April 4, 2011
Did you hear? Google for Nonprofits has Re-launched!
Like Britney Spears, Google has done it again.
If you haven’t heard already, start listening: a new and improved Google for Nonprofits has recently launched! This online program helps our nonprofit community reach more donors, improve operations and raise awareness for our issues. And, most incredibly, it’s all free!
Some of program features include:
- Google Grants: Free AdWords advertising given to select charitable organizations – up to $10,000 a month in advertising!
- Online Resources: Educational videos, case studies and opportunities for nonprofits to connect with each other.
- Google for Nonprofits Marketplace: Certified Google Partners offer their services at free or discounted rates – this one is my personal favorite!
Of course, it wouldn’t be Google if they didn’t include many other innovative tools, including Google Apps for Nonprofits, YouTube for Nonprofits and Google Earth Outreach.
I highly recommend subscribing to the Google for Nonprofits newsletter, where you can pick and choose how often you want to hear from the Google team about their latest outreach.
And, if you’re going to be in the DC or NYC area at the end of April, the Ad Council and Google are co-hosting a free briefing to learn more about these great tools. Contact me for more info. Hope to see you there!
Filed under: Communications
Tags: fundraising, Google, Google for Nonprofits, Nonprofit Marketing, YouTube
March 8, 2011
It Gets Better: A YouTube Success Story
I sometimes wonder what our world would be like without YouTube. First, I wouldn’t have a job. Justin Bieber would be singing at weddings in Canada and George Allen would be running for re-election in Virginia.
“Viral videos” have impacted our culture and nation’s political system. Yet few people know really how to optimize a video so it has a potential to go viral. Honestly, there is no “viral button,” but there are certain tips. Later on I’ll note a few I’ve picked up along the way with my experience with YouTube for the last five years.
I got involved with the It Gets Better Project about a week after it started when on September 22, 2010, Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller uploaded a video to tell LGBT youth that no matter how hard growing up may be now, that it does get better. When I joined we had a few hundred videos. Then my old boss Hillary Clinton made one. Then Obama and then we broke YouTube.
We actually had to call YouTube to see if they could increase our number of favorites to our channel so we could link to all the incredible stories people were sharing. Fortunately they were able to come up with a solution quickly.
At the end of they year we had about 7,500 videos and today there are nearly 10,000 user generated “It Gets Better” videos seen over 30 million times.
Filed under: Communications, Social Media
Tags: It Gets Better, Social Media, social media week, Viral video, YouTube
January 24, 2011
Is anyone watching your YouTube video?
If you’ve done anything with video in the last 5 years, you’ve probably uploaded it to YouTube. At a recent Google Seminar co-sponsored by the Ad Council, the panelist YouTube explained what one should do to get a video discovered. One of the other things he and another panelist spoke about were the YouTube Insights.
If you’ve never looked at the data available on YouTube beyond “view” for your posted videos, you’re in for a real treat.
YouTube offers clear directions on how to use its insights. But for quick reference here you go:
- Sign into YouTube.
- Click on your profile name and choose “My Videos”
- If you have many videos and want to see data on your channel overall, click “Insights” in the top navigation. If you want to see insights for a specific video, click that video then click “Insight stats” at the top of the page.
- You can review a lot of data but today I want to specifically call out “Hot Spots” to you. So click on Hot Spot.
Assuming your video has had enough views to allow YouTube to evaluate it, you will see a green line in a chart that parallels the video playing. It should look something like this:
The explanation from YouTube reads:
“The ups-and-downs of viewership at each moment in your video, compared to videos of similar length. The higher the graph, the hotter your video: fewer viewers are leaving your video and they may also be rewinding to watch that point in the video again. Audience attention is an overall measure of your video’s ability to retain its audience.”
What I think is so exciting about Hot Spots is that it can give you very valuable insight into what might be keeping your audience’s attention or losing them. So the next time you are getting ready to make a video you can consider these learnings.
And for work that is already produced and you see a drop off before the call-to-action (CTA) is revealed, use the annotation tool to call out your website or desired action right from the beginning. Sometimes people argue that ruins the reveal or drama/creative hook of the spot but it’s YouTube, they either searched for it or the title/description have already given them a hint to what it’s about. And if they don’t make it to CTA what’s the point of the video? So I say put in annotations and embed links to make it easier for the viewed to take that next step and do what you want them to do.
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