Making Causes on Facebook Work

Remember in 2009 when the Washington Post told us that Causes on Facebook were ineffective for fundraising? Tell that to the Earth Island Institute, whose cause, "The Cove" - Save Japan Dolphins" has raised nearly $105,000 and built an active online community of almost 900,000 members. But then look at The Girl Effect's Cause, which, despite having one of the most viral nonprofit videos, has only garnered 2,300 members and under $2,500 in about the same time.

Causes has been hugely popular among nonprofits, as it allows them to tap into the peer-to-peer networking power of Facebook and initiate a fundraising cause for the nonprofit they like. The application currently has over 100 million installed users and 500,000 cause communities (started by those users) that attract over 1 million media views per day.

About 15,000 nonprofits have partnered with Causes, which grants them free access to a back-end account that lets them track progress and communicate with cause constituents. Collectively, nonprofits have raised $28 million from the application, which now brings in about $200,000 a week. But why the discrepancies between nonprofits? 

Curious as to what to make of this, I visited Causes' hip DC office off Dupont Circle to talk with Matt Mahan who has the enviable title, VP of Impact. The simple answer is logical - it's about how much care you put into it.

Causes' DC team members (left to right): Matthew Mahan, VP of Impact; James Windon, Director of Business Development; Sydney Fleischer, Office Manager

"One thing we try to do is coach nonprofits on how to reach out to their cause members and cause creators, and give them the means to make it go somewhere," Matt said, pulling up the Save Japan Dolphins cause page on his laptop. "These guys have been at it for almost two years now, making it their primary online community."

One of the common lessons any online guru will press is that online fundraising doesn't just happen when you slap a big pretty donate button on your website. Online donors need to be engaged, welcomed and cultivated, and any new supporter who receives a direct correspondence from the nonprofit itself is exponentially more likely to donate and organize her/his peers than one who hasn't.

The same if-you-build-it-they-just-might-not-come ethos applies to Causes, of course, and Matt's team is working hard to make online community building easier. "In Facebook you have this vast sea of 500 million people, so part of our approach is to empower the philanthropic identity of those individuals," Matt said.

Some of Causes' most recent innovations are in the features they've added to the Causes tab on people's profile pages, which includes messages from people associated with your cause, and the impact scorecard that lets you keep track of your cause's metrics (i.e. fundraising, recruiting and "karma"). Matt estimates that since making these improvements, the profile tab has become a substantial contributor to cause page traffic.

"It's something Facebook users use to see how they are doing," Matt said. "It's their personal 'do-gooder' scorecard that shows them how they and their friends are changing the world."

Another recent innovation is Facebook's OpenGraph API, which allows cause administrators to post updates on members' Facebook wall feeds (unless they opt out), making each cause member a potential broadcast platform for updates.

Despite these viral mechanisms, Matt is careful to point out that the nonprofit's role in prompting, reporting successes and coaching is essential. One option we discussed was for nonprofits to create a best practice guide for its cause members.

For someone who hasn't visited the cause they administer since the marathon they ran two years ago, the new interface is almost unrecognizable - and for good cause (bad pun). The clunky fundraising thermometer has been replaced by interactive impact graphs. Rather than scroll down the page to post multimedia, administrators can do that and more directly from the publisher interface (pictured below) which Causes added six months ago.  

Causes has also extended the fundraising functionality of its popular Birthday Wish tool by launching a dedicated site last July that simplifies the process of generating a Birthday Wish. "What we were really grappling with was the question of how to facilitate organic action and offer better guidance," Matt said, "This gives them a front door to the Birthday Wish."

He then added, "On average, an active Birthday Wish raises nearly $100. Now imagine if you had 100 cause members creating and actively promoting their wishes - that's $100,000 in one year. Again, this is where community building and coaching come in."

Causes has certainly faced competition along the way, with the ongoing development of third party applications and integrated website event tools offered by Convio, Blackbaud, Artez or Global Cloud. Matt believes Causes' edge lies in its unique integration with Facebook. However, it's doubtful that Causes would be where it is had it not evolved in functionality. (Included in that evolution are Causes' project pages, which allow nonprofits to promote a new, fresh aspect of their work and encourage individual causes to raise money for it - this helps keep causes more timeless and relevant.)

But as Matt puts it, the key takeaway for any nonprofit using causes is to "be disciplined in rolling out consistent engagement."       

