See What’s Out There

If you missed your opportunity to donate to a nonprofit on Facebook during “America’s Giving Challenge”, which raised more than $1 million from more than 50,000 donations in 3 weeks, you now have another chance to give on Facebook.

A new program is going live today called the Chase Community Giving Program, between Chase and Facebook.

What this means is:

· For the first time ever, Facebook users will be able to choose from more than 500,000 small and local charities to decide which community organizations they want to receive donations totaling millions of dollars from a corporate philanthropy fund.

· Facebook users, now totaling more than 300 million, will be able to vote for which small and local non profits will receive donations totaling $5 million

· The eligible charity receiving the most votes will be awarded $1 million, the top five runners-up will receive $100,000 each and the 100 finalists, including the top winners, will be awarded $25,000 each

· This $5 million Facebook effort is in addition to the bank’s traditional philanthropic giving, and if successful, the bank hopes to commit more of its annual philanthropy funds using this innovative method of giving.

We’ve already seen a lot of people casting their votes on Facebook, so now it’s your turn!

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.

We are having a great time at the Convio Summit 2009 in Austin. Today at lunch Vinay Bhagat, Convio’s founder and an expert in nonprofit web marketing spoke about trends online.

One thing he talked about was video and social media and how these new online tools have become more important to nonprofits. He was kind enough to give a shout-out to See3, telling the crowd to come and meet us. (If you aren’t at the Convio Summit you can still meet us, just call the office 773-784-7333)

Here’s the video:

We are here in Austin at the 2009 Convio Summit! We are speakers, exhibitors and sponsors and are really excited to now be a Convio Authorized Solution Provider.

Here’s what our booth set up looks like.

America’s Giving Challenge is an amazing program from The Case Foundation that See3 had the opportunity to support this year. It is a program that encourages nonprofits, large and small, to use the web to engage people in their work, and to encourage small donations. They make this happen through a competition that rewards nonprofits daily during the contest period and overall at the end. Today they just announced that the W.K. Kellogg Foundation added another $75,000 to the pot to give away.

Check it out right now at America’s Giving Challenge

Here’s the press release:

W.K. Kellogg Foundation Grant to America’s Giving Challenge Significantly Increases Number of Overall and Daily Awards Offered to Nonprofit Causes

Challenge Has Already Raised $1.1 million from More Than 50K Donations in Three Weeks;
Runs through November 6

WASHINGTON, D.C. (October 30, 2009) – America’s Giving Challenge, a 30-day, national online competition that encourages people to leverage their social networks to recruit supporters and win cash awards for nonprofit organizations, today announced that it has received a $75,000 grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan to help mobilize participation in the last week of the Challenge.

The grant increases the total amount of award dollars in the Challenge to $245,000 for nonprofit causes that net the highest number of donations. America’s Giving Challenge, presented by the Case Foundation, Causes and PARADE Publications, launched on October 7, 2009. To date more than 50,000 donations have raised $1.1 million for nonprofit causes.

“America’s Giving Challenge offers a tremendous opportunity to raise funds and awareness for nonprofit organizations at a time when the communities we care about, including children and families, have never been in greater need of their services,” said Anne Mosle, vice president for programs at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. “We hope that collaborating with our colleagues in these efforts will not only encourage more innovation by all the participants in their fundraising efforts, but ultimately spark a larger movement of nonprofits leveraging technology to reach new audiences and inspire civic action.”

The $75,000 contribution from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation will enable the creation of five additional overall awards, including one $25,000 and four $10,000 prizes for the causes that garner the most unique daily donations over the 30 days of the Challenge. In addition, a $1,500 daily prize will be added for the last seven days of the Challenge beginning at 3 p.m. ET today. With the additional contribution, America’s Giving Challenge now offers 12 overall awards: one $50,000 prize, two $25,000 prizes and nine $10,000 prizes, and three daily awards of $1,500, $1,000 and $500.

Individuals and nonprofits can still get involved in America’s Giving Challenge. From now until November 6 at 3 p.m. ET, participants can compete for daily and overall awards – ranging from $500 to $50,000 – based on the number of donations to their cause using the Causes application on Facebook. Those who wish to participate in the Challenge can get involved in one of two ways:
• Champion a cause – Individuals can become “cause champions,” who are passionate about a specific cause and will compete to obtain the most donations for their cause through the Causes application on Facebook.
• Promote, donate or join a cause – all individuals are encouraged to take part in America’s Giving Challenge by joining, promoting and donating to the causes they care about. Facebook membership is not required to donate to a Giving Challenge cause.

