FrontStream’s entry into nonprofit sector from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

FrontStream enables nonprofits to handle donations with several advantages

Target audience: Nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, cause organizations.

Ilove the serendipity of who you bump into at the Nonprofit Technology Conference each year. At last month’s event, I sat down to lunch with my partner John Haydon and Leila Khoury, director of business development for FrontStream Payments.

If you haven’t heard of FrontStream, they’re a newcomer to the nonprofit space, although they have a long and solid record with businesses and the education marketplace.

With FrontStream, nonprofits can build a donation capability into your website with your own branding — and at a remarkably low cost of just 2.99% of the amount when donors use most credit cards (3.5% for American Express). Customized branding is included at no additional cost. You can create a special campaign widget using FrontStream, or have someone set up a booth at one of your events to accept donations on the spot using a swipe terminal or wireless device.

One the benefits of FrontStream for nonprofits over other alternatives is that you can collect donations directly on your own website instead of being sent off to a third-party site like Fundly, Rally, Authorized.net, PayPal or Google Checkout. And, unlike donation aggregator Network for Good, which holds your funds for 30 to 60 days, your nonprofit will receive the donations immediately.

“We want to be the donation processor anywhere and any time,” Leila says.

Watch, download or embed the video on Vimeo

If you want to get a bit geeky, here’s how FrontStream describes its fasttransact service: “The platform is a self-serve, cloud-based payment processing and data management system, designed to interface with multiple payment channels. The platform offers data management tools for capturing, tracking and mining consumer data, to assist clients with generating increased revenues and the automated sharing of real-time transactional and demographic data with any of their ERP business systems.”

Leila says FrontStream processes $3 billion a year in transactions and has a small team devoting to working with nonprofits. “We’re releasing code every month. There’s no other donation payments company that can say that.” FrontStream provides integration with and upgrades to nonprofits’ various content relationship management and marketing systems — all for no additional cost.

Sounds like an option worth exploring.

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“Protect Our Defenders,” winner of the DoGooder Nonprofit Video Award among small organizations.

At NTC, expert advice on best practices in telling your nonprofit’s story

Target audience: Nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, cause organizations, brands, businesses, Web publishers, educators, video producers, storytellers.

If there was one buzzword at last week’s Nonprofit Technology Conference, it was storytelling. On Wednesday Debra Askanse wrote about our Future of Storytelling panel. And there were at least two or three other sessions about nonprofit storytelling.

One of the most informative was the session “Sight, Sound, and Motion: Video Storytelling and Using Video for Advanced Messaging” put on by Michael Hoffman and Danny Alpert of See3 Communications, which works with nonprofit clients to create compelling video stories.

Michael and Danny offered these tips on how to make your visual story work — and I’ll second all of these recommendations, since I know a little about video production.

Choose one message

1Here’s one of the biggest shortcomings of far too many videos. Settle on a single message — not three, not two. One. You don’t need to cram your organization’s entire message into a single video. Be selective. The more messages you include, the more muddled it becomes. Marketing folks have lived by this rule for decades.

Decide who you’re trying to reach

2You’re creating your video for a reason, right? It’s not to communicate to your staff. Or even to the public. “There’s no such thing as the general public,” Michael said. Target your audience and speak to them. Frame the story in a way that touches and appeals to those people.

Decide what you want them to do

3After you grab people’s attention, what is your call to action? You want to gently but forcefully direct viewers to take a specific action on your behalf. “How realistic is the ask?” Michael said. He pointed to YouTube annotations (see our article How to effectively use calls to action in nonprofit videos) as a great, underutilized mechanism to make your call to action crystal clear — in text form that pops up during the video. “Every one of you should be using annotations in your video in some way.”

One video with a great call to action — Protect Our Defenders (shown at top, with screen grab immediately above) — won this year’s Nonprofit Video Award in the small organization category for best use of video for the social good. At the end of the 1:45 video you’ll see a way to take immediate action, transporting viewers to the petition page or letting them share it on Facebook or Twitter. (This gets a little technical: You add 15 to 20 seconds at the end of the video with these “buttons” hot-linked to your pages; only certain kinds of software can pull this off.)