A DonationPay Takeaway

For nonprofits, nothing demands security and reliability quite like online payment processing. So when I told a New York-based client about DonationPay, a full-service, customizable platform whose 3% per-transaction fee is the only charge its clients see, I shouldn't have been surprised when she laughed, "What's the catch?"

Today I got on the phone with Noah Sochet, who founded DonationPay a year and a half ago with Angelina Strosahl. Ever since the two met in college, they've been running Duo Web Marketing in Olympia, WA, consulting a variety of industry clients including nonprofits.

"We would often find ourselves having to explain to our nonprofit clients the incomprehensible fee structures of some online donation platforms," Noah said, adding, "And I'm not saying that to bash the great services that are out there, it's just a complicated business."

It is indeed. Try explaining to a university development officer who just invested half his budget in a CRM with payment processing that he has to manage a separate merchant account for transactions. Then try explaining that the university's name won't even appear on his donors' credit card statement, which will instead bear the name of the merchant account processor. And when donors request charge backs on billing descriptors they don't understand, the merchant account processor gets slapped with charge-back fees from the credit card company.

It's that parents-are-fighting anxiety that only happens when the nonprofit and for-profit worlds collide -- and when your parents fight. "The ugly truth about credit card fees is that they are purely for profit and not necessary," Noah said in a relaxed West Coast manner.

In this context, Noah and Angelina teamed up with Meritus Payment Solutions, a branch of Wells Fargo, for their payment processing. Noah explained that Meritus has its own merchant account gateway, which allows them to wave processing fees for nonprofit organizations. This "conveniency" setup also allows them to distribute funds collected everyday at 6:00pm -- some payment processors do this monthly -- and customize billing descriptors so that people who donate to XYZ nonprofit know where their money went.

Meanwhile, DonationPay's clients get the range of industry standard tools and customer service that nonprofits have come to expect from companies like Network for Good. The bottom line difference is that all costs are folded into the 3% transaction fee. DonationPay currently serves 126 clients, and has a staff of five, or three, depending on how you want to count it. 

According to Shabbir Imber Safdar, a San Francisco-based consultant and creator of TruthyPR, "The process of scaling for [DonationPay] will involve only scaling their customer service, not their payment infrastructure."

Shabbir recently migrated a nonprofit over to DonationPay because its previous platform had issues spanning inflexibility of form layout to limits on analytics reporting. "DonationPay appears to be a small startup, with a good focus on customer service, riding atop a very advanced payment processing engine from a larger financial processor," he said, adding, "We've worked with Noah, who has worked very hard to make us happy."       

Refudiate Your Social Media Inhibitions

Sarah Palin made Twipples of snickers and depression today when, in a tweet defending her assault on the English language, she compared her "creativity" to Shakespeare's -- one wonders if an aide was dispatched to spell check that one.

Unfortunately, there may be people out there who revel in such audacity of dope. Unfortunately, some people place more importance on swagger than on substance. Finally, and, again, unfortunately, nonprofits and their supporters have something to learn from this: Social media is an arena that allows you to own your message. It's just that some people prefer more intelligent sounding messages than others.

“The 21st century is a really terrible time to be a control freak,” the State Department's Jared Cohen said recently in a New York Times article titled, "Digital Diplomacy." (NYT editors clearly don't have the audacity to call it like it is: Twiplomacy.) Indeed, even stodgy federal institutions are letting go of their messaging inhibitions to venture into the powerful marketplace of ideas and human bonds that is social media.

But it's important to recognize what really matters about social media -- the social (and if you happened to see Katya Andresen's recent tutorial on this, you know I totally just ripped her off). Take Twitter, for example. Viewed one way, Twitter is a closet full of shoes. When you're about to go to some tweet-frenzied technology conference, you put on your running shoes. When you tweet a news link from the New York Times during your Monday morning coffee fix, you're wearing business casual. But what matters at the end of your walk or run in Twitter shoes is the person in them.

Did your followers connect? Were they enlightened? What did you inspire them to do and how do you know they did it? Was it what you had hoped they would do? These are all very critical questions to consider when setting out on your Twitter strategy and owning your nonprofit's message and cause.

Today Jocelyn Harmon blogged about the 5 roles you need to fill when building an online community team, and added her own number 6: the "bridge builder," a brilliant idea in this age of increasing diversity. I hate to add another node on an already growing list, so maybe we can call this a sub-role, or something, but online communities need a Message Maker. Not to be mistaken with an editor, this role is the human bond in social media.

