The highlight of last month’s Nonprofit Technology Conference in Washington, D.C., for me came when Ramya Raghavan, YouTube’s News and Politics Manager, detailed all the programs and services that YouTube provides for the nonprofit community. At NTC, Google announced that nonprofits no longer needed to apply to each program individually — now an all-in-one application process was in place. Fill out an application form, answer a few simple questions and within 30 days you’ll be notified if you’ve made the cut. Qualifying nonprofits will be able to participate in Google Grants, Google Earth for Nonprofits, Google AdWords for Nonprofits and much more.

What was shocking, though, was that of the more than 1.5 million nonprofits in the United States, only 10,000 had bothered to apply for the YouTube nonprofits program.

Are you kidding me?

If you’re not participating, here are a half-dozen reasons why you need to get off your duff.

Video is a great way to tell your nonprofit’s story, Ramya said. “It’s the kind of connection that is very personal, very unique.”

YouTube gives nonprofits branded channels, Ramya said, “which means you can upload an image map banner and link back to your website, you can choose custom thumbnails for your videos, you can upload videos longer than 15 minutes — even a feature-length documentary — and you can put call-to-action overlays, or external annotations, on any video to drive action to your donation page.”

Watch or embed the 6-minute video on YouTube
Watch, download or embed the video on Vimeo

6 ways Google is offering free help to nonprofits

Ramya outlined six ways in which Google is offering free help to nonprofits:

1YouTube Insight is a self-service analytics and reporting tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the audience for the videos that they upload to the site. “You can see who’s watching your videos, their age, location, gender, number of views, and you can even see at what spot in the video a person has (stopped watching),” she said.

2YouTube GoodWork. Nonprofits that don’t think they have the capability to create a video can apply to this program, a partner with Cannes Advertising Festival, asking ad creatives to make ads for nonprofits, for free. The top five entrants will be flown to Cannes, France, to participate in a nonprofit showcase.

3YouTube Direct is an open source uploading platform that you can embed on your website, allowing your supporters to upload a video directly to your YouTube channel, which you can approve or disallow through your moderation pane.

4YouTube Moderator allows any YouTube user to collect commentary, questions or ideas on your YouTube channel and watch the best ones rise to the top. Bring a group of people together on a topic of your choice and leverage their collective wisdom to vote on the best video and text submissions.

5Call to Action overlays is one of the most powerful YouTube tools, letting nonprofits create a text call to action that’s superimposed over their video, asking supporters to make a donation, text a text2give number or visit a url.

6YouTube Annotations is a new way for you to add interactive commentary to your videos. You can use it to add background information about a video, create stories with multiple story threads or link to related videos or search results from within a video.

Perhaps the most anticipated keynote at last week’s Where 2.0 conference in California’s Silicon Valley came from D.J. Patil, the former chief scientist of LinkedIn who is now chief product officer of the hot Silicon Valley startup Color, which recently raked in $41 million in venture backing.

Patil gave a memorable presentation about how we’re connecting to each other in new ways using social tools. Toward the end of his talk he began pondering how we’re starting to see empathy turned into action through the power of proximity.

Color is one of the new breed of social media sharing apps that lets you share images, video and text with the public – and, this is key, not just your friends or social network but with everyone. Every photo or video you share in Color can be seen almost instantly by anyone nearby using the app, so if you’re at an event, your uploads become part of a greater visual story, with lots of points of view. (Here’s a quick video demo.) Color is like a Twitter for images.

Cool, right?

We’ve known for some time that people are increasingly willing to share social objects online with family, friends and, increasingly, the public at large. (Thank you, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr.) And while the vast majority of this social sharing is done for entertainment purposes, and a small subset revolves around business or commerce, an even smaller centers on social good, causes and social justice.

You may have noticed the larger trend taking place in the social causes space over the past few years: People increasingly want to help a specific person, cause or project rather than a general cause or organization. So you see people loaning money to specific entrepreneurs on Kiva, donating to community projects on Jolkona, funding specific public classroom projects on DonorsChoose and helping out specific individuals or causes on give2gether.

