It’s really the fine details that matter most when it comes to website design: the balance of text and images on a page, the user experience after submitting a form, how linkable text appears throughout the site.
But think also about how your website appears when shared on other sites, like when someone shares it as a link on Facebook. It’s important. When Facebook users scan a busy news feed, a strong image or a bold headline can make all the difference and lead to a better click conversion.
In many cases, a link shared will look something like this:
The image is random, the headline is muddled, and the description is non-existent.
But the good news is you can control how all these things appear. You can make it pretty like this (for the Girl2Woman website we built for Pathfinder International):
A bunch of our clients have asked how to make sure a web page shares beautifully on Facebook, so I thought we’d share this quick tip with other nonprofits as well. All you have to do is include the following meta tags in the head of the website or webpage you want to customize, and make sure the text and image match what you want.
by Elliot Greenberger Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
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.
Idealware is an excellent nonprofit that helps other nonprofits—especially smaller ones—determine which technologies and softwares are best suited to their needs. They cover everything from donor management systems to social networking platforms to email tools.
The Idealware Research Fund will give us the flexibility to create the new, high-quality research that will most help nonprofits. By supporting the Fund, you will allow us to build on our base of more than four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of software research to provide the new resources that nonprofits need most, like information about social media tools, mobile text messaging, constituent databases, and more.
by Elliot Greenberger Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
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.
by Elliot Greenberger Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
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.
A few months ago YouTube announced that organizations that are in the YouTube Nonprofit Program would be able to use the overlay advertising feature to create donation links. They call the feature “Call To Action” and said that in their first test of this, Charity:Water raised $10,000 in one day.
At the Nonprofit Technology Conference in March while I was conducting a session about online video distribution, I mentioned to Steve Grove and Ramya Ragahvan—who runs the YouTube Nonprofit Program—that while this feature is nice, it is really limiting. In addition to only appearing in a very limited way on the video, it only works on YouTube and not when you embed the video on other sites. While Charity:Water raised a lot of money, I politely suggested that maybe it had as much to do with the video being featured by YouTube (and therefore getting a large amount of traffic) as with the new functionality.
But I knew they could make it much better.
In front of the NTEN crowd I challenged them: “What would be really amazing would be to allow for outside links in the annotations features.” The annotations feature is available to all YouTube video makers and allows for the user to put an overlay box on any part of any video. YouTube allows links to go in these boxes, but only links to other YouTube videos or YouTube channel pages. Ramya said they started with the overlay because the technology already existed and that they would be working on extending the annotations function.
I must admit that the cynic in me thought, “It’s really in YouTube’s interest to keep people on YouTube and not to allow them to leave.” In other words, I wasn’t holding my breath that they would create more ways that nonprofits could get people off of YouTube and on to engagement.
Imagine my surprise when Ramya sent me this email last week:
Hi Michael,
I’ve been meaning to drop you a note, because I remember that you mentioned that you would love the ability to externally link from annotations.
Happy to report that for nonprofits that are part of the YT Nonprofit Program, we have this functionality. All they’ll have to do, when creating an annotation, is click the “link” symbol and select “external link”. Then they’ll be able to link to external sites right from the annotation. Better still, these annotations should show up on embedded videos.
Please feel free to share with nonprofits you work with.
Best,
Ramya
Oh, share it I will!
Make no mistake, this is a game-changer. If you still aren’t sure what all of this means, it means that nonprofit YouTube videos can have buttons built into the videos that say DONATE NOW or SIGN THE PETITION and these buttons will work—they will link to any site you point them to. You can even go back to all your old videos that are on YouTube and make your logo into a clickable link, add annotations to donate with a link, and otherwise make your video into a center of engagement. This is now, by far, the most important reason to be in the YouTube Nonprofit Program.
People who watch videos on YouTube are very likely to do one thing when they are done…watch another video on YouTube. Not any more. With this new feature, YouTube can become a center for creating effective calls to action and engagement. Major props to Ramya and the entire YouTube team—you rock!
So that you can get see with your own eyes how this all works, we made this video (above) along with our partners at the Case Foundation as part of the Gear Up For Giving program. (Also, thank you to Beth for letting us shout about this news from the rooftop that is Beth’s Blog.)
Last week, Michael Hoffman spoke about online video as part of the “Social Media for Cause Marketers” workshop at the 2009 Cause Marketing Forum.
He spoke about how the web is changing from an electronic brochure to an interactive channel, how video can enhance your existing cause campaigns, and about redefining what “viral” really means. Check out his slidedeck below and leave a comment if you have any follow-up questions.
This year’s theme, “Everyone’s Doing It”, is meant to include submissions of all shapes and sizes, from organizational vlogs, to staff-produced web clips, to high-end, professionally produced videos.
According to Michael Hoffman, CEO of See3 Communications, “2008 was a great year for video, and we continue to see incredible growth each year in the number of nonprofits using video. With camera and equipment costs down, organizations have nothing holding them back from using video as a communications tool. We’ve seen some really innovative, powerful videos this year, and we hope the DoGooderTV Nonprofit Video Awards will highlight that.”
Last year, more than 160 entries were received from over 100 nonprofit organizations. The top winning videos were from the Humane Society of the United States, Greenpeace International, and the Center for Constitution Rights. The winning videos receive thousands of views and publicity online and offline.
Video submissions will be accepted until March 26, when a panel of judges will select the finalists in each category. The public voting period will open on April 7 and end on April 26. The winners will be announced at NTEN’s annual Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) in San Francisco, which takes place April 26-28, 2009. Winners will be featured on The Nonprofit Times website.
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.
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.
There was a great article in this past week’s New York Times Magazine about social networks that every nonprofit and cause-focused person should read. It matters how people use the sites because you can see how awareness of your cause can then travel these same pathways.
What this article explains is why we want to share what we are doing and be connected to several (or several hundred) friends who are also telling us what they are doing. Who has time for this, many people ask.
What does it mean to have constant contact with all of your friends. The article explains:
“Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.”
What the article says is that many people sign up for the services and then wonder why they are wasting their time. But then things change:
But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they’d scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.
This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.
“It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to say. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.” It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley’s group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by — ad hoc, self-organizing socializing.
