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.

Flipping the funnel - the future of fundraising?

Recently I’ve been using an analogy originally promoted by online marketing pioneer Seth Godin to help illustrate how individual donor fundraisers, steeped in traditional direct marketing, need to evolve their thinking to capitalise on the new opportunities being offered by Web 2.0.

In his free to download ebook ‘Flipping the Funnel’ (with a tailored version for nonprofits), he highlights how fundraisers should re-evaluate the traditional approach of funneling high volumes of prospects into a fundraising programme to convert low volumes of supporters.

In Godin’s analogy, when you ‘flip the funnel’ (with the help of Web 2.0 tools) what you end-up with is a megaphone, through which passionate supporters can shout-out to their network of personal contacts on your behalf - overcoming the decline in mass-market appeals and reaching people traditional fundraising communications can’t reach.

In his own words “A new set of online tools makes this approach not just a possibility, but also an imperative for any organization hoping to grow. Give your fan club a megaphone and get out of the way.” I couldn’t agree more!

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)?