Post by Jennifer Marr

Most nonprofits have a long history of relying on traditional media when they want to get the word out about a new initiative. While television, print publications and mailers remain a big part of the marketing game plan, nonprofits are realizing that their social media accounts are becoming increasingly important.

But it’s not all about just Facebook and Twitter.

Do you know what the second largest search engine after Google is? It’s not Bing or Duckduckgo or even Yahoo. It’s Google-owned YouTube. Nonprofits need to be on YouTube to reach your target audiences and move them to take action. In this article, you’ll find out how to get ahead of the pack.

Google and YouTube partner programs

As a nonprofit, you’re  in some luck when it comes to creating a YouTube channel. Alphabet, the parent company to both YouTube and Google, offers special nonprofit programs to help you achieve your goals.

These programs include Google for Nonprofits and the YouTube Nonprofit Program. They’ll help guide you through the process with the goal of building a long-term, stable subscriber base. Be warned, though, some of these programs are available based on region, so if you’re outside the U.S. they might not be available.

On channel and on video optimization

When putting together videos and your channel, you need to remember some basic optimization techniques. These are pretty simple, so let’s run down a quick list:

1. 1. Have titles that people will search for; especially questions
   2. Use appropriate tags and add a lot of tags
   3. Mention the main question or questions and  keywords as part of your video — the algorithm can convert audio to text
   4. Have a simple-to-understand and appropriate thumbnail image
   5. Write a good, detailed description, including these terms

   
   charity: water, part of the YouTube for Nonprofits program, created this video as part of its campaign around World Water Day in 2018.

   Quick tips to getting more subscribers

   The golden rules for building a following on YouTube are time, quality and most importantly consistency. Gaining subscribers and increasing engagement is not a given, but if you remember these three things plus the tips below, you can be successful. Here are some great tips on how you can gain subscribers:

   • Make your videos more personal. You’re a nonprofit, which means you’re part of a movement or cause. This can sometimes seem distant and unemotional to the user. Don’t let it be so. Engage on a personal level with your viewers. Make them feel valued. You’re not posting infomercials or television ads.
   • Host it yourself. Rather than using a professional voiceover artist, have someone from within the organization, preferably your executive director, president or marketing chief, hosting the videos themselves. This allows viewers to connect on a personal level with your brand and your cause.
   • Capitalize on trends and current events. As a nonprofit, you have to stay on topic and on brand, and you can’t get sidetracked by insignificant trends of the day or celebrity-driven news. But take a look at things like the trending topics on Twitter and stay on top of current events to see where you can hook into a topic that is top of mind for people.
   • Get feedback and improve. Creating YouTube videos is an ongoing, evolving process. Engage with your subscribers and commenters (the polite ones) and take constructive criticism to heart. Nobody is perfect out of the gate.
   • Post consistently. Grassroots activist Tim Pool, best known for livestreaming the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, posts three to five videos daily across three channels. As a result, he consistently gets a lot of views and high visibility in YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. Now, you probably don’t have the ability to go that far, but where possible post in a consistent manner, including at least once a week. The ideal would be every other day, or three times a week. Post at the same time as well so people know when to expect your content.
   • Consider live-streaming. Live-streaming is becoming increasingly popular, especially among younger people, so if you’re doing a live event that would generate interest by the public, it wouldn’t hurt to announce it on your channels in advance and to set up a YouTube Live account.
   • Let your viewers know they can subscribe. The YouTube community is actually divided on this one. Some will tell you to “like, comment and subscribe,” all of which help boost a video and a channel. Others grown on the practice. At the very least, it’s a good idea to have a visual reminder of a call to action at the end of the video or midway through.

   Connecting viewers to your site and cause

   The above list focuses on things you can do on your YouTube channel and in your videos to get more subscribers. However, you also have to think about your channel as part of a wider effort to increase engagement and participation. Think of it as part of a network. This can be divided into three areas: on channel, on site and in social media.