Michael and Danny went on to offer rules of thumb to help your audience understand and act on your message. To simplify things, I’ll combine these with the tips above:

Keep your video simple

4The most effective messaging is clean, clear-cut and to the point. “Every video you make doesn’t have to tell the whole story,” Danny said. “It’s a hard lesson for nonprofits to learn.” Resist the temptation by internal stakeholders to grab a share of the spotlight. The beautiful 36-second UNICEF Tap Project video above, showing kids drinking water, is fast-paced but calm and simple. Its only downside: UNICEF doesn’t give you an easy way to donate.

Create aspiration

5Make a connection between your nonprofit’s work and the lives of the kids or constituents you serve, and find a way to communicate that in a compelling way. The video from FosterParentsRock.org does this effectively. “The best fundraisers understand that messaging has to be as much about the donor as the cause,” Michael said. “Your donor wants to feel a certain way, see themselves as a certain type of person. In this video, you want to be the parents who step in to make a child’s life better. You want to live in a house like they do, and act for the good a child like they do.” (Side note: One attendee pointed out that the children in the video are actors, which may be off-putting to some viewers who pick up on that. This raises all sorts of touchy issues about when to use real kids in a video who benefit from a nonprofit’s work.)

Keep it personal

6What works on YouTube? Think personal videos, not PSAs — and avoid “policy videos” at all costs. The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation pulled this off nicely and used real kids rather than actors. This Visible Men video is earnest and personable. And don’t shy away from funny if you can pull it off. I loved Kitty Midnight Madness (above), a funny, offbeat video from the Winnipeg Humane Society, though it runs on too long.

Make it authentic

7Is your cause genuine or manufactured? “People’s BS meters will go off if it’s not authentic,” Danny warned. The Define American video above is amazing, and it gets particularly powerful 70 seconds in when Jose begins talking about his trip to the DMV.

Connect to the Zeitgeist

8What’s in the headlines? What are people talking about? What are the cultural touchstones people are buzzing about? It might be about stand your ground gun laws, or equal rights laws, or a celebrity advocating a cause. Tap into that.

Take your viewers on a journey

9“Take the audience someplace they can’t go on their own, and bring them back changed,” Michael said in a wise and sublime final piece of advice. Hollywood filmmakers do this with every major release. You can, too, in the span of a few minutes. Take a look at almost any charity: water report from the field. “You get the sense that you now know that village a little, and you come away inspired. It’s as if we’re coming out of a movie theater with the feeling that we’ve had a changing experience in some way.”

Be bold and be brave

10Said Michael: “There a lots of reasons you can’t make a video. No time. Not enough resources. But you need to do it. And you need to be clear and straight and authentic – you need to boldly tell your story, the story that was at the core of why your organization exists. Be brave in the telling. Don’t please everyone. Make your strong connections stronger.”

Fantastic advice.

A word about copyright

I wrote a book, “Darknet,” a few years back that addressed the disconnect between the digital generation and current copyright law, so I’m always intrigued by the ways the culture continues to test the boundaries. I pointed out that one of the videos shown contained a large portion of a Coldplay song. The See3 execs began with the disclaimed that they’re not lawyers and noted that the clip couldn’t play on TV without a release waiver from Coldplay, but that YouTube was a gray area, given that the site often allows viewers to buy the music contained in a clip. Danny also observed that when filming in a village or a public place but is still identifiable, “as long as the person doesn’t speak on camera, you don’t need a release” as a general rule.

One audience member pointed to a site I hadn’t heard of: mobygratis.com, from the musician Moby, who lets nonprofits use his music for free.

6th annual DoGooder Awards

During lunch Thursday, we were treated to clips from the winners of the 6th annual DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards, with 1,100 entries from more than 700 organizations and 12,000 votes cast — up from 40 videos entered in the first year.

See3 also offers the Daily DoGooder, a free cause video sent to your in-box each weekday that’s worth subscribing to.

Nonprofit video storytelling has come a long way. Check out some of the other entries to get inspired — then tell your own story!

