Three things I know about the nonprofit annual report: it takes a ton of time to put together beautifully, few people actually read it, but funders require it. The annual report is one of those pieces of communication and collateral that executive directors and development directors dread putting together because it is such a costly endeavor with relatively little return and short shelf life. It doesn’t have to be that way in the age of social. We’ve socialized constituent communication, websites, fundraising, and events…why not rethink the annual report into a social communication? Several nonprofit organizations have done just that, transforming the paper annual report into a video report, and reinvigorating it in the process.

Video is a natural medium for storytelling, and that’s what the annual report should be.

There are some significant benefits to a video report: lasting content on the web, video footage for re-use, and changing a report into a discussion. Four organizations have done just that. I was lucky enough to correspond with Nathan Hand of School on Wheels and Derek Weidl of THEMUSEUM, who offer editorial comments about their organizations’ video reports as well.

THE MUSEUM: THEMUSEUM’s Report to the Community

THEMUSEUM, a children’s “unmuseum” in Kitchener, Ontario, has a mission “to scan the globe for fresh cultural content and use it to stage experiences that stimulate transformative connections for our audiences.” As such, it isn’t surprising that they created a video annual report that expresses the creativity of what happened at the museum in 2011. It’s a lot of fun to watch, too.

Beth Kanter posted THEMUSEUM’s video annual report to her Google Plus stream, and quite a conversation ensued. Beth commented that the video seemed a bit long, with a lot of insider information. Derek Weidl, the video creator, agreed that “scope creep” played a role in length. One solution might be two versions of the report: a shorter video for external use and longer video for internal use with more insider jokes and  insider news.

Derek Weidl adds that the video has succeeded in a number of ways: “It inspired some donations that we weren’t expecting. It provided a great engagement point online (especially twitter) where people relived some of the great moments and events we’ve had over the past year. It’s been already used in some important meetings with potential sponsors/partners to great effect as it really captures what we’re all about. Also, an underrated part has been the reaction by staff members. Since it involves every staff member, it has reinforced their love of our organization. After we first screened it at our AGM, the staff insisted upon multiple viewings – we all watched it 5 times without a break (not kidding)!”

The Sunlight Foundation: Sunlight 2010: The Year in Review

A snappy mix of text, images from the year’s work, and video footage from the Sunlight Foundation’s political advocacy work. Conveys achievements and Foundation highlights in 2:24. Conveys a lot of information in a short amount of time, and keeps your attention.

The Greater Chicago Food Depository annual video report: It Starts With Food: 2010-2011 Annual Report

The Greater Chicago Food Depository’s executive director gives the voiceover highlighting the successes of the past year. The video is embedded within the website and accompanied by a fundraising appeal, short blog post, sample tweet, and a thank you.

I really like how they package the video within their own web page, and explain the report to donors. The web page announces, “This year, the Greater Chicago Food Depository has taken its Annual Report online, providing our donors, volunteers, partners and supporters a glimpse of the day-to-day work your support makes possible. The 2010-2011 Annual Report’s online format saves paper and the cost of printing the report, while offering visitors an opportunity to experience the Food Depository’s work in a new way. ”

School on Wheels: School on Wheels 2010 Annual Report

A combination of the traditional annual report (the Executive Director’s note, the CFO’s report), footage of programs, and stakeholder testimony. A bit long at six minutes, but certainly more engaging than a written report. A list of donors runs through the last three minutes of the video.

Nathan Hand, VP of Development and Marketing for School on Wheels, reports that the organization reverted back to a PDF report for 2011. When I asked why, he wrote: “The work was donated last year. We had a lot of supporters who didn’t/wouldn’t go online to see it but wanted to see their name in print. Orgs spend tons of time/$ on them and they have the shortest life ever – people skim the pretty pictures, look for their name and toss it. We designed (this year’s PDF report) internally, didn’t spend a ton of time pouring over details, mailed it out and then posted it online.”

