YouTube raised the question today: “Are you a nonprofit who needs help creating great video for your causes?” And with the exception of nonprofits lucky enough to have an in-house videographer, of which are few and far between, the answer to this question is more often than now “Yes”.

And with that common response in mind, YouTube officially rolled out its new YouTube Video Volunteers program today.

In short, this new program allows nonprofit organizations to post video volunteer opportunities on one of the three sites including idealist.org, serve.org and Volunteer Match using the words “video volunteer” in postings. In turn, the opportunities for video help will automatically show up in the All for Good feed on YouTube’s Video Volunteers page, in an effort to All for Good’s mission of allowing citizens to take small actions to add up to a big difference a reality.

Why I dig this new program…

• It allows volunteers to use a skill that has been mostly untapped up until this point: video shooting and editing! This is a great way to introduce new volunteers and supporters to your cause by allowing them to donate their time in a way they want to give back.
  
  
• Aggregation of multiple site opportunities in one place. With so many information sources across the web, this is and will continue to be a huge trend.  Nonprofits can now have a heightened probability of their opportunities being found by listing them on one of many sites that will all be pulled into one main source.
  
  
• Ease of use of the site features. The easier you make the experience of a volunteer engaging with your organization’s opportunities online (did someone say user experience?), the more likely they are to help. The new program page has a simple and sleek interface that provides useful information and easy ways to interact.
  
  
• Customizable location. This feature allows any YouTube user or visitor to set their preferred location so they can see what opportunities are available in their local area. Each time someone visits the page, they can browse for opportunities in any area of the country.
  
  
• And at the end of the day, it’s using social media for social good. YouTube videos are known for being funny, irreverent and viral. And for a company like YouTube to put so much time and effort into a socially impactful feature is a wonderful thing!
  
  

I can’t wait to see how nonprofits start using this new tool to their benefit. For any and all nonprofits that start posting opportunities and engaging with volunteers for help with video, please come back and share your experiences and success stories here! I'd love to feature some ways nonprofits find this program useful going forward.

Huge props YouTube and Ramya for the great work to help positively impact the nonprofit community! And here's a short video with more information about the program for those of you interested in learning more:

Chances are, you already know how important it is to have an accessible web site. I’ll spare you a lecture on that subject here by reminding you that your site should, most definitely, be accessible.

So, how do you know if it is? Is it enough to have alt tags on your images? Do you have to install a screen reader to test and see? I attended an awesome session on accessibility at the UPA conference and the folks over at Fidelity Investments shared some great questions to use to test out your site:

1. Can you navigate your site using just your keyboard? (Hint: use the TAB key)
2. Is all graphic and audio/visual content also represented in text somehow? Is that text an equivalent substitute?
3. Is your information architecture, or hierarchy, represented in the code? So, if I see something as a heading, is it also represented that way in the code?
4. Is your content all flexible, scalable and legible for various browsers, font size settings and screen resolutions? Test out a few different options to see.
5. Will the content read in the correct order? If you disable CSS, can you still make sense of the order of what you’re reading? (Note: This is also known as separating content from design)
6. Have all the form fields and buttons or controls been labeled properly?

These questions are a great starting point or quick-test to see if you have some issues to address. Working toward an accessible site from an exisiting site can take a great deal of time. If you’re redesigning, remember to keep accessibility at the forefront so you can avoid retroactive changes to make your site accessible. Can you think of any other considerations for accessibility? Feel free to add in the comments.
 

It's been my good fortune to work with Children's Defense Fund for the last year and a half here at Convio.  CDF is the foremost national proponent of policies and programs that provide children with the resources they need to succeed. I'm happy to be able to tell you today about a couple of things - their redesign of their website and some encouraging results from their hard work, and a webinar that we're hosting tomorrow (Wednesday) where they'll tell you how they did it.

Heidi Hess, the Director of Online Communications at CDF, wanted to make www.childrensdefense.org the destination site for people searching for information about child advocacy issues.  To accomplish this, she led a process to redesign the website - both for look and feel, and for usability and accessibility.  In addition, CDF wanted to make sure that people searching for information about child advocacy issues would be able to find it easily, and so engaged in a process early on to integrate search engine optimization (SEO) into the new site.

And what a marvelous result it is!  Not only is the new site aesthetically pleasing, it's also more intutive.  If I'm looking for resources, publications, and ways to get involved, the top menu bar makes it really clear where I'll find what I'm looking for.  The platform for the site is Convio CMS, and one of the reasons CDF chose Convio CMS was its integration with Convio's Online Marketing suite of tools.

CDF had help during this process - Omni Studio completely redesigned CDF's web assets in 2008, and RedEngine Digital led the process to integrate SEO recommendations.  And the proof of the pudding is in the eating - since the new site was launched on March, 2009:

• overall site visits from 2008 to 2009 increased by 12%
• Google organic search visits increased by 23%
• average time on the site is up 15%

CDF and Convio are hosting a complimentary webinar on Integrating Your Mission with Your Website on Wednesday, June 17 at 3:00 p.m. Eastern time (that's tomorrow!) to discuss their success and lessons learned.  I hope you'll sign up and attend!

Last year’s research into the online behaviors of the wired wealthy changed the way many people viewed the online channel and the role it plays with mid- and major-donors. Inspired by the research and the impact it could have Mikaela King and Nancy Withbroe, CFRE with CDR Fundraising Group have created a whitepaper around their experience putting the findings to work.

Here’s a guest post from Mikaela with links to the whitepaper.

Online Marketers: savvy, fast-moving connectors of constituents and causes, engaging donors to contribute to the cause conversation. Major donor officers: one-on-one relationship builders with individual donors, discussing in-depth program information focused on thoughtful cultivation of large gifts.