Related on Socialbrite

• Storytelling 2.0: Why nonprofits need to tell stories

• How to find amazing, powerful stories for your nonprofit video

• 8 great examples of nonprofit storytelling

• How to effectively use calls to action in nonprofit videos

• Tutorials on social media: Video & multimedia

• Nonprofit storytelling tips from the pros

The post 10 secrets to video storytelling success appeared first on Socialbrite.

At 2012 NTC, we delved into tools, strategy & storytelling

Last week’s Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco was easily the most fast-paced and frenetic of the three NTCs I’ve participated in, and not just because, at 1,800 attendees, it was the biggest NTC to date.

Several reasons for the frenzy: Four Socialbrite team members led sessions or participated on panels; I wound up also attending the Where conference on geolocation technologies, two blocks away; I commuted home each day (a three-hour round trip by train) even after attending the evening social gatherings; and I reached out to a number of attendees to sit down and share their nonprofits’ experiences and challenges with social media.

I also captured a Flickr set of my NTC photos. And here are a few of my takeaways from the annual gathering.

Nonprofits need a social media strategy

• I’ve been giving a lot of talks lately, to organizations, at conferences and in my monthly CharityHowTo webinar, about how to create a social media strategy for your nonprofit or organization. At NTC, my Socialbrite partner Carla Schlemminger and I led a 90-minute session Thursday on You need a strategy, dammit, not a Twitter accountthat drew 100 people. An artist from Rally.org captured a graphic recording of the session, at top.

• We set up a special training summary page on Socialbrite at socialbrite.org/ntc, containing both our full slide show, 12 handouts to share with your team and a directory of resources on monitoring, metrics, creating media, storytelling and more.

• Libby S. asked for an example of how Pinterest — now the third largest social network! — has been effective for nonprofits. Turns out that one of the folks I sat down with, Briana Kerensky of Communities In Schools, had a good example: They’ve begun using Pinaquote, which lets you post any text on the Web to Pinterest (or another social network) instead of an image. So Communities in Schools has been pinning inspirational quotes for students about success and volunteerism.

• Kristina T. tweeted during our session: “Twitter can ID who is tweeting on a particular subject within a zip code range. New to me! Great potential tool.” Yep. Look at the Advanced Search options in Twitter and you’ll see that you can scroll down to Places and enter a town or location. When you do, you’ll see “within this distance” (1-50-500 miles) automatically appear. Click Search and presto!

The future of nonprofit storytelling

Jenna Sauber of the Case Foundation, Cara Jones of Storytellers for Good, Rob Wu of CauseVox and I appeared Thursday on the panel “The Future of Nonprofit Storytelling.” Here are a few takeaways:

• We all agreed on the need for nonprofits to maintain an editorial calendar or story bank to keep track of upcoming stories and make sure upcoming events are given appropriate coverage. Open it up to the staff to add story ideas, even if they don’t commit to writing it.

• Great quote from Cara Jones: “Save video for motion and emotion.”

• I returned to the idea of creating photo slide shows and mashups using tools like Animoto, Stupeflix and others. See our roundup: 4 ways to mash up a visual story for your nonprofit.

• I pointed to the fact that few nonprofits have joined Google for Nonprofits, which would allow them to add call to action video overlays to their videos. See How to effectively use calls to action in nonprofit videos on Socialbrite.

• My advice to a questioner: “Don’t make your story about your organization, make it about your cause and constituents.”

• My response to a question about optimal length of an online video: “I have rarely watched a video and then thought, Oh, that video wasn’t long enough.”

• Someone mentioned ShoeBox for the iPhone, by 1000memories. It’s “the fastest way to scan old paper photos and share them with family and friends.”

• A member of the audience pointed out that YouTube can tell you the hot spots and cold spots in your video — the portions that people replay or the spot at which they bail. When logged into your YouTube account, go to YouTube Analytics > View Reports > Audience Retention.

• Reps from both Call2Action and Active Voice were at our Storytellnig session. Call2Action helps partners with online social issue campaigns with its portable microsite technology. Active Voice is a group of communications strategists who harness the power of film, television and multimedia to spark social change. They’re both worth following at @Call2Act and @active_voice.