There is no clear formula for achieving this. It takes doing, and growing into things. For some, it might also take having a dictionary on hand, but we've beaten that horse enough.

Are You a Data Geek Superstar?

We just attended the "Super Heros of online Fundraising: Become a Data-Driven Strategist" breakout session at the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference (10NTC) in Atlanta. The session was run by Sarah Dijulio of M+R Strategic Services, and she posed some profound points and questions for online fundraisers.

 

For instance, when you use data to drive your strategic decisions, you'll make better decisions, avoid mistakes, and achieve a higher return on investment. But how do you transform your organizational culture to become data driven? And what kind of data are we talking about anyways? How do you sift through the massive volumes of online data to discover what is truly relevant? Superhero costume is not required.

Wilderness Society and AARP tried some targeted $5 vs. $10 ask email campaigns. AARP ran a deadline fundraising goal-oriented messaging campaign that resulted in a 144% increase in response rates over its usual average, while Wilderness Society's email campaign actually underperformed. The difference between the two campaigns was that Wilderness Society targeted non-donors, while AARP's targeted non-donor activists (i.e. people with a history of taking political action in emails) -- it only goes to show that when supporters are engaged in some form (e.g. advocacy) they are more likely to donate.

What should you test as an email campaigner? One thing M+R has tried is monthly giving asks, using javascripted pop-ups over the donation form that offers the monthly option. Another example is Mercy Corps, which allows people to start the donation process from the home page. Then there is Amnesty International, which does something similar, but shows users which program area the donation will go to -- a person from Amnesty in the audience raised his hand and shouted, "It worked!"

But in testing, there are several important questions you have to ask:

• What goal will this help you meet?
• How much of a lift can you expect? Is this likely to produce significant improvements?
• How long will it take to get statistically significant results?
• How much time will it take to implement?
• Is the lesson you learn applicable to future efforts?
• How will you evaluate the results?

One of the things that M+R heard from Amnesty was that adding the Verisign logo next to a donation button improved conversions. M+R ran with the idea with other clients, and found that this led to a 12% increase in response rates for the nonprofits that used it. 

So then how do you evaluate your test results? Try creating a data grid, and make sure your sample sizes give you statistically significant results (i.e. you might have to call that stats geek friend from grad school). But there are several rules of thumb to follow:

• Bigger sample sizes are better
• 400 responses is usually valid
• The smaller the metric you are measuring, the bigger sample you will need (i.e. if you have a list of 100,000 people, a 4% response rate = 4,000. so you can run an A/B test with groups of 10,000 each)

A great online tool for evaluating all of this is the Google Site Optimizer Duration Calculator, which allows you to speculate tests on pageviews to your donation forms. 

As most people know, M+R invests a lot in nonprofit data research, and we're all grateful they do. But tactics like the ones Sarah exhibited today can be tweaked and accommodated to any nonprofit of any size. It just takes a little planning and guidance. Once those systems are in place, you can become a data-driven superstar by second nature! 

Social Media Veterans at the 2010 NTEN Conference

Today Changing Our World's Interactive services team is blogging from the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference (10NTC) in Atlanta, which is pretty much the mother ship of all tech-minded nonprofit gatherings. The first session we attended was titled, "Social Media Veterans," (#smvets) which was moderated by the very energetic Rachel Weidinger, who successfully turned the packed ballroom into an offline Facebook fan page/Twitter feed.

Attendants gathered to share their tips, grievances and brilliant ideas on all things social media, from Ning to FourSquare. I had a chance to interview Estrella Rosenberg, whose campaign, 100x100, is using FourSquare to launch a lobbying campaign around legislation on heart defects.

"It's not exactly fundraising, but it will get supporters engaged and active, and therefore more likely to give at a later stage," she surmised.

Enjoy the video! (This article continues below.)

Estrella Rosenberg on FourSquare from CW Interactive Services on Vimeo.

At one point in the forum, Rachel took a show of hands for how many people had organizational and personal Twitter accounts; Facebook fan pages; a blog that was very active vs. not so active. Hands shot up -- these were social media veterans, after all -- and some embarrassed laughter over the blogging activity question. Rachel picked on one person -- "You with the awesome glasses!" -- who works with the Dr. Pepper Museum -- "Give us an example of how you use Twitter."

