See What’s Out There

We’ve been talking a lot about online video, so we decided to get it on tape. The result is the See3 Guide to Online Video, a 7-part video series created as an introduction to online video for nonprofits. Below you’ll find video #1, as well as descriptions of the whole series.

1. The World We Live In from See3 Communications on Vimeo.

For beginners, this is your chance to get started. And for the experts out there, this is an easy tool to share with your less web-centric colleagues to get everyone on the same page.

These videos are for everyone, so please feel free to spread them around—through your blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, email, newsletter, whichever way suits you best.

1. The World We Live In
Today the web fully supports video. And that requires a new paradigm for how you think about video, how you document your work, and how you reach out to your constituents.

2. Why Video Matters
Video breaks through the noise of everything that’s happening on the web. Video is the most compelling content on the web today, and it’s the content people are spending the most time with.

3. Building A Media Library
If your organization doesn’t have a camera, you need to go out and buy one today. Then you need to start capturing the important things you do and build a media library that you can reuse and repurpose.

4. Finding Your Story
There are millions of stories you can tell about your organization. But how do you make it personal to your viewers, and how do you bring passion and energy to the stories you want to tell?

5. Telling Your Story
Start by asking yourself a handful of basic questions. Then consider the best way to communicate this story to your audience. What form will it take? Documentary? Man-on-the-street? PSA?

6. Using Video Effectively
Everyone wants a “viral video”, but random people watching your video may not necessarily become donors or advocates for you. Thinking about video in terms of campaigns will help you retain audience and deepen engagement.

7. Marketing Your Campaign
You have a great campaign, but how do you reach the right people online? Map the community and join the conversations already taking place all over the web. Tell them about your cause and drive them to your microsite to learn more and take action.

One of the small stories in the election is the role of Jewish voters, particularly in swing state areas, South Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Most of us are familiar with the general slanders against Obama, there has been particular focus on his supposedly being a Muslim (he’s not), the strangeness of his name, etc. This misinformation is being used particularly with religious and older Jewish voters for whom Israel’s safety and the support of the US for Israel are paramount. Even a small move of Jews away from the Democratic party in Florida, for example, can change the outcome of the election.

The Jews in the Obama camp just launched a counterattack - Israelis for Obama. [And of course the counterattack takes the form of video produced primarily for the web.] Have a look:

Link: [Jewish Alliance for Change]

Guerrilla advertising example here that shows that the post-action video can be seen by many many more people than would actually see the action itself.

Link [YouTube]

Every month, a group of bloggers in the Chicago area meet up to share tips, advice and the latest trends. See3 caught up with them at their September 2008 meeting where we talked about fun websites like:

Swurl.com: Lifestreaming tool that brings all your web content to one blog
Fotoviewr: Elegant photo galleries for your Flickr photos
Touchgraph.com: Easy way to visualize your data
Chicagotalks.org : Local citizen news and journalism

We also chatted with the group organizer Barbara Iverson and local bloggers Gordon Dymowski and David Kadavy about what’s special about blogging in Chicago:

Hey bloggers! Check out the Dogooder Blog Network and spread the good.

The Alliance For Climate Protection is Al Gore’s new non-profit that is designed to push his agenda of getting the US off of fossil fuels for power generation in 10 years. It’s ambitious and it will take a huge amount of political will to move this ball forward. Even if we can’t really meet the 10 year goal, it sets a bar to move toward.

The Alliance for Climate Protection are the folks behind the We Campaign, which you can see at We Can Solve It.org. They are spending huge amounts of money on traditional TV advertising. Some of it is very clever, such as having opposites — like Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson sitting together and saying, “we don’t agree on anything, but this.” The idea is that there is a consensus, left and right, to work to solve the climate crisis. [The creative is being done by the Martin Agency, which are the same folks behind the very clever Geico ads.]

I saw this ad today from the Alliance, and it makes me wonder. Will this do any good? Even if I get it, I like it, is there a way for me to act? Does it seem too big for me, an individual, to feel empowered to make change? Their goal can only be reached by getting leaders — Congress and the President — to make changes. Will this ad campaign, without any explicit call to action, have any impact on who these leaders are or make the politicians feel any pressure to pass difficult laws? What would it really take to mobilize people? Do you think this is the best strategy? This brings up much larger issues of what online advocacy really means. (We’ll save that for another post.)

Link [YouTube] via [EarthFirst]

The Republican strategy is to make the Barack Obama out to be un-American. Foreign. Strange. Exotic. And they have tried to paint Michelle Obama as angry, and use that to feed into fears about African-Americans.

