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.
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.
The next big thing in nonprofit marketing will be mobile. But it won’t be the only big thing. Gaming platforms are becoming home entertainment centers and these centers will have all kinds of content. I can imagine PSA’s from nonprofits while games load or before movies play. I can imagine nonprofit messages built into the games themselves.
Here’s a blurb on the gaming system as a platform for video from Reuters.
Sony, the once dominant market force, showed how the PlayStation 3 could do more by introducing a new video service.
The company said it would rent and sell movies and TV shows over the Internet for the PlayStation 3 and double the hard drive capacity of its main PS3 model.
The new video distribution service will attempt to close the gap with Microsoft’s Xbox Live service and feature movies and TV shows from major studios, including its own Sony Pictures, Warner Bros. and News Corp’s (NWSa.N: Quote, Profile, Research) 20th Century Fox.
At first, I thought we were all nuts. A year or so ago, Twitter was described to me as text messaging what you are doing every minute of the day to your friends and then getting text messages of what all of your friends are doing, every minute of the day.
Buzzz
“I am eating ice cream.”
Buzzz
“I am doing nothing in particular.”
Buzzz
“I am wasting your time making you read this.”
Buzzz
“Are we nuts?”
Twitter is like a combination of micro-blogging and social networking. Micro-blogging, meaning blog posts of no more than 140 characters. Social networking means connecting these micro-blogs directly to your friends.
I started to like Twitter the minute I turned off the alerts on my phone. No more buzzing.
Now, I open a browser tab with Twitter and it looks like this.
Why do I like it? The same reason I like reading blogs — I get interesting information. But the best part is that each of these info tidbits are no more than 140 characters long. Long thoughtful blog posts are nice, but so is something that says:
Hear free teleconference w/Andy Sernovitz on getting started with word of mouth. Use code ‘wommafreebie’. http://tinyurl.com/5na6gm
That’s a tweet from @Nedra (Twitter-speak for username Nedra who is social marketing guru Nedra Weinreich.)
She’s telling me about the Word of Mouth Marketing Association free teleconference with Andy Sernovitz. And she told me in 131 characters, including the URL.
With Twitter you can build a following for your organization and send updates, with links. It’s a smart way to communicate. You can send Twitter updates from a mobile phone, so someone in the field in Uganda could send mobile updates that your Twitter followers can learn from.
No, don’t drop everything and have 10 employees Tweeting full time. But you can start playing with it, see what it’s about and you might find it proves to be useful.
Congress is actually starting to pay attention.
From CNN:
Rep. John Culberson, R-Texas, is at the forefront of a new effort to reach constituents by using services such as Twitter.com, Qik.com, and Utterz.com. Twitter is a micro-blogging service that allows users to publish short text messages known as “tweets.” …
Word quickly spread last week via Twitter.com that regulation of congressional use of the site might be coming. It prompted the Sunlight Foundation, a non-partisan organization advocating for greater use of the Internet in order to make information about the federal government more available to the public, set up a Web site as well as a Twitter-based petition.
House Franking Commission Chairman Mike Capuano, D-Massachusetts, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi each weighed in on the matter and sought to make it clear that any new regulations would be limited for now to use of online video sites such as YouTube and Qik.
In my first job as a political consultant based in San Francisco I wrote Congressional Frank Mail for a half dozen Members. Frank mail are those free newsletters that are sent at taxpayer expense and tell you how hard your Member of Congress is listening. With Twitter — and YouTube and MySpace and Facebook et al. — we’ve come a long way since then.
We just completed a great little project for the World Lung Foundation. It’s a slideshow. Big deal, right? But this show lets you make your own beginning and endings. Anti-tobacco organizations around the world can customize this slideshow by adding their URL and information and then embedding the show on their website.
This is another Web 2.0 example really because the consumers of content are also the creators or content.
The occasion is World No Tobacco Day, which is May 31. Here’s the slide show as customized by me. Customize your own here.