She replied that they apply strict practices of following & thanking people who retweet them, and that Twitter also becomes a useful tool for tourists within the museum.

Another person, whose nonprofit addresses a controversial political issue, has put together a crisis plan in the event they fall victim to a political attack. Rachel then asked how many people in the room had a social media crisis plan, and only three people responded.

One of the more interesting topics was volunteer management, particularly when it comes to striking a balance between controlling your messaging and granting autonomy to your volunteers. One attendant explained that her organization maintains a very rigorous application process and engages in frequent followups throughout the life cycle of the volunteer. Another organization member said they enlist autonomous volunteer teams that each have their own Twitter accounts.

The session ended with Rachel throwing business cards around the room, and asking for people to throw theirs back at her. "You, blog about this! You, blog about that!" It was chaos, lightening-paced yet somehow, everything made sense.

Charitivism: The Gloves are Off

This morning I was scanning my Tweetdeck stream for yesterday's Artez Interactive DC fundraising & networking conference and noticed this from Care2's Jocelyn Harmon (my favorite Frogloop blogger):

Still musing on @danpallotta talk at #artezdc. We R handicapping ourselves by perpetuating the myth that low overhead = effective charity.

Indeed, I think everyone was.

It would be unfair to say that Dan Pallotta's presentation, "Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential," stole the spotlight. It was bookended with talks by people like Katya Andresen, Ted Hart, Dharmesh Shah, Judy Chang (Principal Product Manager, PayPal) and Care2's Jocelyn and Eric Rardin, all of whom knocked the ball out of the park. (A few highlights: Ted set the tone by declaring that we have moved from the era of "direct marketing" to "direct influence," and to fundraise online effectively, we'd have to "stop fundraising and start communicating"; Katya gave her first live presentation of her must read ebook, Homer Simpson for Nonprofits, which she'll repeat at the NTEN conference next week; and Dharmesh probably converted everyone in the room into avid bloggers, SEO buffs and tweeters, if they weren't already.)

But Dan's presentation was definitively special. For those who don't know, Dan is the author of Uncharitable, a rather insurgent book which argues that "society’s nonprofit ethic undermines our ability to eradicate great problems, and, ironically, puts charity at a severe disadvantage to the for-profit sector at every level."

In his talk, Dan pointed to the flurry of warnings issued by media outlets and state attorneys general about donating to relief organizations in the aftermath of Haiti's earthquake, to highlight the erroneous assumption that people ought not donate to nonprofits that report high overhead costs. 

Stop and think about this.

How exactly is a Haiti relief organization supposed to implement solid programs without skilled staff, technology and organization? There is no doubt that some nonprofits are more or less efficient than others, but why are overhead costs the litmus test?

Put another way: You should not donate to the soup kitchen that reports 30% overhead expenses (don't bother to find out that it has highly professional facilities and staff, and serves healthy organic soup). You should donate to the soup kitchen that reports 5% overhead expenses (don't bother to discover that their facilities are dilapidated, their staff rude, and their soup bereft of nutritional value).

Dan believes this stigma hearkens back to our country's Puritanical belief system that rewards capitalist entrepreneurship and humbles charity to an almost parasitic level. That is, you're not doing your job if you're working on a Macbook Pro and have complimentary coffee in the office kitchen. You are expected to run highly sophisticated software on donated IBMs circa 2001 and call hospitals in Haiti from a shared rotary phone.

Meanwhile, corporations that want to sell sugar water to children and exploit lax labor laws in poor countries are rewarded with billions. Yes, something is certainly wrong with this picture.

Perhaps the worst consequence for the nonprofit industry is that this culture forces it to lie to itself. Dan cited the statistic that a third of nonprofits with a budget of $5 million had reported no fundraising expenses.

So how is the sector expected to become more efficient when our culture forces it into dishonesty?

Dan's answer to this problem is as common sense as it is profound. Replace words like "overhead" with "implementation," or, if it's not a stretch, "vision." He closed his presentation saying, "Revisit your great dreams and infuse them with courage, and the determination to make them real."

I later ran into Dan by the elevators as he was leaving and told him I planned to use his talking points in my own work with nonprofit organizations. "Do it," he said, "we've got to get this movement going." 

He meant every word, I thought.

Using the Social Media Snowball Formula

A staple read this week in the online nonprofit sphere was Brenna Holmes’ blog post on Community Organizer 2.0 about building the California State Parks Foundation’s (CSPF) Facebook Fan Page from 517 fans to 45,000 – a pretty big honking deal.

