of their partner organizations and how they were tied to urgent actions. Diana and Sheila also lead you through their foundation’s transformation into one of the leaders in the field of supporting creative media and audience engagement.

For more information, go to http://workingfilms.org/impact and http://www.thefledglingfund.org/impact.

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.

This year, See3 is playing an active role in Tweetsgiving 2009, a global celebration that seeks to change the world through the power of gratitude. Last year, Tweetsgiving raised $10,000 to build a classroom in Tanzania. But as the story behind Tweetsgiving demonstrates, the real focus is not to raise money but to share gratitude all across the web.

Over the next few days, we’re encouraging folks to create a short video of themselves expressing what they’re thankful for this year. All you have to do is upload it to YouTube, tag it with “Tweetsgiving”, and include the tweetsgiving.org URL in your video description.

Watch the instructional video below, as well as three Tweetsgiving videos made by members of the See3 staff.

To see videos that others have created for Tweetsgiving, visit the Epic Change YouTube channel.

Any questions? Write in the comments below.

We’ve really enjoyed getting to know the folks at Flip Video Spotlight. They designed these custom Flip “trophies” for the 2009 DoGooderTV Nonprofit Video Awards, and they’re continually demonstrating their commitment to providing necessary digital resources to the nonprofit community.

So when Basho Mosko, Program Manager at Flip Video Spotlight, asked us to co-present with him for NTEN’s “Mission Video” webinar, we couldn’t resist.

Here’s what we covered during “Mission Video: How to turn your nonprofit’s story into an engaging video”:

Video is all over the interwebs. You recognize it’s power to tell a message by engaging the eyes and hearts of viewers. Your nonprofit has a story to tell. Converting from words to video is powerful but where do you begin? With its plethora of information about video, it can be hard to find what those tactical steps to creating a video for your nonprofit are. In this webinar, we will walk you through an adaptable template to create your organization’s introductory video and provide some quick tips for reporting from the field.

You can access the slidedeck and audio here.

At See3 we have worked for organizations that have it in their mission to be accessible. For example, See3 client Easter Seals is all about helping people with disabilities. They need to model being accessible in their physical spaces as well as on their website.

See3 Director of Interactive Marketing and Fundraising, Shirley Sexton was the VP Interactive at Easter Seals for 8 years. She couldn’t do everything she wanted to do with video because videos playing in a Flash player — like those on YouTube — are not accessible. If you can’t see and hear it, it won’t work.

We have created workarounds for this within our own projects. And when asked about broader-based captioning what we have always said is that it’s a value, but it’s expensive. Someone has to create good captions before they can be added to the video.

We have been watching carefully the advances in speech recognition online with interest. People such as David Pogue are big believers in speaking into their PCs instead of typing. It didn’t seem a huge leap to us that someone would take this technology — which is amazing — and apply it to video. [Here’s a review from Pogue of this software from 3 years ago, and it is much better today than it was then.]

So it came as no surprise to us that Google is the one to step up. They have been leading advancements in all kinds of translation and other technologies, and oh, they also happen to own the biggest video site on the web, YouTube.

Here’s the lead from today’s NYTimes:

In the first major step toward making millions of videos on YouTube accessible to deaf and hearing-impaired people, Google unveiled new technologies on Thursday that will automatically bring text captions to many videos on the site.

While the technology can only insert captions on English language speech, Google is giving users the choice to use its automatic translation system to read the captions in 51 languages. That could broaden the appeal of YouTube videos to millions of other people who do not speak English but could use the captioning technology to read subtitles in their native language.

The speech recognition technology that Google uses to turn speech into text is not new; Google currently uses it to transcribe voice mail messages for users of its Google Voice service. But Ken Harrenstien, a deaf engineer who helped develop the automatic captioning system, said the technology had never been applied on such a large scale.

“This is some thing that I have dreamt of for many years,” Mr. Harrenstien said speaking through an interpreter. “To see it happen, is amazing.”

You can read the whole article here.

It’s been a busy start to the week at the 2009 Convio Summit! At the conference, Nonprofit Live TV interviewed See3 CEO Michael Hoffman about creating a video strategy, video as a transaction, and why story still matters.

We also had the chance to speak with Convio staff and users during the three-day event. Watch what attendees took away from the last day of the conference.

If you want to see more of the Convio Summit, take a look at the videos featured on the See3 YouTube Channel.

YouTube is doing some cool things for nonprofits. One of those things is to leverage the YouTube community to make videos for nonprofits. They have a program called Video Volunteers, which encourages YouTube video makers to make videos about nonprofit issues.

They launched the program and I didn’t see much activity. It was all kind of vague. But they just started to pick issues and create contests to encourage people to make videos on that issue. The first issue was animal welfare. The next issue is hunger.

Seems to be working. Over 100 users made animal welfare videos and they have the results sitting on YouTube’s home page today, driving traffic to the videos and raising awareness for the issues. Way to go YouTube!

Here you can read YouTube’s blog post on the subject.

And go to Video Volunteers page and see if you can get YouTube video makers talking about your issues.

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.

Girl Effect Video

Our Holiday Parody: The Regift Effect