Guest post by Teddy Hunt

Creating video content is one of the easiest ways a nonprofit organization can get noticed. Eighty-five percent of Internet users say they’ll watch videos online, and 39 percent say they’re more likely to share videos than text-based content with their friends.

Forrester Research says it’s also 50 times easier to get a site with a video to rank on Google’s first page than a standard website. Read on to learn about the key ways nonprofits can take advantage of the power of video marketing.

Raise awareness of your nonprofit

There are more than 1.5 million nonprofit organizations in the United States alone, according to the latest stats from the National Center for Charitable Statistics. These organizations and those abroad all compete for the generous donations of the world’s donors. So how do you make sure that your nonprofit’s voice is heard above the throng?

A video is one obvious answer. It puts a human face to your nonprofit’s name, outlining the problems it addresses and its efforts to fix them. Focusing on your achievements is a good strategy, as video ads that evoke strong position emotions, such as happiness and pride, are three times more likely to be shared among friends than those that elicit neutral or negative responses. Think carefully about your script and lead with your most compelling points, as you’ll have only 10 to 15 seconds to capture the attention of your online audience.

Outline your nonprofit’s mission and efforts with a mixture of emotion and intelligence and you’ll inspire your viewers to want to help you. However, you shouldn’t just expect that they’ll figure out how. A “call to action” is a key element of any nonprofit awareness video. This is the point in your video where you encourage your viewers to give to your cause and you tell them how to help. Creating a unique click-through Web address for video donations is a great way to monitor your advertisement’s effectiveness.

You may want to display basic call to action information at the bottom of the video throughout. This ensures that people know how to give, even if they don’t make it to the end of your video presentation.

Thank your donors

Your relationship with a donor shouldn’t end once they part with their hard-earned cash. Thanking your donors is the best way to cement the relationship and encourage them to give again. Consider the research of Grant and Gino, which asked students to offer their feedback on an employment letter from a fictional student called Eric. One group received a personal response after submitting their feedback, while the other received an impersonal email receipt. The students who were personally thanked were twice as likely to help again when compared to the control group.

Nonprofits that receive many donations often aren’t able to personally thank all their donors. However, a thank-you video can bridge the gap by adding a personal touch to your message of gratitude. A video enables you to show donors where their money is been spent, to see the smiles on the faces and hear the appreciation in the voices of the people they’ve helped. Positive video advertising like this is a good way to engage your donor base and encourage repeat donations.

Donors can see this message no matter where they are, whether they’re at home browsing their emails on a desktop computer or visiting your social network page during a subway ride on their mobile device, tablet  or laptop.

Have a bit of fun

Nonprofits do serious work, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a bit of fun with your videos. Creating a more light-hearted video is a great way to separate your nonprofit from its competition and show a more human side of your organization. Consider filming the humorous interactions of your volunteers or office workers to engage your viewing public.

Use these videos sparingly to give your nonprofit personality. Rely on them too much and you risk detracting from the serious work you do.

Entering the world of video marketing can be daunting, but the advantages of this form of digital promotion make it worth the effort for your nonprofit.

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Annual video contest now open, with winners unveiled at NTC

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, educators, video producers, multimedia specialists, storytellers.

All of a sudden, it feels as if nonprofit video storytelling is busting out all over. Tonight I’ll be heading into San Francisco for the Storytellers for Good film festival and fundraiser.

Over at TechSoup Global, the annual Digital Storytelling Challenge begins April 1 — here are the details (though the TechSoup website is experiencing a planned temporary outage).

And the 7th DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards opened for entries on Tuesday.

As in past years, the multimedia consulting firm See3 Communications, YouTube and NTEN are teaming up for the contest. They’re accepting submissions now through March 22.

For the first time ever, they’ve expanded the contest to accept submissions from individuals who are making videos to change their communities or the world. So if you’re a YouTube creator trying to save the whales one video at a time, or if you made a video on behalf of your favorite nonprofit this year, visit YouTube.com/DoGooder to nominate your video.