Can physical location provide added context?

Until now, location hasn’t been a major part of this conversation. But perhaps that’s about to change.

In his presentation, Patil outlined a vision where physical proximity adds context to a location, leading to an increase in the level of trust and familiarity between participants, whether they’re neighbors, attendees at a wedding or eyewitnesses to an event.

“Technology should enable us to share each other’s experiences through each other’s eyes, helping us walk a mile in someone else’s shoes,” he said. “That leads to empathy, which in turns spurs people to take action. It changes the paradigm.”

I sat down with Patil after his talk for a quick interview. “As you’re able to follow someone’s stream or thread and really get a sense of what’s happening with the person,” he said, “suddenly you’re able to combine proximity with his or her well being. If this person isn’t feeling well, how do I move that empathy to compassion and action? Maybe it’s bringing the person a bowl of soup or checking in on them. It can come in all sorts of forms.”

Under the current models of online interaction, he said, “there’s no easy way right now for you to say, ‘This person needs my help.’ Or, ‘How do I assist you?’ We’re all dancing around that question.”

But a new generation of social tools may begin to change that. “You can meld all these elements by using social tools,” he said. “It starts with proximity data but it goes much further. You have to be in physical proximity with people to achieve that level of bonding. We’re focused on enabling and extending those kind of close, nearby, immediate relationships.”

In other words, help thy neighbor – literally.

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And how nonprofits need to adjust to the new mobile marketplace

Guest post by Tonia Zampieri
Director of Marketing, Smart Online

Last week I presented at the NCTech4Good conference here in North Carolina. Our session, “Mobile for Today’s Nonprofits,” was a combination of recent discussions held at last month’s NTEN conference on the big four of mobile as well as an overview of findings from our recently published whitepaper on consumers’ use of smartphones titled, “A Mobile World: How supporters are using their smartphones, and why you should care.”

The first thing many people think when they hear mobile is text2give. But that’s only one of the four pillars of mobile. Here’s a rundown:

Mobile websites

 Nonprofits need to embrace this as a necessary piece of their overall marketing strategy. An early first step is creating mobile optimized landing pages for their most critical calls to action. I chose to highlight the organization Soles4Souls (“recycling shoes for people in need”). In the presentation above, notice how their site looks on a desktop vs. a mobile device. This example shows clearly how critical it is to select the most important calls to action – or risk losing the mobile visitor.  Do you study your site analytics to track how many visitors are connecting via a mobile browser?  I’d recommend starting to do so – Google Analytics has this feature.

SMS & text2give

Next we highlighted SMS – text2give is a subset of this. I felt it was important to differentiate between the two to further educate nonprofits on the importance of not just raising money with mobile but also delivering programs. A great example of this was the Text4Baby campaign, a free mobile information service from National Healthy Mothers designed to promote maternal and children’s health.

Mobile applications

Should nonprofits venture into the world of mobile apps? Some thought leaders go so far as to suggest there’s no need to do so. My answer? It depends: Do you have a brand to uphold? Is your target audience using smartphones – or will they be soon?. In the presentation I spotlight the National Parks Conservation Association and how they created their app – not with the explicit intent to get more donations right away but to grow a new engaged audience that will eventually be cultivated into supporters.

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Have you considered asking the community to support your new enterprise?

Target audience: Social enterprises, nonprofits, volunteer groups, sustainable businesses, community organizations.

Guest post by Kerry Given
Green Marketing TV

Finding funding can be one of the biggest challenges for social entrepreneurs. Fortunately, there is a growing number of options for social entrepreneurs and founders looking for capital to start or expand their social enterprise, startup or nonprofit organization and do more good in the world.

One non-traditional funding opportunity that has seen exponential growth in recent years is the phenomenon of “crowdfunding.” Family and friends have been one of the most common sources of venture funding capital for centuries. Crowdfunding takes this age-old source of venture funding and brings it into the digital age.

Thanks to social media and other forms of modern technology, entrepreneurs are able to build networks of friends, colleagues and like-minded individuals more easily and effectively than ever before. Crowdfunding websites allow entrepreneurs or project leaders to leverage these networks to gain funding.