Nathan adds “there are tons of other benefits to the video version but for us, the cost/time factor won out. Plus, we just had a great video done (donated again) for a big event which basically served the same purpose. We now have a ton of great digital b-roll of our kids that we’ve already used in videos we’ve created since then.”

Two takeaways from the School on Wheels experience: budget for the video report or find a talented videographer, and know how your donors want to be thanked.

 Bonus: Ideas and opportunities for further socializing the annual video report

• Ask volunteers/members/constituents/stakeholders to submit video content for the annual report
• Crowdsourced ideas for what should be featured in the report
• Run a contest around sharing the report to the most people and places
• Include a question during the video report that you’d like viewers to respond to in the comments
• Ask for video responses to the report
• Run a contest for fans to create their own annual report of what they think the organization has done best over the past year

If there were an award for the most courageous, determined social media experimenter around, Manny Hernandez would win, hands down. He is also one of the busiest people I know. Manny founded and manages the Diabetes Hands Foundation (DHF), a nonprofit organization that connects people touched by diabetes and raises diabetes awareness.

The Diabetes Hands Foundation is among the rock stars of social media – it is nimble, experimental, and not afraid to fail. Mostly, they succeed - big time.

Manny, along with thousands of volunteers, has built DHF into an incredible community of care and activism around diabetes. All of their activities create community, and the organization keeps that at the forefront of every new initiative. It is truly a community-based organization.

The community primarily lives in its two active, successful (Ning-based) online communities for people with diabetes: TuDiabetes.org (English) with 17,450 members and EsTuDiabetes.org (Spanish) with 11,200 members. The strong community gives DHF the strength to be able to experiment with new tools and develop new applications. DHF developed an application called TuAnalyze, in which members of the TuDiabetes diabetes social network track, share and compare their diabetes data. DHF also co-developed and launched (in collaboration with the Joslin Diabetes Center) HealthSeeker, a Facebook game to help people with diabetes develop healthy lifestyle eating habits. Since its launch in June, HealthSeeker has grown to 1,553 monthly active users. Right after launching HealthSeeker, DHF published No Sugar Added in July, a collection of poetry entirely crowdsourced, with the theme of living with diabetes. You can read Manny’s guest post about how he developed No Sure Added here.

Now comes Big Blue Test: test your blood sugar level, exercise for 14 minutes, test yourself again.

Just in time for World Diabetes Day on November 14th, DHF is publicizing its Big Blue Test in a big way. DHF learned from last year’s campaign and it is entirely reconceived. Last year, DHF asked people to create their own landing pages and online spaces to discuss the Big Blue Test. “The range of implementations was too broad. It was complicated to analyze the data and it did not give the feeling of community,” says Manny. This year Big Blue Test looks and feels entirely different.

From the beginning, this year’s Big Blue Test was a collaborative project. Manny explains, “around the time we were brainstorming about this year’s Big Blue Test, diabetes advocate Riva Greenberg sent me and Roche a viral video and suggested a video collaboration between us and Roche. That inspired me to create a video that could really get some traction and go viral.” Roche supported and partnered with DHF in the development of all aspects of Big Blue Test. “Roche really gave us the creative freedom to develop this project, and Roche USA championed the idea of sponsoring the video and the Big Blue Test video donation challenge.” says Manny. The result is the video at the top of this page publicizing the Big Blue Test and a donation challenge.

DHF wanted to create a video sharing incentive, and also people to feel good about the incentive and have a short-term, measurable impact.DHF teamed up with Roche, Life for A Child, and Insulin for Life to create short-term impact:  For every view up to 100,000 views, Roche will donate $0.75, a cap of $75,000 to help children with diabetes in developing countries. The donation will be divided between Life For A Child (of the International Diabetes Federation) and Insulin for Life. Both organizations focuse on giving insulin and diabetes supplies to children in developing countries.