There are four separate categories in this year’s DoGooder Awards: the ImpactX Award for videos that drove clear real-world impact; Best Nonprofit Video; Funny for Good, recognizing effective use of comedy; and the Change Agent Award, for individuals who’ve gotten involved and produced their own cause-focused video.

Prizes include $3,500 in grants, free admission to the Nonprofit Technology Conference and an appearance on the YouTube home page April 12. Here’s a big ol’ video that explains the contest.

The winners will be announced next month at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in Minneapolis.

Want some inspiration to get started? Here are last year’s winning entries.

Visit the contest website and submit your videos today! Here are the contest rules.

Bonus: A daily dose of inspiring, dynamic storytelling

Want to get a daily dose of nonprofit video goodness? Check out See3’s Daily DoGooder Widget. Our friends at See3 say:

Our new Daily DoGooder Spark widget curates fresh video content direct to your site. All you have to do is a single embed and we’ll do the rest! Videos will aggregate over the course of the week, so viewers can peruse more compelling content and share through social media.

Share it with your team members or your readers.

And hope to see you at the DoGooder Awards in Minneapolis next month (yep, I’ll be there)!

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The multimedia consulting firm See3 Communications, NTEN and YouTube have announced that the DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards for 2012. They’re accepting submissions through the end of February.

This year, winners have the chance to win one of four $3,500 prize donations along with great products worth an additional $3,500 provided by Cisco, free registration to next year’s Nonprofit Technology Conference and a special prize to recognize fearless use of video, provided by theCase Foundation.

The winning videos will be announced at this year’s Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco hosted by NTEN and featured on YouTube’s home page on April 5.

Visit the contest website and submit your videos today.

And speaking of video, check out TechSoup’s 2012 Digital Storytelling Challenge, also open to video submissions through Feb. 29.

The post Enter the 6th Annual DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards appeared first on Socialbrite.

A step-by-step guide to using YouTube’s Video Editor feature

This is part of an ongoing series of guests posts from content partner Movements.org.

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

Guest post by Brannon Cullum
Movements.org

By now, most nonprofits understand the value of creating video to publicize their cause and connect with supporters. But, if you have little to no video editing experience or don’t have access to editing software, that can be a problem in creating a compelling and visually appealing video.

The YouTube Video Editor is a perfect solution. This feature describes how you can edit your YouTube video from within your browser and points out other editing features such as combining video clips, adding music, shortening clips and adding transitions.

9 steps to editing with YouTube Video Editor

Upload videos
1To use the Video Editor, you have to use videos that you’ve already uploaded to YouTube. Check out Movement.org’s how-to guides to learn how to upload a video to YouTube from your computer and how to upload a video to YouTube from your mobile phone.

Choose a video to edit
2Point your browser to http://www.youtube.com/editor. Under the video camera icon on the left-hand side, you will see all of the videos you’ve uploaded to YouTube. They will be in chronological order. This area is known as the “Media Picker.” If you want to preview a video before selecting it for editing, mouse over the video and click the play button.

Add videos to your storyboard
3Below the Media Picker is the Storyboard area. This is where you can drag and drop the videos that you want to edit. You can add up to seven videos to the Storyboard. YouTube has made a lot of changes lately, but this hasn’t changed.

Trim clips
4To edit a clip, mouse over the video in the Storyboard and click on the scissors icon. The Edit Clip dialog box will open. You can trim (shorten) a video by selecting new starting and ending points. Drag the “trimmers” (gray bars) on either side of the clip to your desired starting and ending points and then click “Save.” You can preview your work at any time by hitting the Play button.

Tip! You cannot split a clip, so if you want to use different parts of the same clip, drag the video into the timeline multiple times and trim each clip down to the parts you want.

Rotate clips
5To rotate a clip, mouse over the video in the Storyboard and click on the round arrow icon. Select “rotate left” or “rotate right” and then click “Save.”

Add effects
6To add effects, mouse over the video in the Storyboard and click on the wand icon. You can adjust the clip’s brightness and contrast and convert the clip into black and white. Click “Save” when you are finished.

