| Engaging Supporters Through Interactive Video Projects |
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| Written by Lorna Doone Brewer | ||||||||
| Friday, 22 January 2010 15:53 | ||||||||
 Getting people involved and invested in your nonprofit organization is one of the best ways to ensure that theyll stay committed, right? This Technology Age offers a number of ways to engage prospective supporters, from blogging and commenting to Twitter to Facebook pages. These all allow people to feel like theyre being heard by the organizations they respect.
Now, theres a possibility for them to be seen, too. After all, everyone wants their 15 minutes of fame, right? YouTube DIRECT is a video platform that organizations can embed right into their own websites to allow contributors to upload their relevant content. This opens a lot of possibilities for nonprofits, especially in a time when nearly everyone has a video camera on their phones. One of the most obvious uses is to ask people to upload videos of themselves volunteering for your cause. Another idea is to ask them to create short videos explaining why or how they choose to support your particular organization. Theres even potential for a great PR event in which you create a contest for videos made specifically for your site. Its way cheaper than hiring an ad agency to do a spot, and the participants will be genuinely enthusiastic. Another of the advantages of this approach is that it has potential to engage younger supporters. Dont worry, though, about irrelevant content. The YouTube DIRECT platform allows for you to review and moderate any videos that are uploaded via your site. For added protection, you also have the option of requiring users to register at your site in addition to having their own YouTube accounts. The videos uploaded will also be posted to YouTube, with a link back to your organizations site. In fact, they are actually hosted by YouTube, which means that they wont be eating up all of your bandwidth. | ||||||||
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About the Author: Dianne Crampton is Group Development Consultant and Leadership Coach. For the past twenty years she has helped not-for-profit leaders and their teams learn how to work well together to consistently achieve goals with high levels of group and individual satisfaction. She is also the founder of the TIGERS group development model. The model addresses six collaborative core values necessary for creating an ethical, quality-focused and successful team culture. The values are trust, interdependence, genuineness, empathy, risk and success. The TIGERS model passed a rigorous validation study through Gonzaga University and was Crampton’s dissertation for her Master’s of Arts designation in Organizational Leadership. As president of TIGERS Success Series, Dianne has published in a business anthology endorsed by Stephen Covey and written for trade magazines. Merrill Lynch nominated her business for Inc. Magazine’s regional small business and entrepreneurial awards. Her work with Native Americans was recognized at a United Nations sponsored conference in 1994. Dianne is also the creator and distributor of the TIGERS Team Wheel game. This game helps Board Chairs and Executive Directors identify behaviors that build collaborative groups and behaviors that cause conflict, morale problems, production failures, and misunderstandings. For more information go to http://www.corevalues.com/Game.htm |