Typically, entrepreneurs post a request for funding on a crowdfunding site with a detailed project description. Depending on the site, funding may be provided as a loan or a donation. Once the funding request is posted, the entrepreneurs use their networks to spread the word about their project to potential donors through word of mouth, email, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms.

Crowdfunding is not for everyone. The majority of crowdfunding sites fund entrepreneurs on an all-or-nothing basis. If the project is fully funded when the deadline arrives, the money is given to the entrepreneur. If it is not fully funded, it is returned to the donors to keep or donate to another project. So it’s important to have a compelling project or story and to be a skillful marketer and networker to ensure that word about your project reaches enough potential donors to fully fund the project before the deadline. If you’re confident that your social enterprise has what it takes to become a crowdfunding success story, you may find crowdfunding to be the perfect option for your fundraising efforts.

The following is a list of crowdfunding websites that can help your social enterprise, sustainable business or nonprofit organization get off the ground:

33 Needs: Connecting microinvestors & social enterpreneurs

133needs is a recent crowdfunding startup that connects microinvestors with social entrepreneurs who have big ideas in categories such as sustainable food, health, education and the environment. Investors can earn a percentage of revenue in exchange for their support.

AppBackr: Offset app development costs

2A specialty crowdfunding site that may be useful to some social enterprises, AppBackr allows Apple developers to get funding upfront for iPhone, iPod and iPad apps in the concept stage by selling the app wholesale to backers, who receive a percentage of the profits for the apps they have purchased. Many app buyers also assist developers with marketing and promoting their apps to ensure that their investment is fully recouped. With a growing number of social enterprises tapping into the explosive apps market to raise awareness and sell products or services, AppBackr may be a useful tool to help offset app development costs, and even gain some extra promotional help.

Buzzbnk: Supporting a wide range of fields

3Buzzbnk is a crowdfunding platform especially for social enterprises that allow funders to donate either money or time to support social enterprises working in a wide variety of fields. Though based in the UK, it is open to social ventures operating anywhere in the world. Social enterprises must submit their project proposal to Buzzbnk and the Buzzbnk team will work with the social enterprise to help develop appropriate fundraising targets and benefits or rewards to offer funders.

CauseVox: Fundraising pages for nonprofits

4CauseVox offers nonprofit organizations a fully customizable fundraising page that makes collecting money from supporters easy. Supporters can also create their own personalized fundraising pages. Social media integration makes it easy to embed YouTube videos, Flickr slideshows and more.

ProFounder: Investors share in the profits

5ProFounder caters to entrepreneurs – social or otherwise – who are looking for alternative sources of venture capital. ProFounder provides a secure platform where entrepreneurs can raise money from family members, friends and other connections, who then receive a share of the profits when the business they have invested in succeeds. This revenue sharing system is good for investors and good for entrepreneurs, because it doesn’t commit entrepreneurs to making debt payments (potentially with high interest rates) during periods of bad business, only when the business is successful and profitable.

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It’s more important than ever to get face to face with your community

Guest post by Erik Mintz
Director of Event Marketing, Constant Contact

During a presentation last month at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in Washington, D.C., called Get Heard: Using Online Tools to Inspire Volunteers and Donors, I outlined four online communications tools that every fundraiser should take advantage of: event marketing, social media marketing, email marketing and online surveys.

Many of you will embark on the busy spring and summer event season and so, today, I’ll focus on event marketing. While I’ll concentrate on event marketing for the purpose of this post, I encourage you to view the presentation link above to learn more about the other online tools as well.

Why online event marketing? If you’re a nonprofit already using online marketing tools, you can likely answer that question with a few key phrases – look professional, save time and money, real-time results!

According to our research, online event marketing tools are increasingly popular with nonprofits, in large part because events remain a critical source for fundraising. Nonprofits are consistently more active with driving awareness through events, using more promotional tools, having more events with larger turnouts, and using more methods to manage registrations than B2B or B2C businesses.