The video went live October 31st in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and French, all translated by volunteers. To date, it has 83,801 views. To gain exposure, DHF reached out to influential twitter users and bloggers in the diabetes and nonprofit communities. “Most of the bloggers and twitter uses we reached out to either tweeted about it or blogged about it,” says Manny. The most effective means in getting it out has been through Twitter. They are tracking the hashtag #bigbluetest. In the past two weeks it has been tweeted about 3,500 times with that hashtag.

From the YouTube page, the call to action within the video of watching it and passing it along has been effective. To date, the largest sharing group is  35+ and female, and the top viewing countries are the US, Brazil, Canada, and Australia.  56% of the views are on YouTube itself, and 37% are views embedded on another website.

What has not worked at all?  “Asking celebrities to retweet it. That was a wrong assumption on my part.” Manny sent @messages to many celebrities asking if they would retweet the message and none of them has done so yet.

DHF also took advantage of the Ning platform to publicize the video challenge and test. Ning offers “takeover” functionality to change their Ning homepage. DHF essentially replaced the home pages of TuDiabetes.or and EsTuDiabetes.org with the Big Blue Test page. Members have to view this new homepage in order to enter the site. About 5% of all the video views come in this way.

I asked Manny what has been the most surprising part of the campaign. “The generosity has been just unbelievable. People watch it often. People take the time to watch it several times and tell others to do the same. The same thing on Twitter – several people have tweeted and re-tweeted it hundreds of times. Some have incorporated the #bigbluetest into every tweet. We haven’t seen yet the power of the influencers to generate a high number of video views, however. What we have seen is the power of the community pulling their weight behind this effort to do so.”

Manny sums up the success of the video challenge and the Big Blue Test to date:

“Believe the commitment of the people that are part of your community.”

That’s the secret behind the success of the Diabetes Hands Foundation as well.

Please watch the Big Blue Test video at the top of this page. Every view means a donation of diabetes products to children in developing countries. I also bet you won’t be able to get the catchy song out of your head.

Today, YouTube announced that every single YouTube channel now comes equipped with a moderator feature. It’s an incredibly exciting step to see YouTube becoming fully social. The moderator feature allows any channel to ask for ideas, questions, or suggestions from the community..right from your YouTube channel. Users may vote the crowdsourced ideas up or down. By integrating Google moderator, YouTube has brought real time engagement features into play and made it 100% more engaging.

Here is how it works: Every YouTube channel incorporates Google Moderator. All you have to do is enable moderator on the channel, and ask a question of your users. Here are some screen shots of how to enable moderator on your channel. First, click on the Modules tab of your channel.

After you’ve checked “Moderator,” a drop-down menu appears, as seen in this screen shot:

And here is an example of the feature at work on the Foodwishes channel. Foodwishes is running a contest asking users to submit a summer recipe they want to see to prepared on the channel. The recipe with the highest number of votes will be the chosen.

Basically, YouTube is giving its users the power to crowdsource ideas and suggestions, and use the wisdom of the crowd to vote for the top ideas. I think the voting feature is fantastic. This could be a very economical way for a nonprofit organization to run a contest, promotion, or campaign.

I also think that YouTube is giving Facebook a run for its money with this new feature. It’s always been difficult for Facebook Page administrators to crowdsource ideas using Facebook: if you ask for ideas using a wall post, then the ideas will come in over time, and aren’t collected in one place. If you want to run a crowdsourced contest or special offer on Facebook, you must create a custom landing tab and application.

Look out Facebook…here comes YouTube

If you are already using video, today’s announcement should encourage you to think about using YouTube as the new address to crowdsource for engagement and answers instead of Facebook.

Video is a personal medium. Involving someone through a personal request on video is much more compelling than writing a blog post about a need or creating a Cause. I can envision charity:water inviting stakeholders to ask questions when they drill for wells using YouTube’s moderator function, or Epic Change encouraging YouTube users to “nominate a favorite Mama” using this feature. Combine the moderator feature with the YouTube Nonprofit Program, and perhaps YouTube will become the favored action center instead of Facebook Causes.