Participants can register to compete in the Giving Challenge, view details and donate to a cause they care about at www.americasgivingchallenge.com.

About the W.K. Kellogg Foundation
Established in 1930, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation supports children, families and communities as they strengthen and create conditions that propel vulnerable children to achieve success as individuals and as contributors to the larger community and society. Grants are concentrated in the United States, Latin American and the Caribbean, and southern Africa.

About the Presenting Partners:

The Case Foundation
The Case Foundation, created by Steve and Jean Case in 1997, invests in people and ideas that can change the world. The Foundation champions initiatives that connect people, increase giving, and catalyze civic action. For more information, visit www.casefoundation.org.

Causes
Causes empowers anyone with a good idea or passion for change to impact the world. Using our platform, individuals mobilize their network of friends to grow lasting social and political movements. To date, over 85 million Facebook users have installed the application and created and joined more than 300,000 grassroots causes that benefit more than 60,000 nonprofit organizations in the U.S. and Canada. For more information, visit the Causes Application (www.causes.com) and Causes Exchange (www.exchange.causes.com).

PARADE
PARADE, the most widely read magazine in America, is distributed in more than 500 of the nation’s top newspapers. The magazine, which launched in 1941, now has a circulation of 32 million and a readership of 73 million. Each Sunday in PARADE and every day at Parade.com, our mission is to entertain, inspire and inform Americans about the issues they care most about and move them to action. For more information, visit www.parade.com.

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

Shirley Sexton, our Director of Interactive Marketing & Fundraising, recently hosted a webinar, “What Donors Want This End of Year Season”.

Below is the slidedeck to the presentation, which you should feel free to share within your networks. We will be adding the audio portion shortly, and in the meantime, feel free to send an email to info (at) see3 (dot) net with your questions.

I recently put together a webinar about how nonprofits can use YouTube effectively. This issue has become much more important than it once was. When YouTube first started, all of 4 years ago, the quality of the video was bad, the audience wasn’t so huge and messages about changing the world just seemed totally out of place amid the poor amateur video that was appearing on the site.

My, how the world changes quickly. YouTube has improved so much in the past few years that looking at the early version would be hardly recognizable. The changes are too numerous to mention but the quality has improved, user control has improved and what people expect to find on YouTube and how they interact with it has also changed.

I have pasted my entire 1-hour webinar below. It has both audio and the slidedeck and I was told it was quite packed with useful info.

If I had to choose a few key takeaways, this is what I would tell you:

1. Search is critical. Not only are YouTube videos showing up in Google first-page results, but YouTube itself has become a top destination for searches. So if you don’t have YouTube videos for your key search terms you are missing out. YouTube is now a CENTRAL part of an effective SEO strategy.

2. The YouTube Nonprofit Program is The Bomb. If you are a US or UK registered nonprofit, and you are not religious or political in nature, apply for the YouTube Nonprofit Program, today. Right now. It gives amazing benefits to nonprofits in terms of branding and functionality.

3. The best part of the YouTube Nonprofit Program is linkable annotations—the ability to put links, anywhere in a video, that actually go to your website. “Donate Now”, or “Sign the Petition” become links that really work. Finally, YouTube has the potential to drive engagement. (You can watch how this works here).

4. No excuses. Even if you don’t have a budget and are stressed for time you can create a channel on YouTube and put videos in it. You can use existing video assets, repurposed video assets and make simple videos using a Flip Video camera or other low-cost consumer product.

5. Spend some time browsing nonprofit videos for ideas about what you can do. Most likely you will come across something with a style or tone that you think is perfectly appropriate for your message. Flatter them and copy their approach.

6. Fill your YouTube Channel with Favorites from complimentary organizations. There are great videos already online that speak to your message. Leverage those also. With the new YouTube channel designs, you can use these as a playlist on your channel.

Here’s the complete webinar. We are collecting questions about YouTube for future posts, so if you have questions, send them to info@see3.net