Telling Moving Stories

When the American Jewish World Service used to talk about using video to illustrate its overseas aid projects, it usually meant gathering enough footage

for a seven-minute spot to be shown to the people who would attend its annual fund-raising dinners.

But the Internet has changed all that.

The New York organization last year collected more than 60 hours of footage of the organization’s workers and volunteers helping AIDS patients in Uganda, tsunami victims in India, and poor residents of El Salvador, and it soon plans to use that extra footage for an extensive online video campaign. The collection of two- to three-minute spots will run on the group’s Web site, and the charity will also post video clips of interviews with volunteers on the popular online video site YouTube. The organization is also creating DVD’s of some of the videos to send to prospective donors.

What’s more, the charity has trained some of its staff members to shoot video using inexpensive cameras, with the goal of creating a library of footage that it can use to create fresh online videos for years to come. The cost for this effort — which included the purchase of four cameras and video-editing equipment — was about $2,000.

Susan Rosenberg, American Jewish World Service’s director of communications, says these projects are important to the organization because video, more than any other medium, can tell powerful, emotional stories that move supporters and donors to take action. Instead of simply telling potential donors about the organization’s overseas outreach work, it can show them the people it helps and allow them to hear volunteers and those they help in their own words.

“Increasingly, audio and video on the Web are critical tools [for nonprofit groups] for communicating to people about the work they’re doing, and I only see that intensifying,” Ms. Rosenberg says.

With YouTube’s announcement in September that it plans to dedicate a portion of its video-sharing site exclusively to charities, experts say many nonprofit groups are likely to follow American Jewish World Service’s lead. In the weeks since YouTube announced that it had created the channel, officials say it received applications from hundreds of nonprofit groups interested in creating their own YouTube video sites.

But while video is being hailed as a way for charities to personalize their causes more effectively than ever before, some communications experts worry that a rush into online video is not going to bring the results many expect — especially for some fund raisers.

Madeline Stanionis, chief executive officer of Watershed Online Fundraising & Advocacy, in San Francisco, cautions that no model exists for turning that buzz into donations.

“I’ve seen lots of tests where video doesn’t boost response,” Ms. Stanionis says, noting that current technology doesn’t allow those watching a video to make a donation or interact with an organization without first going to another Web page.

As a result, “putting video on the donation page might depress responses,” she says.

YouTube Factor

Despite that skepticism, many people in the nonprofit world see the recent announcement by YouTube as evidence that online video is the next major trend in charity communications.

Through the YouTube program, charities are eligible to get a “premium channel” on the site that can be used as a central clearinghouse for uploaded videos. Nonprofit groups will also have the ability to attach a Google Checkout donation button to their video pages to allow viewers to make donations. Google has agreed to process the donations free through the end of 2008.

The arrangement, organizers say, gives even the smallest charities the opportunity to create video spots that can be seen by an unlimited audience.

“It takes a free YouTube account, a $120 camera, and a good idea,” says Steve Grove, YouTube’s head of news and politics. “With those things, you can put together a good campaign and you can mobilize other people to do the campaign for you. If nonprofits think of ways they can reach out to supporters and donors and citizens, YouTube is a far more easy method than we’ve ever had before.”

The key, of course, is to create something that people want to see — and then make sure it is marketed in a way that they know where to find it.

While YouTube, for example, boasts an audience totaling more than 56 million people per month, it also features more than 10,000 hours of new user-submitted videos each day. To get noticed by viewers, nonprofit groups will have to create videos that are strong enough to cut through the clutter, and they will have to actively promote them through other mediums, Ms. Stanionis says.

“What nonprofits need to be aware of is that they have to drive the traffic. Who on earth goes on to YouTube and they are going to look up the name of a charity? Nobody does,” Ms. Stanionis says. “It has to be very funny or very compelling. It’s hard to make a video that works.”

Reaching Young Supporters

So how do serious nonprofit organizations with sober messages stand out in a medium dominated by skateboarding dogs, bikini-clad models, and movie stars behaving badly?

The Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, in Kansas City, Mo., confronted that question when it set out to create a video campaign aimed at identifying potential donors in their 20s and 30s. The organization was concerned that it was relying too heavily on older donors, even though soldiers serving in the war in Iraq have earned tremendous respect among their peers back home, says Mark Blankenship, chief executive of Barton Cotton, a Baltimore marketing agency that created an online video campaign for the charity.

To reach that group, the VFW has produced two videos that have been posted on YouTube. One — a slideshow-style spot called “Our Heroes Next Door” — featured a series of heroic images of soldiers set to somber, military-style music. The images were interspersed with written messages, such as “They are our brothers and sisters” and “Honor them by flying your flag.”

The video was a YouTube hit, at one point becoming one of the most-watched videos — No. 17 — on the site. Mr. Blankenship says the video attracted an audience, in part, because the VFW was able to get bloggers sympathetic to its cause to link to it on their blogs.

The organization did not ask for donations as part of the video, but it was able to collect nearly 3,000 e-mail addresses. Based on the number of young people YouTube attracts, Mr. Blankenship says he believes many of those addresses belong to younger adults who responded to the video and its message.

“This is a couple of thousand folks that we might not have reached otherwise,” says Mike Elliott, Barton Cotton’s director of Internet strategy, noting that those e-mail addresses will be used for future fund-raising solicitations. “Any single e-mail from that demographic is incredibly helpful to have.”

