Michael Hoffman from See3 has written a good article on getting your videos onto the Web, published in February 2009 on Idealware.org. Online videos can be a great way to showcase your organization's mission and work - but you'll need to make sure they reach your intended audience. He discusses hosting video in the age of YouTube and reaching on online community.
Read Michael Hoffman's full article on getting your videos onto the Web
Target Analytics, a Blackbaud Company, released its 2008 donorCentrics™ Internet Giving Benchmarking Analysis back on March 18, 2009. This was a follow-up to their groundbreaking 2006 report and provides insights into the online and offline trends of donors. The findings represent analysis of information from over 9.5 million donors and more than $747 million in donations to the nonprofits in the study.
Key findings in the report:
Read the full 2008 donorCentrics Internet Giving Benchmarking Analysis
Do website "splash pages" that go up for a month or so negatively impact an organization's search engine positioning? This issue came up for me in several conversations earlier this week, so I posed the question in my Facebook status update. Tip of the hat to Michael Hoffman at See3, Dan Schulman at Donordigital, and Kevin Gottesman at Gott Advertising for some very thoughtful responses. Here's a summary of what I learned:
NTEN's We Are Media will be coming to San Francisco, live and in-person on February 12 and 13! This workshop is designed for small planning teams from nonprofit organizations ready to roll up their sleeves for two days and dive deeply into understanding how to craft a social media strategy and to experiment with tactical approaches. Throughout the workshop, they'll walk through important topics like:
* Social media readiness
* How social media fits into your communications plan
* Implementing social media tactics
* A look at the tools you'll use
Take a look at this lineup of instructors: Beth Kanter, Holly Ross, Nina Simon, Rachel Weidinger, Britt Bravo, David Cohn, John Kenyon, JD Lasica.
I wrote a short article for Mal Warwick's widely read e-newsletter on the topic of incorporating online video into nonprofit messaging. I was in the midst of working on an online video strategy for a Foundation client and collected my own thoughts and also aggregated the good ideas that I was reading online. Here are my 10 tips, but you should make the jump to read more detail on each of these items, and sign up for Mal's excellent e-newsletter on all things fundraising while you're there:
"From viral videos to text-messaging tactics, top nonprofit organizations ramped up their tech savvy in '08," proclaim the good folks at M+R Strategic Services who have assembled an interesting list of what some of their clients achieved online. Their Best Online Campaigns of 2008 includes profiles of these campaigns:
Download The Best Online Campaigns of 2008 PDF here
See3 Communications has published a wonderful Guide to Online Video, a 7-part video series created as an introduction to online video for nonprofits. For beginners, this is your chance to get started. And for the experts out there, this is an easy tool to share with your less web-centric colleagues to get everyone on the same page. Here's a run-down of the video series:
My friend and online alter ego Michael Stein (yes, there is another!) offered a useful write-up way back in July 2008 about The Nature Conservancy's use of Facebook for fundraising. Michael writes:
There's been a lot of excitement in the last year about social networking in general, and about Facebook in particular. And a lot of talk about the value of social networking for non-profits. But is there really a return on investment for non-profit participation on these sites? Here's a success story. The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is a 501(c)3 organization that works in the U.S. and over 30 other countries to protect ecologically important lands and waters. Using tools readily available on Facebook, the organization has raised almost $48,000 in the first six months of their social-networking effort. They did this by creating a Cause and a Fan Page for the org, and by forming a relationship with an ecology oriented game on Facebook, (lil) Green Patch. Six months later the (lil) Green Patch application is one of the most popular on Facebook, with over 6 million users!
Michael Hoffman and Stacy Laiderman of See3 have shared a wonderful Powerpoint deck on "Incorporating video into nonprofit messaging" which is a very useful overview of this growing trend in nonprofit communications, and full of great examples.
You can click through the deck above or visit their blog
Laura Quinn from Idealware (I'm on the Board) offers us her useful insights into the question how how much a nonprofit should expect to pay for a website:
Ah, it's the eternal question: how much should I expect to pay for a website? And how can I find out some answer other than "it depends" without actually building the sucker? It can be really difficult to define what communications approaches make sense for you when website costs appear to be all over the map. Well, it does depend. If you want to hone in on a price, the best way is probably to get proposals from consultants or firms - not a fast process, but a pretty accurate one. But the general magnitude depends on factors that are knowable, so I thought I'd take a crack at defining what you could expect at each price level based on my experience. Note that this prices are approximate US market rate - so you might be able to find folks who will discount or volunteer for less, but these are what someone who's doing this full time might charge.
10 tips for incorporating online video into nonprofit messaging (Mal Warwick's Newsletter, Dec 2008)