I’ll wager that the YouTube moderator feature is a game changer. It will bring more nonprofit organizations into YouTube, enable organizations to reach and engage with new stakeholders, and become a platform to create interesting and exciting new social media campaigns. It’s simple, immediate (real time voting and interaction), personal, and most of all, engaging. It brings the bottom up and the stakeholders in.

Now, it’s up to you. How will you integrate this feature into your overall social media strategy?

I’m a SphinnCon Israel, a conference about SEO and search marketing, and live blogging the sessions. The first session is a moderated panel entitled SEO Fundamentals. The panelists are Eli Feldman (RankAbove), Menachem Rosenbaum (TENS Technology), Uri  Breitman (TBWA Digital), Itay Paz (Itaypaz.net), and moderated by Barry Schwartz (SearchEngineLand.com and RustyBrick). OK folks, this session may be a bit techy, but hopefully by capturing this information for you, you’ll gain some information about how to use search engine optimization to help your blog, website, cause and brand! Let the live blogging begin:

Eli Feldman: The old way of thinking about search engine results = above the fold on Google search results, and everyone will look “above the fold.” Now: there is “fully integrated universal results” and it takes up spot from the SERP. Live results are added. Videos are groups on first page. The big changes – get all types of results on the first page, options to search by types of search, and lots of different kinds of search options.

Major change for video is coming: Google has started grouping video results in the regular search results. You see them in packs of two or four on the page. If the video makes it to the front page, you’ll get better rank all the sudden because of this. It doesn’t matter if your video was ranked 89, because if Google shows it with a high-ranking video on the Google search page, your lower video’s rank is pulled up.

How to get video to come into the Google results and take advantage of the “packs:” utilize the video sitemap (like an XML sitemap), liste in sitemap index, include new tags (content, player, thumbnail location, categories, if family-friendly). If your URL is too long, it won’t show up in Google search – it must be less than 60 characters. Will only show up if it is family-friendly.

We are seeing Google show live results, latest news results, on search returns. You can go to trends.google.com and see the latest news trends/news results. If you are in a newsworthy area, your company may come up on the trends results.

Add content into this media, or around this media, as much as you can. Example: put up an image, add text to it with context and captions, tags, comments, translation. In YouTube video, you can add transcripts. For Flickr, you can add info about the type of camera used, and other meta data.

Rules for Video SEO: optimize every aspect of the video (title, description, tag), look at internal backlinks from you tube (comments/groups), external backlinks.

Itay Paz: SEO tips, tricks and fundamentals

Important to have good tags, of course. However, it’s all about content nowadays. Valuable content = traffic generation. Hard to trick search engines with lots of mediocre content. Site maps are critical: build as many site maps as you can – Google likes it. Write about trending topics and “hot” news, which will help bring traffic to your site and help you with rank. Google likes WordPress – a lot, indexes it almost immediately. Use the SEO plugs inside WordPress for SEO – there are a lot of ones to choose from. Incoming links: have to have valuable links pointing to your website. Friendly URLs – keywords inside a URL is a good idea. Control outgoing links – think about the number of outgoing links and not having too many outgoing links. Be SOCIAL – if you put out a lot of content on networks, you’ll gather incoming links and traffic. Blogs give great traffic and links into the website.

Uri Breitman: Talking about keyword research – it’s important to do keyword research for everything, even to prepare to meet with an SEO team. Use the Google Keyword Tool and use it every day – it’s amazing. Then, go back and research using the keywords you found. Find new keywords in the search, then go back to the Keyword Tool, and it involves re-thinking and re-researching. Check the guys who are ranked above you because they know what they’re doing. Prioritize with what you should do with main keywords.

In order to figure out keywords, think about this: Who am I? What is my core business? What would I search for if I were going to search for my company? What would a client look for? Call clients! Ask clients how they found you, and how they found your competitors.