Final words

• Jenna pointed out earlier that when you call up a photo in Facebook, clicking the L key will Like the photo.

• Shoutouts given to Astrid To-do: a personal organization and group collaboration app that’s free for iPhone, Android and the Web. And Asana, a shared task list for teams to collaborate.

• Dan Roam, author of “The Back of the Napkin” and “Blah Blah Blah: What to Do When Words Don’t Work,” gave a great presentation during Wednesday’s plenary on how to use pictures to communicate in ways everybody can understand. “I have a simple proposition. We can solve our problems with pictures. We can clarify our ideas with pictures.” Here are Rally.org’s visual notes/graphic recording.

• Thanks to the Community Techknowledge Foundation for the great dinner at the St. Francis.

• In the days ahead here on Socialbrite, look for my summary of the See3 session on video storytelling best practices, My take on GroupeMe, my interview with Leila Khoury of Frontstream Payments, Debra Askanse’s take on our Storytelling panel and more.

Of course, the best part of NTC was in the hallways, catching up with friends like Beth, Kivi, John, Debra, Peter, Lauren, Carla, Darian, David, Deborah, Cara, Robert, Mark, Kirstin, Kaitlyn and dozens of others. Thanks, NTC crew, for another amazing gathering.

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Results of 2012 Nonprofit Social Networking Benchmark Report, with infographic

Target audience: Nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, cause organizations, Web publishers, educators, journalists, general public.

Guest post by Frank Barry
Blackbaud

Blackbaud, the Nonprofit Technology Network and Common Knowledge have just released the fourth annual 2012 Nonprofit Social Networking Benchmark Report.

We learned a lot of things, but one prevailing theme stood out: Despite limited budgets and staffing, nonprofits continue to find great value in their fast-growing social networks.

The report is packed with insights into how nonprofits are leveraging social networks as part of their marketing, communications and fundraising strategies. Have a look at the infographic below, and then download the full report to learn more about important behaviors and trends.

6 key findings from the report

• 98% of the nonprofits surveyed have a Facebook page with an average community size of over 8,000 fans. (The nonprofits tended toward the mid- and larger size organizations.)
• Average Facebook and Twitter communities grew by 30% and 81%, respectively.
• Average value of a Facebook Like is estimated to be $214.81 over 12 months following acquisition.
• 73% allocate half of a full time employee to managing social networking activities.
• 43% budget $0 for their social networking activities.
• The top three factors for success are: strategy, prioritization, dedicated staff.

Nonprofit social networking infographic

Check out this Nonprofit Social Networking Infographic based on the 2012 report to get high level insight into the findings as well as a few year over year trends.

View large version if you prefer (yes, it gets larger).

View large version

Don’t forget to download the complete 2012 Nonprofit Social Networking Benchmark Report.

And tell us if you agree or disagree with the conclusions or the findings.

Related

• See Socialbrite’s compendium of free reports for nonprofits
• Free social media reports

The post 3 keys to nonprofits’ success: Strategy, prioritization, dedicated staff appeared first on Socialbrite.

If you’re attending, please stop by and participate today & Thursday

Four of Socialbrite’s strategists will be speaking at the Nonprofit Technology Conference — the year’s biggest nonprofit tech event — which concludes today and tomorrow in San Francisco. We might have the largest crew speaking on panels or leading sessions at NTC. But we haven’t been publicizing that fact much, because that’s not how we roll.

Socialbrite has already received a lot of love at NTC because of the thousands of free resources and tutorials we’ve made available to the nonprofit community since 2009. But it’s worth letting NTC attendees know which speakers we’ve got on tap, since there’s just so much going on at the conference!

Wednesday, April 4

Today, look for the following sessions:

• Online Organizing for a Cause/Movement Building (hashtag #12NTCOnOrg on Twitter). Debra Askanse, 10:30 am to noon today, Cyril Magnin I (Parc 55 hotel).

Come and meet your fellow nptech-ers who are working in community building, movement building, and developing online organizing campaigns. Find support and as a place to discuss challenges, issues, online campaigns, and the brass tacks of how to build movements online. If you’ve ever developed an online campaign to develop leaders and recruit stakeholders for your cause, or want to learn more about it from your fellow online organizers, join us for this Birds of a Feather discussion.