The Internet can be a game changer in this election. While the Net can be used to smear and spread lies, it can also be used to undermine smear strategies. The reason is that if you missed Michelle Obama speak last night you can watch it on YouTube. Or on the Obama campaign website or RIGHT HERE! Portability of online video means people can get unfiltered messages directly in the places they frequent. So while you might have heard Michelle Obama is a hate-filled angry Black woman, you will actually see her speak and then, poof, those ideas will be out the window.

You can deploy this same tactic for your organization. Make those unfiltered views of your work on the ground available and see people begin to connect in ways that weren’t possible before. There is a gap between what you do on the ground every day and what donors can see. Use online video to close the gap.

After watching this speech, I think the Republicans will need to come up with a different strategy to get Michelle. Angry? Not at all. A smart, beautiful, loving mom? Totally.

Tonight is the start of the Democratic Convention and you should pay attention to the films they will show. There will be a film about Michelle Obama and I think a tribute film to Ted Kennedy. Then later in the week we will see a Barack Obama bio film. Remember how successful Clinton’s Man from Hope was?

Pay attention to how the stories are told. Keep in mind that nothing in the Obama films are done by chance. The music, the quotes, the clothes, the backgrounds, are all designed to elicit a certain emotional response from the audience. Then think about how you can use some of these advanced techniques in your own work.

The New York Times has a little video called The Art of the Bio Film.

David Axelrod, Obama’s senior strategist, is a master at storytelling and the use of video. My guess is that the Obama film is going to be very very well done.

Last week we asked our peeps on Twitter, “What’s your favorite nonprofit video?” Check out some of the responses below:

Also, check out this video for Operation Smile featured on @johnhaydon’s recent blog post The Six Sees of Nonprofit Video:

Here in our office, we have a tie for the staff’s favorite nonprofit video produced by See3. The first was created to bring attention to the Foreign Assistance Act for Global Development Matters.

The second was made for Amnesty International to raise awareness about extraordinary rendition.

Special thanks to everyone who responded! This week’s question: What’s the most effective strategy you’ve used to build an email list? (For example: in-person events, a petition, social networking, a video campaign…)

The amazing thing about this video is that the statement McCain made — not remembering how many houses he owns! — was yesterday. And here’s the ad. Sleep, for now, is out of the question.

Have you noticed a mysterious decline in the amount of views your videos appear to be getting on YouTube? Turns out, YouTube made a change to their view count policy without telling anyone!

The Incident
We found out about this change at See3 because we made three spectacular videos for the Sierra Club and the first one had more than 65,000 views and the second one had 1000! - at least according to the public view count on the site. We knew that this video had at least 40,000 views. Something strange was happening.

The Investigation
How did we know there were more views? The first place we looked was the YouTube feature Insight which shows a day by day graph of video views. In adding that up for the video below, we got well over 40,000 for a video that only showed about 1000 in the “views”.

VS.

The second way we knew was website stats. If we knew that 80,000 people came to a page, and on that page is a video (one that plays automatically) we could safely assume that more than 1000 people saw the video.

Why is this a problem?
This poses a problem because getting a large number of views in a short period of time puts videos into more visible categories for the YouTube community — most viewed, for example. A video that gets 40,000 views in 24 hours might well make it into a most viewed category which gives it the potential to be viewed by another 40,000 or 400,000 people.

The Solution
It took YouTube weeks to respond and explain, but finally we got this message:

View counts are important to the community and are a reflection of the interests and intents of video viewers. Autoplaybacks are not counted toward the visible “views” numbers displayed on the YouTube site because autoplaybacks are not viewer initiated. The vast majority of videos are not substantially affected by this.

What is auto-playback?
When you embed a video, you can choose to set it to auto-play — so when someone lands on the page the video plays. These plays used to count normally but suddenly, YouTube changed how it worked. This might have been in response to people placing videos on high traffic pages just to run up view counts.

Our recommendations
Autoplay is no longer a good option on YouTube. As See3 CEO Michael Hoffman explains, “I would say that I cannot see a circumstance now where See3 would recommend using autoplay. Once YouTube has taken away the incentive to use Autoplay, it only works against you.”

On the one hand, we know the Sierra Club videos got the views we basically expected them to get. More importantly, we reached campaign goals for sign-ups and house party attendees, etc. As Michael says in his talks, views aren’t usually the organizational goal - it doesn’t get you more money or more supporters - it is specific viewers that you are interested in and the actions you want them to take. On the other hand, our primary internal audiences use those view counts as a kind of short-hand for success of the campaign, so we weren’t very happy about it. But now we all know!