Add audio
7To add audio, click on the music note (audio) icon to find a list of music you can add to your video. YouTube has a pre-approved collection of music and you can search by genre or artist. Preview a song by clicking the play icon. Select a song by clicking the “+” icon. The song will then appear in the Storyboard. Unfortunately, you can only use one song per video. You can adjust the music’s volume level by sliding the bar toward the music note icon or the video camera icon. If you want to delete the music, click the “x” next to the slider bar.

Add a title
8Add a title to your project in the upper right-hand side.

Publish your video
9When you are all finished, click “Publish” next to your project’s title. Your newly edited video will not replace your old video. It will create and publish a new video.

Have you used YouTube’s Video Editor? Share your lessons learned and suggestions for your peers!

Related

• 6 ways YouTube is helping out nonprofits

• How to effectively use calls to action in nonprofit videos

•Techniques to add dazzle to your advocacy video

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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?

3/ Videos with a call to action

call to actionSince YouTube rolled out a free “call-to-action overlay” feature for nonprofits in March 2009, a lot of nonprofits (but too few) have made use of the technique. Nonprofits can place an “ask” in the opaque pop-up overlay. As YouTube explains:

“Adding a Call-to-Action overlay to your video is easy. First, run a campaign to promote your video on YouTube. Then, go to the Video Details page under My Videos and fill out the fields in the section marked ‘Call-to-Action overlay.’ All you have to do is include a short headline, ad text, a destination url, and upload an optional image, and the overlay will appear whenever someone watches your video. Clicks on the overlay will be tracked in YouTube Insight.”

YouTube also offers tips on how to run an effective campaign.

Two examples:

• World Water Day Video from charity: water, with a 15-second ad overlay at the beginning, earned charity: water $10,000 in a single day, largely thanks to YouTube placing it on its home page. The overlay url takes users to its Donate page.

• StillerStrong, stealing great ideas from other charities to build schools in Haiti, with an ad overlay throughout. I think we’ll increasingly see requests for text2give mobile donations, as shown above.

4/ Mobile devices: Video on the go

mobileSometimes, simple is better. Video producers and photographers often say, the best device is the one you have with you — and that gadget is increasingly a smartphone — an iPhone, Android device or Nokia phone — or a Flip cam or other portable device.

Here are two examples:

• Flip Video and Save the Bay

• Save Our Sounds, by J.D. Lasica, interview conducted in London with a Flip HD Ultra.

5/ Animation

“Do You Own Stuff Made by Slaves?” by Call + Response

animationSome subjects are best told using evocative imagery or animation rather than documentary or traditional video techniques.

Six examples:

• The Girl Effect, by girleffect, is almost without peer.

• Do You Own Stuff Made by Slaves, by Call + Response (2:01) doesn’t have celebrities, but it contains a compelling, little-heard message and inventive animation.

• The EACH Campaign, by LegatumMedia, is visually arresting, though may lack a sufficient emotional impact.

• Prospera: A new way of doing business in Mexico: a social enterprise story.

• 300 Years of Fossil Fuels in 300 Seconds, by the Post Carbon Institute, won the Best large organization video in the Do Gooder Nonprofit Video Awards.

• Closed Zone, by Ground Report: life in Gaza.

6/ Creative mashups

mashupsOne of my favorite flavors of nonprofit storytelling is the kind that takes advantage of the visually interesting styles you can get by using sites like RockYou, Slide, Animoto and Stupeflix. (We covered them in Mash up a visual story for your nonprofit.) The creative possibilities are boundless.

One example is the Will Steger Foundation Mashup Video, showing climate change made accessible.

7/ Personalized videos

personalized videosThis is a risky technique — the line between engaging and gimmicky is a thin one — but I’m still a fan of videos that let viewers insert themselves into the storyline. For young people in particular, personalization is part of the new media ecosystem.

Note: These videos have been removed.

• beyond oil, by Moving Beyond Oil, lets you “make this video about you” by adding your name and email address and forwarding it to President Obama.