   On channel: Include links to your website and other social media in the description but also do so again in the comments, especially if you have a fundraising campaign you want people to contribute to.

   On site: Write quality blogs of more than 600 words, preferably double or triple that (yes, longer is better). A good post answers a question related to the topic of your video. Then embed the video into the blog post. You can easily embed YouTube videos in a blog, just hit the “share” symbol and you’ll find an embed option, copy the code and paste it into the html area (called “Text” in WordPress) of your blog service.

   In social media: Focus on the new video immediately upon its release by sharing it across your social media. Some social media platforms, like Instagram, will require you to re-format your videos, but it’s well worth the work to reach a wider audience. Re-share the video over the next few days. If it’s an evergreen topic, then you can re-share regularly in the future.

   Share the love to build a wider community

   YouTube is much like other parts of social media in that pure self-promotion does not go down well. Creators are part of a community, so be aware of YouTube viewers’ expectations. It’s good to get personal (see above) and to be part of the community and not turn your channel into a beg-athon. Champion other nonprofits, tag them on social media, give shoutouts, comment on their videos as your channel, and build the love.

   Do the same with individual creators as well, even those you might disagree with. It builds goodwill and engagement, plus in the future the influencer may be more willing to help you out pro bono.

   Now you have some tips on how to use YouTube as a nonprofit. It’s a great resource and should be part of your promotional arsenal and communications strategy.

   One last piece of advice: Just get started, get on with it, learn as you go and keep making content. Let us know how you’re doing in the comments below. Good luck!

   Jennifer Marr, a freelance writer with many years of experience in the marketing sector, is looking to expand her experience with the nonprofit sector and to help them grow.

The post How nonprofits can make the best use of YouTube appeared first on Socialbrite.

Project 4 Awesome on YouTube: 5 years of online community organizing

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

Guest post by Hunter Walk
Director, Product Management, YouTube

In 2007, YouTube stars John and Hank Green, known online as the VlogBrothers, asked everyone on YouTube to upload videos for their favorite causes and charities on Dec. 17. This YouTube community driven movement became known as Project for Awesome — so many people participated that the videos actually took over the YouTube homepage in a “flurry of awesomeness.”

Last year Project for Awesome generated 10 million video views, raised hundreds of thousand dollars, and was the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter for 36 hours.

Now celebrating its fifth year, P4A is a shining example of how YouTube can help nonprofits of all shapes and sizes raise awareness, funds, and friends.

Leveraging the YouTube community to do good

At YouTube, we have 800 million unique visitors a month. That is a big, engaged audience wanting to be inspired, informed, and entertained. As seen with Project for Awesome, when you talk to the YouTube community, they talk back to you and to each other. As in any community, the YouTube community has celebrated figures leading trends and movements. Savvy nonprofits are figuring out how to interact with YouTube stars to reach a new generation of supporters.

For example, YouTube comedian Kevin Wu, aka KevJumba, has been using YouTube to help raise awareness and build a middle school in Kenya with The Supply, a nonprofit supporting education. Through his second channel on YouTube, JumbaFund, Kevin donates 100% of the ad revenue to charity. The JumbaFund channel, currently at over 43 million total views, is solely dedicated to supporting the school.

Turning views into action, regardless of budget

YouTube is giving small grassroots organizations the same marketing and fundraising opportunities as large organizations. In a matter of days a grassroots Australian organization can gain international attention with a viral video. A man with a camera can travel through the developing world and reach millions with the message of ending extreme poverty. A simple video message can start a campaign joined by political leaders, athletes and celebrities.

While there are 1.5 million nonprofits in the United States alone, only around 12,000 organizations are enrolled in the YouTube nonprofit program. Video conveys messages and stories in a powerful way. Make sure you are using video to further your cause. Enroll your organization in YouTube’s nonprofit program to access special tools. At YouTube we’re committed to helping turn view counts into donations, volunteerism, policy change, lives saved and other social action. We work to help nonprofits connect and change the world through video.