Google Keyword Tool is great. Using that, check the “broad match,” the “phrase match,” and the “exact match.” ALWAYS check the exact. Look at what the competition is doing, and the prices for top keywords in AdWords. Can be a good indication of what’s going on in the organic search field. Beware of keywords that attract a lot of competition, but don’t generate SALES.

Prioritize: most popular keywords, most suitable keywords. Go for regional keywords which may have best conversion. First-step keywords (the ones you thought about at the very first of your keyword search) may not have been the best keywords.

Finalize your list:  make a short list, have modest objectives, (don’t get into street fights over keywords!), it will take time to move your site up, prepare to make changes, and use web analytics for keyword traffic data so that you can monitor every small change, check rankings using 3rd party tool (not your own computer which will give you the wrong results!)

Menachem Rosenbaum: How to judge link building success? What happens if you are building links and you don’t see results? How to judge results quickly? Google webmaster tools is how Google sees your website on the internet. Look at the diagnostics crawl stats in webmaster tools for crawl information. If we want Google to crawl as many pages as possible. Each website has a www.yourwebsite.com and a yourwebsite.com URL. Make sure that you have a www.yourwebsite.com that redirects to the one with the www. in the beginning to get the most crawling of the site from Google. Bottom line: the more often Google comes back, the more authority you have. Lower crawl stats, or crawl stats not improving, it reflects in your ranking.

Takeaways:

1. Video search returns in Google can be a huge boost for your video. Optimize for a higher chance that will happen.

2. Social search within Google is huge, and will continue to grow.

3. Google Keyword Tool is great, and critical for your site. Use it as a guide.

4. Content is still king. Good incoming links are also incredibly valuable.

Image by Kiera Duggan

In a former office workplace, we used to look forward to the holiday cards folks would send us. The administrative assistant would hang each holiday card in the front entrance, and we’d look at the new cards daily. In the age of social media, I’m pleased to see that holiday cards are beginning to morph into virtual cards and engagement strategies. Goodbye standard pre-printed card with scenic snowscape on the front. Hello creativity and innovation! You’ve got my attention when you send me a video card. (Now, how do you hang those up?)

There are two types of holiday video cards: the humorous video (that often parodies something known) and the end of year annual appeal. Each has its advantages.

Humorous Holiday Video Cards

In a humorous holiday video, I want to see another side of the company’s personality and the staff in the video. I love feeling like I know the company a bit better, which makes me feel as if I have a stronger relationship with them. Humorous videos can be forgiven for a lot: they don’t have to be professionally produced or scripted well. However, they have to have heart, soul…and humor.

The best video card that I received this holiday season was from See3. I loved it because it is incredibly innovative and it’s humorous. At the outset of the video, the view is asked to enter his/her name and mobile phone number (See3 promises not to keep this information). During the video, Santa’s elf calls to find out if you have been naughty or nice this year. Get this: your phone actually rings and a recording asks you to answer the question. Depending on your answer, the ending changes. (Hint: being naughty is more fun.) See3 left me wanting to know more about using this technology integration.

Runner up was a hilarious holiday card video animation from Eckerd College. The college created a custom animation mocking the university President’s lack of social media skills. I’m not familiar with this university (the link was passed to me by @Ashli_Cooper), but I can only assume that the President is quite tech savvy. According to the material on its website, Eckerd College was named #7 of the Top 20 Wired Colleges of 2008 from PC Magazine. It’s also worth checking out their website page of previous Eckerd College holiday cards.

I also really enjoyed a holiday e-card sent to me by Donor Tools and created by jibjab. Unfortunately, the video was embedded in an email so that I could not link to it. However, check out some of the jibjab video e-card options here. They all ask you to put faces to animated videos, and the videos are quite funny.