It’s especially remarkable given that CSPF’s four-day “Friend Get Friend” campaign nearly met its original goal of 5,000 fans, then surpassed it with 6,236 fans on the following day. The campaign brought CSPF considerable media attention and encouraged about 5,000 concerned Californians to visit state parks on a weekend in June and then post photos from their visits to CSPF’s Fan Page wall.

It’s the kind of online-to-offline-to-online success that would make any digital-savvy mother proud, and Brenna’s must be smiling.

Of course, any nonprofiteer who read this wants to know how to make this narrative her own. And absent a perfect villain like the anti-progressive, state park budget slashing Governator himself, and the fierce urgency of legislative deadlines, will CSPF’s Facebook formula of smart messaging be enough?

Before we go there, let’s assume that while your nonprofit addresses a noble and necessary social need, there are no foreseeable wars, hurricanes (though ‘tis the season), forest fires or sinister bands of ninjas out to undo your good work. 

The first question you should ask is whether you’ve taken full inventory of opportunities that do exist. For instance, are you aware of Twestival Local, and that your city and charity might qualify to benefit from it if you register by August 25th?

Moreover, are you on Twitter? Why not? (Don’t worry, CSPF didn’t get there until late last July.)

The next step is to realize that success isn’t all about fortunate externalities – although they do help. It begins instead with a combination of perspective, the right tools and a winning formula. And persistence, of course, but since you work for the cause that’s in your DNA.

To see what I mean about perspective, turn back to the CSPF example with a different mindset: State parks are always under the threat of budget cuts, that’s not unusual; compared to other Republicans, you could be facing much worse opponents than Governor Schwarzenegger.

If CSPF had this perspective, there would be no state parks east of the Rockies. The point is that there may be no impending ninja attack, but your job wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t a threat to your cause. It’s up to you to reframe it, and apply the right online tools to communicate and make it viral.

Let’s begin with the tools. If your organization hasn’t already invested in email campaigns, you undoubtedly intend to. Next consider the two strongest social media applications in online organizing, Twitter and Facebook. Regardless of where your nonprofit lies on the spectrum of novice to advanced, everyone shares a common interest with these tools: growth. That is, followers on Twitter and fans on Facebook.

(A quick aside: There’s been great debate over the benefits of Facebook’s Causes vs. Fan Pages applications. Your correspondent is of the opinion that Fan Pages win this one. Causes are great but have trouble sustaining over time – once dormant, they’re hard to resuscitate. Fan Pages are like the vintage Mustang you take out on weekends – they’re more timeless. And with a Static FBML box, you can embed donate or email subscribe functionalities on your Fan Page.)

Finally, the Fan Page-Twitter cocktail is ideal because both applications create communities of potential donors; have email blast-like capabilities (in fact, many practitioners have found greater returns on tweeting take-action or donate links than they get from conventional email campaigns); provide a forum for activity, media sharing and conversation; and the online audience you’re not reaching on Twitter is probably active on Facebook.

Now for the winning formula, which goes something like this:

Goals → Urgency → Communications → Giving

 
The Snowball Formula, as I just decided to call it, earns its namesake because each element rolls into the next, making your campaign bigger and more formidable as it goes. Besides, snowballs grow, which is precisely what you want you campaign to do, not just with followers, but with generating a buzz and raising money.

Here’s how it breaks down:

Establish Goals: There’s nothing like clarity. Tell your supporters exactly what you’re trying to do. You want a million dollars, 10,000 fans/followers on Facebook and Twitter, and you need it all by this deadline. Promote this on your website (or, dare I say, a microsite?) and in email campaigns, and don’t forget to be creative: Tie your goal to a mission match (e.g. 10,000 fans for 10,000 blankets for the homeless) or donor match (e.g. 10,000 fans matched with $10,000 from ACME Co.).

Introduce Urgency: This step is best accommodated with robust communications coupled with timing. That is, constant vigilance for opportunities to exploit, such as hurricanes and marauding ninjas. More importantly, you need to sound convincing. As stated earlier, CSPF had several externalities working to its advantage. In their initial Friend Get Friend appeal last May (broadcast via Fan Page email notification), they articulated Schwarzenegger’s plan to halve the General Fund budget by July, and eliminate it by 2010. But the real urgency was introduced several sentences later when they said, “This year’s cuts are 10 times as bad so we need 10 times the fans on Facebook – 5,000 – by Friday to fight this newest proposal back.”  That’s it. No meticulous breakdown of cause and effect, no online grassroots feasibility metrics, just a few words that said, basically, you should really, really do this. Because we said so.