Are live events the most powerful tool in your arsenal?

So, it’s time for the “wow” factor: A recent study by the International Experiential Marketing Association suggests that almost 60 percent of marketing professionals worldwide consider live events to be the single most powerful tool in their arsenal. While the world is going digital, it’s more important than ever to get face to face with your community. These online tools provide a great way to engage your donors, members and volunteers at all phases of an event’s life cycle.

We’ve learned that traditional event management tools have not kept pace with today’s digital environment and communications needs. What worked well in an era of ample staffing, volunteers and administrative budgets does not work in today’s environment. The economy, environmental concerns and diversity of communications channels has dictated a shift in the way we organize, manage and market events.

However, there is a lot of good news for nonprofits. In addition to the three “savings” – cost, time and paper – online event marketing tools automate a number of activities that can contribute to an event’s success:

1. Promotion: More important than anything else, you have to get the word out about your event. There’s lots of synergy when using these online tools in concert with each other (nonprofit websites, event sites, partner sites, email newsletters, online surveys and social media destinations, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter). These channels greatly expand the awareness of your events and encourage attendance by igniting word of mouth, both online and offline.
 
2. Capture: Without an online registration system, collecting attendee information, fees and donations is a time-consuming manual process. We hear time and time again that offering online registration with the ability to capture fees and donations electronically increases fundraising dramatically while reducing the workload, even for the smallest nonprofits.

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GroupMe, Ditto, LocalMind & some other cool apps you may not have heard of

Icaught a fair chunk of the Where 2.0 conference yesterday in Santa Clara, Calif., plus part of Tuesday’s sessions. I think it’s fair to say this is the best annual gathering of thought leaders in the mobile space — people from the future who beam in to bring us up to speed on where this whole mobile revolution is taking us.

Here’s my modest Flickr photo set of 14 images.

I got to spend some time with two of the rock stars of the mobile world: Di-Ann Eisnor, VP Community of the cool beat-traffic-jams app Waze, and DJ Patil (another initial guy), former chief scientist of LinkedIn and now chief product officer of the hot startup Color, which recently raked in $41 million in venture backing.

I’m always impressed by the visual eye candy at Where 2.0 and this gathering was no exception. Check out the 90-second clip above, Waze Presents: An LA Traffic Story (music), which visually represents a 24-hour time lapse of traffic congestion, accidents, police activity and more in Los Angeles, based on the automatic GPS tracking in the Waze app as well as reports by Waze members. Fun!

Some other highlights from Where 2.0

Alexa Andrzejewski of Foodspotting, Jyri Engestrom of Ditto, Di-Ann Eisnor of Waze.

I didn’t get to all the sessions I wanted to, but here are a few other highlights and takeaways:

• Good to meet the folks behind SeeClickFix, a site that lets people report community problems to local government, and one that I’ve admired for some time.

• My favorite new toy: the GroupMe app, a group messaging service for ad hoc groups of friends, family, co-workers, college buddies. Says co-founder Steve Martocci: “It’s like a it’s like a reply all chat room on your phone. … This is a very intimate tool that’ll buzz everyone’s pocket.” Yowza!

• 40 percent of ratings on Yelp is coming in through mobile devices. Yelp now has 50 million unique visits per month in eight countries.

• One out of every 10 Israelis (not just drivers) uses Waze.

• Localmind is a new service that allows you to send questions and receive answers about what is going on — right now — at places you care about. If it scales, this would be an awesome service.

• Loved this quote from Jyri Engeström of Ditto (just downloaded the app: “Looking to hang out? Find out what your friends are up to, have a conversation, or get a group together. Ditto makes it easy to get recommendations about restaurants, movies and things to do.”):

“A lot of the conversation that goes on at conferences like Where 2.0 is based on the assumption that we’re talking about places and buildings. But the resolution of social objects is getting higher and higher so we’re getting to the things scale and person scale, with almost everything being able to have a unique identifier associated with it — even plants and animals. Then the whole conversation changes.”