Other groups have tapped into the name recognition of celebrities to help their videos gain attention. A foundation-supported advocacy campaign aimed at promoting education policies during the 2008 election has attracted more than 447,000 viewers. The campaign, called Ed in ’08, used a 29-second video featuring the rapper Kanye West to attract attention and was successful, in large part, because Mr. West’s videos are popular on YouTube.

Efforts such as the VFW’s and Ed in ’08 are effective, observers say, because they are short, simple, and powerful — three elements that are needed in an already crowded market. Experts say the best videos often run no longer than three minutes, and they can get away with looking amateurish if they have a clever premise or offer powerful images.

Because of these factors, groups that attempt to use their internal, benefit-dinner videos for an online audience will find their efforts largely ignored, says Michael Hoffman, president of See3 Communications Company, a Chicago consulting group that helps charities produce online video campaigns. See3, for example, helped the American Jewish World Service create its documentary-style videos for YouTube and other Web sites, including the company’s own video portal, DoGooderTV.

“You can’t produce that dinner video over and over, three or four times a year, because most organizations don’t have the budget to do that,” Mr. Hoffman says of those richly produced videos, which typically cost between $20,000 and $75,000.

Instead, he encourages nonprofit groups to produce documentary-style videos that show their work and cast their workers as real people. Such videos can be done inexpensively — requiring only the investment in a digital video camera, video-editing software, and staff time.

Because many digital cameras and editing software are inexpensive, that investment can be less than $1,000.

“The model of continuous documentation is so important,” Mr. Hoffman says.

“If you’re shooting on a regular basis and capturing your work on a regular basis, there are great opportunities to show the kid who walks into your program timidly on the first day and three years later is the leader of a group,”he says. “To have the documentation of the transformation gives you material for powerful stories.”

Enlisting the Audience

Other groups have taken a much more participatory approach, using video as a way to tap into the creativity of their supporters or as a call to action to those who care about their cause.

The March of Dimes, in White Plains, N.Y., has populated its YouTube channel with traditional commercial-style appeals and also with videos submitted by its supporters, who use them to tell their own stories.

The group solicits such submissions by promoting a six-minute video featuring a couple who had been helped by the March of Dimes following the premature birth of their son eight years ago.

The video, which has been played online nearly 190,000 times since January, also carries an invitation to other families to share their experiences on the March of Dimes Web site through a promotion called Every Baby has a Story.

To accommodate those stories, the charity has created an online map of the United States that includes plotted points highlighting the location of every family that has submitted a story to the effort. About 1,000 stories — most of which include photos and video — have been added to the site, which also invites visitors to donate to the March of Dimes’s effort to help families who have children in neonatal intensive-care units.

Doug Staples, a March of Dimes senior vice president, says the effort has been successful in raising awareness about the organization and in getting people more engaged with the charity. He says the promotion has also helped raise money for the charity, though he says it is too early in the effort to gauge how much money has been collected.

Other fund-raising efforts, rely on supporters to create their own videos. Network for Good, a Web site that allows donors to contribute money to the charities of their choice, gives its supporters the option of creating “badges” that they can include on their Web pages or blogs to encourage visitors to support a particular cause.

People have the option of uploading their own, homemade videos onto the badges, which other visitors can view by clicking on a “watch my video” link.

The videos have the ability to bring potential donors closer to the creator’s cause and, in some cases, have been effective fund-raising tools, says William Strathmann, Network for Good’s chief executive.

In one case, a participant has raised more than $24,000 for Saving Georgia Dogs, an animal-welfare group in Athens, Ga., through a badge that includes a link to a video produced by the charity. The video, which lasts three minutes and 45 seconds, features pictures of animals that have been rescued by Saving Georgia Dogs, paired with a recording of the song “Amazing Grace.” The end of the video includes a black-and-white graphic that says, “Help us continue to save beautiful animals like these. Donate today.”

“Video transforms a cause from a concept to a real story starring real people or animals,” Mr. Strathmann says. “For that reason, we’re seeing people using video more and more.” And, Mr. Strathmann says, those appeals can be more powerful when they come from real-life donors and supporters.

“The most commonly cited reason for making a donation to a charity is because a friend or family member asked them to,” he says. “It’s the user-generated, individual appeal that makes video so appealing in this context.”

Training Tool

For Sylvia Nadler, executive director of Compass House, a social-services organization that helps runaway and homeless youth in Buffalo, N.Y., online video has another role: It provides a way to train the group’s volunteers and staff members. Through a program coordinated by the State University of New York at Buffalo’s School of Management and by Buffalo’s Not For Profit Resource Center, Compass House has been able to record and post online 15- to 20-minute videos that have been used to train volunteers who serve at the 13-bed shelter.

Ms. Nadler says the videos have saved her organization money because it has not had to coordinate live training sessions for its volunteers and has allowed the group to accommodate more people.

“It also gives you some consistency,” Ms. Nadler says. “The message you know is the same every time.”

Compass House is one of 14 nonprofit groups in western New York that are using video through the program. The university allows the groups to use its video recording space when it is fallow, records the videos, and provides room on its server for them.

The setup allows smaller charities the chance to use video technology in new ways — and it’s a model Ms. Nadler says she hopes will be adopted in other parts of the country.

“We would not have come up with this on our own,” she says. “As a small agency, most things are cost-prohibitive.”

But with technology rapidly changing, video is no longer on the list of unaffordable luxuries — even for the smallest of nonprofit groups.