Sustain Communication: Your average dictator, cynic or communications consultant will tell you that power lies not in facts, but in controlling the story. Communications should remain consistent throughout your campaign while you optimize all channels of social media and email. Content is largely informed by external events, but some can be planned in advance, such as reminding your supporters about goal status (i.e. urging people to recruit more), and finding new ways to express urgency. There is also the matter of not-so-public communications: Along the way it helps to identify and enlist individuals with large online followings (it could be a Twitterphile celebrity like Ashton Kirchner, but any person with a zillion followers will do) to help contribute to the buzz you’re creating on Facebook and Twitter, especially if you decide to end your campaign with a big ask…

Get’em Giving: There’s nothing wrong with asking for money. And it actually improves your chances of reaching your supporter-growth goals if you orchestrate the giving into a singular fundraising event, such as a 24-hour offline-to-online Tweet-up event. This is because the days leading up to your fundraising day will be all about growing your supporter base. Treat it the way you would a fundraiser house party. Your friends will be happy to help you promote it, and on the party day itself, you have a captive audience that’s ready to give $20 here and $100 there. Several examples are worth mentioning, such as Charity: Water’s Twestival, Epic Change’s Tweetsgiving and PlayPumps International’s Aquathon.

There is, of course, much more to be said for social media outside of Twitter and Facebook, and even more regarding the 3rd party applications that support them. But if a strong, social media sensibility comes first, the tools will follow.

To YouTube it or not, that's the question.

Recently, I lost a friend, not a person friend, but a close go-to partner that's been with me for over 2 years. My friend's name was Brightcove, and it was my favorite alternative to YouTube.

Brightcove, if you are unfamiliar with it was a free online video publishing site similar to YouTube in its intent, but different enough at its approach. The back-end was filled with customizable options, channel setups, layout tools, water marking options, banner options- in fact, the first time I saw a playlist embed code was when using Brightcove. And while Brightcove is still operating as a company, it is no longer free. (Price is not posted on their site.)

Recently I had to move all my Brightcove videos into another tool, the obvious choice was YouTube - it's popular, it's easy, it offered embed options and it's an "in" into the a large pool of popular videos, drawing millions within a month. Those were important factors for what I needed, and thus far, it's done that well. Videos uploaded a week ago have already been getting hundred's of views. However, YouTube has it's drawbacks. For one, there is a very visible loss of quality in videos uploaded, the customizable options in the channels are good, but lack any pizazz (very 2004), and the related videos that appear on the right of your video are a hazard that may result in losing visitors exploring your channel. For instance, while watching a video on youth empowerment on your channel, the title "Fred Goes Swimming" may catch your visitor's attention under the "Related Videos" box underneath your list, they'll click it, than whoosh, like Kiser Sozer (from the Usual Suspects), they're gone forever. 

There's no doubt that YouTube is the monster of online video, but it's important to know that they are alternatives out there, alternatives that may not be as good for accidental visits, but are superior for showcasing.

Vimeo

Vimeo, in my world, is probably the 2nd most well known video hosting option out there. It's especially popular with high definition (HD) videos. If you visit a Vimeo channel, you'll immediately see the difference between it and YouTube, the video quality often looks better, the video controls hide - allowing you to enjoy a full-screen like movie, the description is right below the video (not hidden at the far right), and the channel layout is not as busy. Also, there is a focus on icons over text which creates a nice simple clean look to your channel. Similar to YouTube, is the channel grouping. Video clips are organized into general topics (The White House has a channel (viemo.com/whitehouse) and College Humor casts have their own channel (vimeo.com/amir and vimeo.com/streeter)) and than further sub-organized by tags like activism & non profits, comedy, sports, etc.

Vimeo also has a Facebook tie to it. If you like a video on Vimeo, click the "Like" button and it instantly appears on your Facebook feed as public message that you "liked a video on Vimeo", with a link directly to it.

Two drawbacks to Vimeo over YouTube is it's notorious reputation for slow uploads, and that for those uploading more that 500MB a week, fees are involved (unlimited uploads of SD and HD are available for $59.95/year or $0.16/day).