• Raffi Krikorian of Twitter: “People want to say ‘I’m in Vegas, baby!’ without giving away their exact location.” His hourlong talk about the different tiers of “local” was fascinating. I was also digging terms like “geohash.” And: “The holy grail of geo-location is to use some kind of GPS triangulation.” Follow him on Twitter at @raffi.

• Jack Abraham, Director of Local at eBay: “Any product that can be digitally distributed, will be.” He noted there were 465 million active IP addresses in 2009 and that number continues to balloon. Also: ecommerce still makes up only 5 percent of all commerce in the United States.

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“A Glimmer of Hope – LTBH Feature – Austin 2009″

How to convey a powerful message with videos & photos

Target audience: Nonprofits, social enterprises, NGOs, foundations, cause organizations, Web publishers, small businesses.

As regular readers know, I’ve been a longtime proponent of visual storytelling to advance the missions of nonprofits, cause organizations and businesses. (Heck, I co-founded Ourmedia.org before there was a YouTube.) People take action on behalf of a cause only when they feel an emotional connection, and yet nonprofits in particular are famously bad at telling their own stories.

What we tell people in our Socialbrite bootcamps and in our consulting work is this: Every nonprofit is now a media organization (the same goes for social enterprises and businesses). Never before have the tools of visual storytelling been so inexpensive, easy to use and accessible to the masses.

So why aren’t you taking advantage of visual storytelling yet? (Or are you? Tell us in the comments!)

There are dozens of ways to convey your story, and we’ve laid out lots of ways to get started — see the links at the bottom of this article.

Today we’d like to highlight a few best-of-breed examples of visual storytelling so that you can think about how to take a similar approach for your organization. At least one of the examples cited below should trigger an insight — an idea that resonates or an approach that you might consider using with your team or with a production partner.

Remember, it’s not about the tools or the technology. It’s about finding people who encapsulate what your core objective is all about — and conveying their stories with power, genuineness, passion and humility. Some can be elaborate productions, with narration, titling and musical score all working together. Others can be as simple as holding up a video-capable smartphone to capture a moment.

One you have a visual story, or several, that you can draw upon, you’ll be able to begin using it in your public outreach: on your website or blog, on your Facebook page, in your annual report, in your email newsletters. And don’t forget to enter contests like the DoGooder Awards, TechSoup Storytelling Challenge or CurrentTV’s just-ended The Current Cause, where $15,000 in prizes will be awarded.

Here are seven great examples of nonprofit storytelling:

1/ Classic video advocacy

“Breathe,” by Repower America

advocacyLast month’s 5th annual DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards, presented by YouTube and See3 Communications — See3 is at the forefront of nonprofit video storytelling — drew 1,350 submissions from 750 nonprofits, with 16 finalists and four winners.

Among the winners were:
• Best thrifty video: It’s In Your Hands, by Watershed Management Group
• Best large organization video: A Public Service Announcement Not Approved by AJWS, by the American Jewish World Service

Some entries I liked better included:
• Breathe, by Repower America (1:33, embedded above)
• The funny, celebrity-studded Seriously, Serious PSA (featuring B.J. Novak & Friends) by malarianomore (1:01)

Sign up to receive See3′s Daily DoGooder: a daily cause video delivered to your in-box.

And here were the 2010 winners. Observe how other organizations are telling their stories — which style did you like: earnest, funny, polished, grassroots?

2/ Digital stories using photos & narration

“Mountaintop Library Expands Horizons,” by Room to Read

digital storiesI’ve been involved in the digital storytelling movement since 2004. A vastly underutilized medium, digital storytelling uses photos, video, film or found materials, combined with voice-over narration, to convey powerful, evocative stories with a rich emotional dimension.

Our in-depth tutorials Digital storytelling from soup to nuts and Digital storytelling: A tutorial in 10 easy steps offers some great examples. But for a simpler way to do this, look no further than the winner of February’s TechSoup Storytelling Challenge.

The first place winner, Mountaintop Library Expands Horizons, by Room to Read (embedded above), took advantage of visually stunning photos taken in Nepal and weaved together a simple 60-second story about the San Francisco nonprofit’s global literacy mission. Nicely done — with no video at all. This is something your organization can do on its own, no?

