Jaime-Alexis Fowler, Pathfinder International
It's no newsflash that video is -- in some ways -- king of social media visibility. Who hasn't seen the JK Wedding Entrance Dance or Holly's ‘Put a Ring on It' from 09NTC?
The big news is (if your organization is anything like Pathfinder) that increasingly donors, boards, and senior management are asking "why aren't our videos getting 1 million views?" or perhaps "Why aren't we on YouTube?"
Just a little over two years ago at Pathfinder, we had no videos online and little in-house video production. Now we've launched a new microsite, www.girl2woman.org, that is built entirely around videos -- and most importantly -- sharing them.
Making the Most of What You Have
So what's the first step to increasing your video production, visibility, and share-ability? First, evaluate your assets and think about where your resources are best invested. Do you have someone already on staff who is a video editing guru? Do you have a small staff with no time, but who are handy with a FlipCam? Do you have a budget that could include paying an outside vendor like See3 to help develop video -- or a limited budget that could only utilize Windows Moviemaker?
Where Do I Host It?
Once you determine your resources, internal assets, and what types of videos you're interested in creating, the next move is to look at video hosting. Of course, the biggest player is YouTube -- for many good reasons -- but there are myriad other options for hosting.
Some of the first questions to ask in looking at hosting are:
Who is your audience? Everyone? 30-year-old moms? 65-year-old dog owners? 15-year-old Miley Cyrus fans? This will help you understand where they spend time watching videos and their comfort level with different technologies.
Are you comfortable with ads on your videos or unknown related videos? Some hosting sites include ads, or will suggest related videos over which you have no control. At Pathfinder, this is a big concern. As a sexual and reproductive health organization... you never know what related videos might pop up! For your organization, it might not be a problem.
Why do you want people to share? This may seem a strange question, but it gets to the heart of how you set up your share functionality. For our particular Girl2Woman project, we wanted people to share for three reasons: a) we wanted to raise the visibility of reproductive health needs throughout a woman's life; b) we wanted to raise $1M (and for each video share, a generous donor is giving $1 to Pathfinder); and c) we wanted to leverage the share functionality to increase our constituent registration. To meet those goals we needed to be able to count the number of shares and capture the information of people sharing.
Do you want people to be able to embed your video? This is not a given for all video hosting -- or at least not an easy given. If you're aiming your video at 30-year-old moms, chances are they are familiar with YouTube, have probably shared an online video before, and are likely to know how to embed a YouTube video. If you're targeting 65-year-old dog owners, that may not be the case.
Does your CMS have the ability to host video? Or integrate with other video hosting sites? Check with your CMS and see what options already exist. Convio, our CMS, has an easy embedding tool for YouTube.
How much money do you want to spend? In the age of YouTube and free online access, we expect to get services for free, but video hosting sometimes comes with a cost. It is important to determine your budget for hosting and for how long you are willing to spend that amount.
Are your videos in HD? Many hosting options now offer HD, but to varying degrees. If you have amazing videos that you want only want to showcase in HD, finding the right host is important -- particularly as technology evolves.
Once you answer some of the questions above, you can use simple resources like CNET or even just Google to explore comparisons of different hosting sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Kaltura, DoGooder.TV, etc. For HD video, CNET has a great piece analyzing HD quality among competitors that includes a great stat sheet reviewing upload limit, time limit, cost, advertising and other restrictions.
To YouTube or Not to YouTube
YouTube offers a range of fantastic and easy options for nonprofits. Details of their nonprofit program are available online. Hosting on YouTube has worked for us in the past because we can easily embed on our website, create call-to-action overlays, our supporters are resoundingly familiar with YouTube versus other social media sites (based on a recent survey), it's easily picked up and embedded by bloggers/sites we've targeted, and it's a household name among users.
But for Girl2Woman, we opted not to use YouTube because we couldn't control the look and feel as much as we would have liked, we wanted to count the shares of the videos (not the views), and we wanted to focus on integrating features like the call to action "share". We've still posted the videos in YouTube, however, so that others can embed elsewhere.
Ready to Create Videos!
We are by no means video production experts at Pathfinder, so I will leave the ‘how-to' on creating videos to others, but here's some encouragement:
Video is the one medium where users are comfortable -- and sometimes prefer -- lower end production quality. You can't get away with a hodge-podge print newsletter or Annual Report, but a video made on a FlipCam and produced internally resounds with authenticity -- a huge component of being effective in social media. Sure it's great to have a beautifully created video. Just don't let that stop you from using what you've got! Armed with a camera, and with the ability to tell a good story, you can create videos yourself or, at the very least, do a lot of the heavy lifting, if you work with a vendor.