Can online marketers and major donor officers find mutually-beneficial ways of integrating their expertise?  Can we get along? Absolutely!  And in reality, we must. The Wired Wealthy study by Convio, Sea Change Strategies and Edge Research, which came out last year, shows us that major donors are already online in a significant way, and unfortunately, most nonprofits aren’t doing a very good job of communicating to them through this medium.   

In fact, online marketing and major gift officers use many of the same approaches towards cultivating engaged supporters and soliciting donations. We inform, and we try to communicate in a way that feels personal and asks for - and truly values - input. We invite people to make a larger investment and to develop a deeper relationship with the organization’s mission and leaders.  And of course - we both ask for money! 

The Wired Wealthy study surfaced quite a bit of useful information about major donors and their online behavior.  Roughly two-thirds check out an organization’s web site before making a gift, they expect fresh and engaging content geared towards their interests and preferences, they expect a smooth, simple donation progress and want a year-end tax receipt emailed to them.  Major donors want accountability, reassurance that their philanthropic investment will have a measurable and significant impact, easy-to-find information, and access – to organizational leaders, their programs and plans, and metrics of effectiveness and success. 

So what are some ways we can use the online experience to identify, cultivate, solicit and steward existing and prospective major donors?  Here are some ideas.

• Ask for large gifts online: include higher-dollar amounts when you solicit gifts through your web site, and personalize ask amounts to a person’s giving history.
• Don’t just ask for large gifts - explain the need for them and the impact they’ll have: include “price points” that show how you’ll use larger gifts.  What could your organization achieve with a gift of $1,000? $5,000?
• Create a section of your web site or a micro site specifically targeted to major donors: customize information to this audience – make current financial information readily available, include “exclusive” and in-depth program content, event invitations, and reports.
• Provide program reports and update them monthly: provide quantitative data on program needs and impact, goals, progress and achievements
• Post interactive content: tell stories and ask donors to provide their own, show videos, or post a “program cam” where visitors can see your programs in action!
• Create a special email “stationary”: mimic the look of a one-on-one email from the President or a program officer; this could include a “forward” of an email from a program director or a “cc” to an executive assistant.
• Acknowledge people who have already made significant gifts to your organization in the past year, with their permission, and ask others to join this “exclusive” club!

Your major donors are already on your web site, looking for reasons to engage with your mission and support your cause.  By combining each discipline’s expertise, tools and best practices, online marketers and major gifts officers can create meaningful conversations with major donors online, deepening those relationships and providing opportunities for more significant giving to support your mission. 

Read more about this topic in CDR Fundraising Group’s whitepaper, “Raise Big Money From Thousands of Your Closest Friends: Engaging Major Donors Online,” by Mikaela King and Nancy Withbroe, CFRE, January 2009.

Fundraisers in the worst economic era since the Great Depression continue to struggle according to a study out this week from the Giving USA Foundation.   While an estimated $307 billion dollars was given to charitable causes in 2008; total fundraising declined an inflation adjusted of 5.7% from 2007 levels.  This is the largest decline since Giving USA began publishing these statistics in 1954. The blog Tactical Philanthropy had a great post yesterday about the perspective one could bring to the news.  Sean asks, should the headline here be - Charitable Giving Exceeds $300 Billion. Second Highest Level of Giving Ever! or Charitable Giving Falls Dramatically. Largest Percentage Drop on Record!  Regardless of which perspective you take, while the total pie appears to be shrinking, online continues to be the lone bright spot in this fundraising landscape. 

With an estimated two-thirds of charities experiencing a decrease in 2008 overall giving, I decided to take a look at how things are shaping up so far in 2009.  See our full Q1 findings here.  Looking at actual data from the same 400 clients we studied in our annual benchmark study, we’re seeing online revenue is up 8% in Q1 2009 vs. 2008; 5 points higher than what we were seeing in Q4 2008.  So things appear to be trending, albeit modestly, in the right direction. Given these organizations have had online fundraising as a part of their mix for several years and the growth is on a significant fundraising volume, we believe this to be more reflective of the overall online fundraising environment than some of the other claims we’ve read this week.

When we look at the Convio client base as a whole fundraising is up significantly quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. In fact, our Go! clients have experienced a more than 200 percent return on their investment in the last year, but it would be disingenuous to add that to our system performance and claim online fundraising is up 70 percent. The more salient point is that for these organizations online revenue has replaced most and in some cases all of the revenue they lost through traditional channels – and is more cost effective and efficient.

Another key point in the Giving USA Foundation online discussion with The Chronicle of Philanthropy was that building and strengthening individual relationships is critical in this environment. In this arena there is very positive news from the Q1 Benchmark. We are seeing Website traffic increased by 16 percent and email file size increased by 27 percent. These results reflect an opportunity to use the online channel to grow and cultivate relationships in a more cost effective and efficient way. According to the Giving USA report 75 percent of all giving came from individuals. Organizations are and must continue to focus efforts on cost-effective stewardship and engagement programs so that these individuals remain committed as we come out of the economic downturn. Our client’s results and feedback indicate that organizations that are engaging donors through multiple channels, with an emphasis online, are better positioned to weather the current economic storm and build lasting relationships with current and new supporters.

With only a quarter in the books, 2009 obviously has a long way to go.  The results in the Giving USA Foundation annual report reflect the difficulty the economy has created, but also show that there is opportunity to efficiently engage individuals in support of the nonprofit sector. The good news thus far is that nonprofit organizations are continuing to see success online in the first quarter.  Look for Convio’s Q2 updates on the state of online fundraising in early August.