Image by PAUL

Serious End-of-Year Video Cards

If your organization wants to produce a serious, “we have accomplished so many things video,” it must be produced beautifully, visually stunning, and tell a compelling story. If it isn’t, I’ll click away instantly.

I was moved by the New Israel Fund’s end of year video. “If Israel Were A Village of 100 People, What Would It Look Like?” is as powerful a video as I’ve ever seen, and it is just words and images. It is is the story of the demographics of Israeli residents, but also compels you to think about inequality.

Honorable mentions:

The Rhode Island School of Design‘s annual giving campaign video. Though not a holiday video card per se, it’s humorous and sentimental, gentle and compelling. It is a mix of claymation and a live actor.  In the video, a RISD grad recieves an annual appeal letter and remembers an old college friend.  As reviewed by @Elisa_Hebert, it was “really cute and made me want to give.” Who doesn’t love a cute, sentimental, animated monster?

Hubspot‘s holiday video card “We Wish You a High Conversion” features the Hubspot staff singing by the fire. It shows off some of the company personality, with creativity.

The Toronto Community Foundation‘s holiday video has a lot of heart. It features a gift being passed from employee to employee, filmed in several locations around Toronto. Though not humorous, it has heart and soul, and connects you with the staff.

Lastly, I also want to reference an audio holiday recording that is not a video card. I’m including it because it is genuine, warm, and inventive. It is a window into how much Karen Zapp cares about her clients. She was kind enough to allow me to link to her audio recording of A Carol for Associations (to the tune of Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!) and A Carol for Charitable Nonprofits (to the tune of Angels We Have Heard On High!)

Happy Holidays to all of my wonderful, giving readers. I wish you a very happy new year, and look forward to many more conversations in 2010!

I’m live blogging the Affilicon Israel 2009 conference session on Video Sharing and Ranking. Arik Czerniak, Entrepreneur, former CEO of Metacafe is the speaker for this session. He tweets at @arikcz.

If you upload your videos using TubeMogul to all different sites, to syndicate the videos, then you will double your views.

Here are some very interesting statistics:

Video audience attention span:

• after 20 secs, 20% leave
• after 1 min, 50% leave
• over 2 min (75% leave), and
• only 9.5% stay for a video over 5 minutes.

Make it SHORT and DRAMATIC. Implications for advertising? Do it within first 15 seconds.
Life span of a video: 35% of views made it first 4 days. 50% of views in first 14 days.75% if views in first 44 days. Most of the views are in the first two months.

Takeaway: Viral videos are a RARITY. They rarely snowball to gain more and more. “Evergreen” video (generate same number of views continuously)  are just as rare.

How do make the video viral? No “magic bullet.”

What constitutes an “actual view?” As soon as it loads.

Ingredients:

• Make awesome content
• Choose a right thumbnail: the small picture to be displayed
• SEO the tags and metadata: don’t be stingy when adding tags and metadata
• Promote it like crazy

Content:

• Make it short
• Inject interesting “passable” content: humor, celebrities, animals, cute kids, and sex

Promote:

• Let it bubble to the top
• Web 2.o: submit to sharing  sites
• You can utilize guerrilla marketing tactics
• You can “buy” views (he didn’t explain this very well)
• Use a through-broker to go viral

Landing pages: with video works better than without. Rich media improves click through rates (flash).

Optimize videos by analyzing traffic sources. Look at where people drop off the video and test the video with revisions to see if people will drop off less  than previously.

Case Study: etoro

How did they get 2.9 million views on their video: Forex Tracking Online? There is no sound on the video. The speaker thinks that they used an affiliate to market the video. Here is the first:

Then they made a funny video, that included humor and sex.

Spent 20K They used KetaKeta to market it and got 160K vies. High cost, but high branding impact and B2B. Hard to track the ROI.

Summary:

• It’s really hard to make a viral video. If you want to, follow the tips above.
• Video marketing is still brand oriented
• Video does improve landing page conversions for a product
• Still in the exploration stage.