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One Economy, SF Goodwill, SF Dept. of Tech, Code for America & Socialbrite team up to develop mobile apps for social good

Save the date! On May 6 and 7, several public-spirited organizations — One Economy, San Francisco Goodwill Industries, Code for America, Socialbrite as well as the City of San Francisco’s Department of Technology — are coming together to put on a Community Code-a-thon.

With the Where 2.0 mobile technology conference taking place down the road in Santa Clara, Calif., this week (I attended yesterday and will return tomorrow), it’s a good reminder that the best mobile applications fill a gap in the marketplace.

A code-a-thon is where local developers come together and spend the day hacking on different ideas that could be teased out into a full-fledged mobile application. Unlike some other code-a-thons you may have heard of, this one is all about creating public-purpose mobile apps that improve the lives of people in the community.

To see an example of how this works, take a look at the top apps that emerged from the hack-a-thon held in Washington, D.C. this past Saturday.

Doing most of the heavy lifting for this effort is Arthur Grau, the tech force of nature who’s behind nonprofit One Economy’s Applications for Good. The Bay Area gathering offers $1,000 in prizes to the winners.

Code-a-thon: Have geek credentials? You’re invited

Here are the details:

When: May 6, a Friday, pitch session and social mixer, 3-5 pm; May 7, a Saturday, offers a full day of coding, ending with judging and announcement of winners.

Where: SF Department of Technology, 1 S. Van Ness Ave.

Who: The Code-a-thon is open to all community-minded programmers. A few case studies will be shared in advance to inspire the developers with examples of how mobile apps could be made available to community organizations and nonprofits

Cost to participate: Free. Register on Eventbrite and see the full Agenda. Food and snacks will be made available.

Organizers: One Economy, Goodwill Industries of San Francisco, San Mateo & Marin Counties, Code for America, Socialbrite and the San Francisco Department of Technology. The daylong, developer-meets-community code event supports Applications for Good, One Economy’s national contest, launched in early 2011, where developers design public purpose mobile applications to help underserved Americans improve their lives. For this event, Code for America is expected to bring 10-12 developers.

Prizes: The day’s activities will offer seed prizes totalling $1,000 to engage developers to design and refine their work under the helpful eyes of experts in community and software development. It could lead to $50,000 in prizes to software developers who design applications that help families, find jobs, get healthy, improve education and build financial security in One Economy’s national contest, which runs through May 16 and is co-sponsored by AT&T. Other details are still being firmed up.

According to a Pew Research Center report, lower income households access the Internet at higher rates on mobile phones and devices because they do not have a computer at home. Those without computers and high speed Internet in the home are disproportionately people of color. African Americans and Latinos, with 87% owning smart or feature phones, are more likely to take advantage of a wide array of phone data functions.

Check out the Applications for Good website to see a rich best-of-apps catalog, needs and solutions pages.

The e Pack spotlights organizations & initiatives making a difference

Alot of us have a hard time keeping up with organizations and initiatives that are advancing the social good. The e Pack makes it easier.

I met the impressive founder and director of The e Pack (the “e” stands for enlightenment and Earth), Alejandra Torres of Venezuela, two weeks ago at Sustainatopia in Miami.

The e Pack is a Web portal that promotes organizations and individuals who are helping to improve our world from the inside out. It offers information and resources that “help people engage take action for a more sustainable, peaceful world,” she says.

Importantly, the site lets you create a list of My Contributions outlining the actions that you’ve taken, such as attending an event, volunteering or signing a petition.

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

Some of the spotlighted organizations on the site include Ashoka, The Story of Stuff, Carrotmob, the Global Oneness Project, Repower America, Cooler Planet, Green Energy, Suzlon, Green Exchange and Green Jobs — some of which I’ll bet you’re not familiar with. There’s a lot here beneath the surface.

Alejandra says she’s looking for other organizations in the areas of sustainability and corporate social responsibililty to get involved.