Fellow panelists: Avi Kaplan of Rad Campaign and Charles Lenchner of Organizing 2.0.

• Designing Online Engagement to Collaborate With Your Community (hashtag #12NTCCollab on Twitter). Debra Askanase, 1:30-3pm today, Yosemite B (Hilton).

You can design online engagement to unleash your evangelists. In this workshop, we’ll focus on all aspects of designing high-value, engaging, and participatory content that creates a partnership with your fans. A true evangelist is moved to create, is a seamless co-creator with your organization, and motivated spreader of content. Successful organizations intentionally design and construct multiple online channels that enable access for all fans and develop paths for relationship reciprocity and trust, fostering true evangelists.

Fellow panelists: Amy Sample Ward of NTEN and Vanessa Rhinesmith of StartSomeGood.

• Personal & Professional Brand in Social Media (hashtag #12NTCPPB on Twitter). John Haydon (co-author of “Facebook for Dummies,” 3:30-5 pm today, Golden Gate 6 (Hilton).

Are you proudly representing your organization, seamlessly blending your personal and professional persona online? Or are you scared stiff that someone will figure out that your old beloved handle “bunnykiller” actually belongs to you, the Executive Director of the Animal Protection and Welfare Society? Are you stymied by your organization’s social media policy, annoyed that you can’t discuss politics, religion, and sports online? Do you juggle multiple online accounts in order to express yourself authentically in different spheres of your life, or have you embraced a modified authenticity, knowing that your grandma might be listening in? Do you behave differently on different platforms? Come discuss these issues and many more. Tell us your real life successes and failures.

Fellow panelist: Laura Norvig, ETR Associates.

Thursday, April 5

On Thursday, look for these sessions:

• You Need a Strategy, Dammit, Not a Twitter Account (hashtag #12NTCDammit on Twitter), led by yours truly and Carla Schlemminger of Socialbrite. 10:30 am to noon, Plaza Room A (Hilton).

Sure, your nonprofit has a Facebook or Twitter account. So why aren’t you getting traction with social media? It all begins with a strategy. Nonprofit consultants J.D. Lasica and Carla Schlemminger of Socialbrite will map out the essential ingredients of a Social Media Strategic Plan that’s aligned with your mission, that enhances your fundraising efforts, and that’s integrated with development and marketing. We see a lot of industry events focus on tools and tactics, but your nonprofit needs a strategy to steer your team toward your organizational goals in the social media era. In this highly interactive session, J.D. and Carla will offer concrete steps and actionable advice and resources to help your organization create immediate and long-term impact.

• What’s Right and What’s Wrong with Nonprofit Data Today (hashtag #12NTCDDTL on Twitter). Debra Askanse, 10:30 am to noon Thursday, Franciscan C (Hilton).

This session will provide tips, techniques and lively discussion for guiding decisions about contacts, donors, members, and advocacy constituents. Data-Driven Technology Leadership will use case studies, recommended metrics, and engaging experience-sharing to help you provide direction to your organization on effective contact and donor management, social media and web content management. Learn to be more effective with today’s communication and engagement tools through targeting and segmenting audiences for campaigns, connecting with social media audiences and reaching a wider web audience. Discuss how to balance and integrate disparate measures into a common framework useful for senior leadership and board-level decision-makers.

Fellow panelist: Steven Backman, Database Designs Associates.

Monday and Tuesday

We’ve already met a great group of nonprofit people at NTC, including these folks and many others:

• Katya Andresen, Network for Good
• Jodi Heintz, Banfield Charitable Trust
• Nyaka Mwanza, World Food Program USA
• Daniel Karp, Save the Children
• Elisa Pluhar, Public Radio International
• Carolyn Assa, Perkins Communications
• Jenna Sauber, Case Foundation
• Alec Stern, Constant Contact
• Karen Bray Irwin, Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Southern NJ
• Derek Hurwitch, AJFCS
• Rebecca Bowe, EFF

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