Blog
June 14th, 2009
Video Blogging Boosts the Outreach of Non Profits


Beth Kanter, at Beth Blog, writes about how video blogs enable non profits to reach out further and with more impact and less costs than ever before. Non-profits are now producing videos that bring the stories, sights and sounds of their field work to the whole word at minimal cost and with great speed and ease.

A good example of how non-profits leverage video blogging is what the United Nations’ World Food Programme is doing in Tanzania. Their videos include a visit to nutrition centers where school kids show up for their daily meals and get a taste of original Masai goat. The host is Marcus Prior, the WFP spokesperson for East Africa. This is just one of the many different ways WFP is using social media for its global battle against child hunger.

The WFP’s homebase Web site shows how creative the organization is at leveraging social media. These developments are due to the drop in price of cameras and to their enhanced ease of utilization (HD pocket cameras like the Flip or Kodak’s Zi6 are under $200), to the rise of user-friendly editing software and to the emergence of many sites with sophisticated functionalities for uploading these videos. The most popular cameras include Kodak’s Zi6 and Pure Digital’s FLIP camera . Pure Digital even has a giveaway program for non-profit organizations. The Flip site has a resource section with lots of tips for using the camera.

There’s also a YouTube Channel with some how-to videos and lots of other useful information.

See 3 has a step-by-step guide which provides valuable advice on topics ranging from shooting the videos to storytelling, editing and marketing these videos. It’s one of the better guides for nonprofits.

Witness Training Materials focuses on the use of videos for human rights advocacy. Their how-to and training resources are top notch!

Get Seen by Steve Garfield; Steve is a video blogging pioneer with a book due in December 2009.

Distribution
If you are looking to go viral and are interested in big viewer numbers, rather that uploading your video to YouTube directly, you can use sites like TubeMogul.com to submit your video to multiple sites and save energy and time. Here, you can also track the progress of your videos. MySpace videos, Yahoo Video, MetaCafe, Grouper and DailyMotion are also possibilities.

If you are looking to make news, the CNN site, which uses blip.tv software, and the ABC site, are worth trying.

Blip.tv has an impressive range of distribution and community options: download, post, email, communicate, etc. Uploaded video is available for sharing immediately.

Vimeo has simple uploads, tagging, commenting and voting, but it’s light on community features. Weekly storage of 30Mb is probably too limiting for most people.

Veoh has unlimited distribution capacity for full-screen, TV-grade video content which is then made available to anyone with a broadband connection, including high-definition videos.

VideoEgg does not have a site to watch and download video and the service lacks community features, but it provides simple sharing with other mainstream sites. Their software captures video directly from the webcam, camcorder and other mobile devices. VideoEgg limits videos to 5 minutes.

Any stories about how non-profits leverage video blogging to make this world a better place to live?

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June 14th, 2009
Charitable Organizations Transformed by Social Media


Beth Kanter, author of Beth’s blog dedicated to how non profits can use social media is also 2009 Scholar in Residence at the Packard Foundation, and one of Business Week’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media.”

She recently published a great article in Mashable where she outlines four ways in which non-profits are being transformed by social media.

a) First is the ability to create deeper, more meaningful relationships and engagement with their constituencies.
With the rise of social media, the role of the non profits rapidly evolving from initiating and controlling charitable initiatives to letting stakeholders control them, and they can focus on nurturing initiatives in the field.

b) Charitable Giving is more and more becoming self-organized, by people with a social conscience leveraging social media. Stakeholders are feeling more and more empowered to self-organize and take charitable action on their own. Applications like Facebook’s “Causes Birthday” encourage people to leverage their birthdays to raise money for a cause. And Stephen Colbert’s “DonorsChoose” recently launched a similar feature called “Birthday Give Back.” Social media allows non profits to reach a lot more people than before, in a more effective and less costly manner. We are witnessing the dawn of a social-media enabled groundswell in social responsibility.

c) Social media help people within and across charitable organizations collaborate rapidly and inexpensively. Whether it is communication between volunteers, or between the organizations and other funding or granting organizations, or whether it is sharing ideas for charitable programs, the ability of charitable organizations to operate and join forces effectively is being dramatically increased. Beth Kanter goes on to describe how WeAreMedia, a wiki project has allowed more than 100 technology professionals to pool knowledge and resources to develop training materials to help no profits lean how to use social media effectively. The initial content, says Beth Kanter, was facilitated through discussions on blogs, Twitter reviews and Facebook reviews. The presentations were then remixed and delivered as trainings to non profits at conferences and workshops across the US.

d) The reengineering functionality inherent to social media (flattening organizations, enhancing decision-making speed..) fosters change within the non profit organizations to a significant extent, and with a speed which would not have been possible otherwise. For Danielle Brigidia, with the National Wildlife Federation: “We have started to focus on cross-promoting our ideas and programs thanks to social media tools like Yammer.”

As social media fluency grows among people in non profits, and as more supportive applications get developed, we can expect to see a growing transformation in how non-profits operate and in the results which they are able to generate.

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