Your organization can start today with some tips to help grow your YouTube channel:

• Reach out. Post videos that get YouTube viewers talking, and then stay in the conversation with comments and video responses.
• Partner up. Find other organizations on YouTube that complement your mission, and work together to promote each other.
• Keep it fresh. Put up new videos regularly and keep them short — ideally under 5 minutes.
• Spread your message. Share links and the embed code for your videos with supporters so they can help get the word out.
• Be genuine. We have a wide demographic, so high view counts come from content that’s compelling rather than what’s “hip.”

Start with Project for Awesome. Saturday, beginning at noon ET (9 am PT), you and your supporters can upload a short video highlighting the cause you care about. Use this thumbnail for the video, and tag it with “p4a2011.” Encourage your supporters to participate and help you connect and change the world through video.

Related

• 6 ways YouTube is helping out nonprofits

• How to effectively use calls to action in nonprofit videos

• How to edit your nonprofit video inside YouTube

The post YouTube’s viral stars: The new nonprofit ambassadors appeared first on Socialbrite.

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.

The post 6 ways YouTube is helping out nonprofits appeared first on Socialbrite.

By Jessica Haswell
Socialbrite staff

Nonprofits have long known that creating a YouTube channel can help tell your organization’s story. But did you know that YouTube offers a nonprofit program? YouTube’s program gives nonprofits a number of handy features to get your message heard.

One nonprofit that put the program to good use is charity: water, which raised more than $12,000 in one day through the use of an in-video ad overlay on their World Water Day video, shown above.

Features of the YouTube Nonprofit Program

What exactly does YouTube’s Nonprofit Program offer?

• More exposure. Videos will be listed in YouTube’s nonprofit channel and Nonprofit videos pages, and you’ll have your own nonprofit channel, which can be fully branded to suit your organization.
• New outreach and fundraising opportunities. Your organization can add Call-to-action ad overlays on your videos, and a Google Checkout “donate” button can be added to your organization’s YouTube channel to help drive campaigns.
• Volunteer videographers. You can post a video opportunity on the YouTube Video Volunteers platform to find a skilled YouTube user to create a video for your cause.

To us, the most exciting feature of this program is the call-to-action ad overlay. You know how about 10 seconds after you start watching a You Tube video, an ad pops up at the bottom of the video? After joining this program you can now control the content of the ad overlay wording on all of your videos, giving you the ability to include a call to action: Link the viewer to your website, additional content, places to donate or other external sites. Cool, right?

Make your channel count

After you join the Nonprofit Program, you’ll have your own nonprofit channel. You Tube offers some good tips on how to maximize the impact and exposure of your channel. Among them:

• Reach out. Post videos that get YouTube viewers talking — perhaps you’ll want to create a compellng digital story. Then engage in an ongoing conversation with comments and video responses.
• Partner up. Find other organizations on YouTube that complement your mission, and work together to promote each other.
• Keep it fresh. Put up new videos regularly and keep them short — ideally under 5 minutes.
• Spread your message. Embed your video on your own blog, and share the links and embed code with supporters so they can help get the word out.
• Be genuine. YouTube has a wide demographic, so high view counts come from content that’s compelling, rather than what’s hip or trendy.

Videos are still limited to 10 minutes in length, even if your nonprofit is accepted into the program.

How to join

Membership in the nonprofit program is free, and it’s currently only available in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.

To apply, first make sure you fit the meet the program requirements, and then click apply now to fill out an application.

Has your organization joined the YouTube Nonprofit Program? If so, we’d love to hear to hear your experience — please leave a comment below.

Related

• Guide to shooting better online video (Socialbrite)

• Creating media: a roundup of guide & tips about how to create video & more (Socialbrite)

• Complete guide to creating a video project (Socialbrite)

• Google for nonprofits

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