• Glenn Beck Attacks Progressive Voter, by cnnbc (aka MoveOn.org), is a funny takedown of the wacked-out Fox News show host — using clips of his own rants — who was recently fired by the network. One lesson: Someones humor works in a field where we take our work very seriously.

8/ High-end professional productions

Trailer of Burbax, Ethiopia from A Glimmer of Hope on Vimeo.

high-endI saved the high-end professional productions for last because most nonprofits look at these, throw up their hands and say, I can’t do that. Well, two answers. First, maybe you can, by partnering with an organization like Storytellers for Good, a small outfit in San Francisco that’s doing some amazing work with nonprofits (see video at top). Second, don’t get distracted by productions whose budgets outstrip your budget — people don’t expect every visual story to be a masterpiece.

If you hook up with the right storytelling organization — ActiveVoice in San Francisco and Free Range Studios in New York are also good places to start — or if you have a decent budget, then find a local video production outfit and go for it.

Here are seven high-end professionally produced videos that caught my eye:

• LTBH Feature – Austin 2009, by A Glimmer of Hope, at the top of this story. A Glimmer of Hope also offers some wonderful examples of storytelling with images.
• Trailer of Burbax, Ethiopia, by A Glimmer of Hope — the music chokes me up every time I watch it.
• Mama Hope, by Storytellers for Good (above)
• Charity: water’s September birthdays — or almost any charity: water video
• Jai Pausch Public Service Announcement by the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network at pancan.org
• Rooftop Gardens, on CurrentTV — while I love CurrentTV, they could benefit from a big splash of variety.
• And, of course, let’s not forget the Official music video for OK Go’s “White Knuckles,” benefiting the ASPCA — 9.7 million YouTubers can’t be wrong.

I’m sure you have your own favorites — please share. Which kind of storytelling do you like, and why? What did I miss? Let us know in the comments!

Related

• How nonprofits should be using visual storytelling (Socialbrite)

• Visual storytelling checklist (Socialbrite)

• Mash up a visual story for your nonprofit (Socialbrite)

• Digital storytelling: A tutorial in 10 easy steps (Socialbrite)

• Roundup of resources on how to create media (Socialbrite)

• Create video stories for your nonprofit in 6 steps (Socialbrite)

• How to maximize your nonprofit’s impact with YouTube (Socialbrite)

• Vimeo channels for nonprofits

• How to run an effective campaign (YouTube)

• Secrets to Nonprofit Video Success (CitizenTube)

• Kivi Miller’s Delicious bookmarks on nonprofit storytelling

The post 8 great examples of nonprofit storytelling appeared first on Socialbrite.

Calling all nonprofits that have made kick-ass videos this past year. See3, in partnership with YouTube, has announced that entries are now being accepted for the fifth annual DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards.

This year winners will again have the chance to win one of four $2,500 grants provided by the Case Foundation, video cameras from Flip Video, a free registration to next year’s Nonprofit Technology Conference provided by NTEN and more. The winning videos will be announced at next month’s Nonprofit Technology Conference and featured on YouTube’s home page in March.

For many nonprofit clients I worked with over the years, we’ve talked about the power of video. Video is a great way to share your mission, messages and goals. The medium educates, makes others aware of issues, progress that’s being made, and the work that still needs to be done. Awards like these recognize nonprofits that see the importance in video and inspire others to try telling their own stories.

Last year there were 750 entries, 17,000 votes by the public and 150,000 views. Wow, right? Now it’s your turn. Here are some details to get you started:

• Submissions for Best Small, Medium and Large nonprofit organization videos must be a video that was made in 2010. Entries for the Best Thrifty Video category can be for videos made any time before the end of the submission period. Each nonprofit can submit as many videos as they would like. No specific categories or missions are needed.
• Entries cannot exceed 10 minutes in length and are limited to nonprofits from the US, the UK and Australia.
• You can submit your videos from now through March 2. Starting March 7, voting is open to the public.
• Your organization must be a member of the YouTube Nonprofit Program.

Good luck! If you enter, let me know so I can help spread the word when voting starts!

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