Which charity will be first to make use of YouTube Annotations interactivity?

Earlier this week YouTube released a new feature called ‘Annotations’ that allows you not only to annotate your uploaded video with captions, but also to create links within the video to other video clips or to your YouTube channel.

Easy captioning is a handy function, but it is the interactivity offered by the embedded links that makes this new feature particularly interesting. There are several simple demonstrations of what’s possible already on the site, including one involving the good old ‘pick a card trick’ shown above (which jumped from 300k to well over 2m views in a day - showing the level of interest in the feature) and a ‘find the shell’ game (keep going to the ‘hard’ video and just see where it leads you;-).

Interestingly, the annotations seem only work on YouTube and not when the videos are embedded elsewhere - which is unfortunate (and presumably why embedding on the ‘pick a card’ video has been ‘disabled by request’).

Ever since YouTube took-off I’ve had countless discussions about how best to use videos on the site to engage with consumers beyond simple viewings, comments and ratings- other than just including a URL for them to type into their browser. While still restricted to links within YouTube, this new feature does offer a new level of interaction which has the potential to be used in interesting ways by non-profits. For example as the basis for a personally guided, interactive video presentation of your work or support opportunities.

Thinking ahead, if links out of YouTube are added then the potential becomes even greater. Allen Stern at CentreNetworks suggests that external links could offer a new way for YouTube to monetize - through a small fee being paid to link products in videos to the product owner’s site or ecommerce sites.

Many non-profits are already making use of YouTube - so who will be the first to get into YouTube interactivity?

Insights, tips and tricks for online fundraising - it’s this week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants

Welcome to this week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, a weekly blog carnival drawing together some of the best nonprofit news, advice and resources on offer across the blogosphere.

Each week a different host blogger sets a topic for this carnival and other bloggers submit posts on that theme - with the best seven being highlighted on the host’s blog. This week it’s my turn to host and the topic I chose was ‘Insights, tips and tricks for online fundraising’.

So, without further ado, here are seven online fundraising insight, tip and trick posts for you…

1. Starting off with some tips on how to evaluate and utilise Website architecture and and design to boost online fundraising from Jim Killion and Amanda Wasson of is7.

2. Staying with website design, Katya shares some tips from the latest study by Donordigital on what makes a great donation page.

3. And still on websites, for anyone at the early stages of website planning Jason King has posted the handy presentation he gave at the Connecting Up conference in Brisbane on Planning your non-profit’s website.

4. The Care2 folks over at Frogloop have reported on a recent survey that suggests that ‘51% of donors are not at all interested in Social Networks. However, apparently around a third of donors are somewhat or very interested in keeping-up with nonprofits through Social Media - rising to 40% for high level donors. Handy insight for social network fundraisers.

5. In her Nonprofits blog, Joanne Fritz shares some tips derived from UNICEF’s use of social networking and video-sharing sites.

6. For email fundraisers, here are Ten tips from Network for Good to help prevent your emails being deleted.

7. Finally, over at onLine, Garth Moore examines the potential of the new generation of ad funded click-to-donate applications.

That’s it for this week. You can keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants as it travels around from site to site by subscribing to the Carnival feed.

Crisis ‘Send a Singer’ Christmas online fundraising campaign hits its £1m target

Back at the end of October I wrote about an innovative online corporate fundraising campaign that our team at WWAV Rapp Collins had just developed for homelessness charity Crisis.

Based around the microsite Sendasinger.com, the idea was for companies to replace their traditional Christmas cards with video e-cards of carols sung by choirs made-up of folks who have been helped through Crisis projects - and the target was to raise £1 million.

The great news is that this ambitious target has now been met! A success celebrated through a double page advertisement in the Financial Times today (using space donated by the paper) listing all of the companies who took part.

All in all, a great example of how the video capabilities of today’s high speed internet can be used to deliver innovative, fun, and highly successful online fundraising.

Anyone else out there using video to raise money from either corporate or individual donors? If so, let us know how you’re getting-on by using the comment function below.

Never mind YouTube contests - equip your supporters as citizen journalists

On Wednesday the UN’s food agency, The World Food Programme, launched what it described as a “unique international competition” called Hunger Bytes – calling for budding film-makers to “put their creativity towards raising awareness about hunger”, through the creation of 30 to 60 second videos. The top five selected by WFP will be posted on YouTube and whichever receives the most views will win its creator a chance to visit and film one of WFP’s relief operations.

While I’m not sure how “unique” using YouTube to encourage the creation of promo videos for causes is these days, their competition is a good reminder of the potential of YouTube as a platform from which individuals can help promote a cause.

However, if you really want to maximise on the potential of online video it’s worth thinking beyond straightforward competitions for online promos.

We live in a world where citizen journalism is becoming increasingly common – as shown by all the requests for photos or video footage on TV news shows. At the same time, research into what donors want in return for their support increasingly highlights the importance of helping them to understand just how their money delivers the goods - especially donors in the ‘Baby Boomer’ demographic.

So, how about putting the two together? Capitalising on the ease with which good quality video content can be filmed, edited and posted online to enable groups of supporters - from all age groups - to become citizen journalists, reporting-back on your work to their peers.

For example, if you’re an animal welfare charity, could a small group of volunteers film the work of your veterinary team for a day to offer a ’supporter’s eye view’ on how their donations are being used? They might need some help to produce a quality product, but it could make for an interesting and engaging alternative to the day-to-day newsletters and updates that people are used to receiving (and all too often ignoring)?

Christmas online corporate fundraising from Crisis

With Christmas just around the corner, we recently launched a fun online corporate fundraising campaign for UK homelessness charity Crisis - aiming to raise £1million by getting corporate sponsors to replace their traditional Christmas cards with a ’singing’ video e-card.

Depending on the company’s Christmas card budget, at the microsite sendasinger.com they can select a four, eight, or fourteen piece choir, made-up of people who have been helped through Crisis projects. Every video e-card card is personalised to the sponsoring company for distribution to their own address list, and all companies taking part will also be formally thanked through double-page advertisements in the Financial Times.

The fun, seasonal approach certainly seems to have struck a chord with companies preparing for Christmas, with a range of organisations already signed-up. So, here’s hoping the campaign reaches its £1million target by 25th December.

UPDATE… Great news - we hit the £1million well before the 25th!

Do The Green Thing

Do The Green Thing is a great site that launched earlier this month, aiming to help as many people as possible to do something to help protect the environment.

There are already a whole host of sites around aiming to do the same thing. But, what makes this one really different is the way it addresses the whole issue in a fun way - and its beautifully crafted style (no surprise, given that one the people behind it is Naresh Ramchandani, formerly of advertising agency St Lukes).

There’s a vast amount of fun content (the videos in particular are fantastic) and to encourage you to keep on doing the green thing you can sign-up to receive regular videos with ideas of more green things to do.

(This post is part of Blog Action Day - 15,000 blogs of all shapes, sizes and specialisms uniting for one day by publishing posts about the environment).