Viddler

Not wildly popular, but still strong with content is another video hosting service called Viddler. With Viddler there is no limit to the number of videos you can upload for free, and according to a recent CNET review, it is one of the fastest when it comes to uploading.

It's channel layout is not highly customizable, and it's very barebones-ish, which isn't great, except that it does offer something YouTube nor Vimeo offer, a Twitter and Flickr feed on your profile page. This option really helps bring full circle what Web 2.0 is all about, shorter text, free pictures, and free videos.

Other offerings from Viddler include revenue sharing and iTunes Podcast Support ("Viddler [can] make you an iTunes-compatible RSS feed which you can submit to the iTunes Music Store").

In the end, it may be that YouTube is just the thing you need for your videos. The opportunity to be discovered on it is undeniably higher there than anywhere else. However, to some, there are times when creating a hub where you have better control over quality, and an ability to promote social networking tools matter more than someone finding my channel on seeing eye dogs while watching Bizkit the Sleepwalking Dog.

Links:

Brightcove: www.brightcove.com
Vimeo: www.vimeo.com
Viddler: www.viddler.com
CNET Review: YouTube sucks: 4 sites that do video better

Keyword Madness Solved

These days, it seems everyone struggles with their keywords; they just seem to grasp at anything in their site's content that may have the slightest possibility of helping them generate traffic. I think people over thinking the problem, so I want to share one of my solutions for generating great keywords.

I use a site Keyword Spy which allows you to type in a site or keyword and get a large amount of relevant information that you can use to generate larger list and better target your audience through search engines.

If you type a keyword into the search box, the site will give you the number of search results for that keyword and the number of clicks a day it generates, along with the average cost per click on ppc campaigns, and the sites using that keyword in their ppc campaigns.

From there, you can dig deeper so you can look at the list of people advertising on that keyword and see what other keywords they are advertising on.  For example, I did a search on the keyword "water", which returned the results you can see in the image above.  Now looking down the list of those who pay for advertising on that word, we find several companies and nonprofits, so by clicking on one of those sites we can get information on just how that site is doing, its advertising items, including a list of the paid and organic keywords being used to generate traffic.

This is where is gets really handy, and where we answer the question which keywords to use. Keyword Spy will give you a list of the keywords combined with a rating for their return on investment, search ranking position, competition ranking, average clicks per day and the average cost per click for every keyword in the list.  This will help you determine exactly which keywords are going to help you more and which ones you are going to be competing a little more on.

Now for those using ppc campaigns to drive traffic to your site, you can even get a list of ad variations that articular site is using, which can help you get ideas for how to word your own ads.

Finally, it will let you export the list of keywords to either a text or Excel document so that you can save them and use them wherever you like, however you prefer.

Now Keyword Spy does have two levels of membership: the first is free, which is honestly all that I use since it gives you quite a bit of information there.  If you decide you need more, then upgrade to the Pro account, which is $139.95 a month.  But, for the average nonprofit just looking to drive more traffic and awareness, I think this is a bit extreme. Anyway, give it a try and let me know what you think. It has always worked well for me.

Tweet Tweet Went the Nonprofit

Truth be told, that headline is a nod to a CNN.com headline this week about a congressman tweeting during President Obama's address to the nation. But this week was a clear indication of why we've recommended that clients use the Web 2.0-social media-micro-blogging phenom that is Twitter.

One of our clients signed on to Twitter on February 11. Since then, they've had two key returns:

1. A clear increase in site traffic with Twitter jumping up to one of their top referring websites.

2. Just this week, the client was contacted by a company in their field that they were not previously connected with soley because the company found them on Twitter. I hope this is just the beginning of new collaborations and potential partnerships that come as a direct result of a Twitter.

I should also say that I've been particularly impressed with this organization's adoption of Twitter. They quickly keyed in on developing their voice and leveraging Twitter to highlight the information and resources found on their website, which are surprisingly handy for almost everyone, not just the blind and low-vision audience they target.

If you're still not sure about Twitter for your organization, I have these recommendations for you:

• Visit http://twitter.com/nonprofitorgs to see which nonprofits are using twitter

• Use Tweetscan or Twitter Search to see who's talking about you

• Think it will take up too much time? Consider Tweetlater to schedule your tweets

• If you're a organization serves a local community, try Twellow to see who's tweeting in your neighborhood.

I'm on Twitter. Are you?