Last week's Net Tuesday in San Francisco featured Maryrose Dunton, the Head of User Experience at YouTube,, who spoke about YouTube's Nonprofit Program.The YouTube Nonprofit Program, is an in-kind donation by YouTube to the nonprofit sector that's worth about $20 million. Currently available to established 501(c)(3)s, YouTube offers participating nonprofits:
- A premium branded channel - some environmental nonprofits that have done a good job with this include Friends of the Earth and Defenders of Wildlife. The ability to upload videos of any length. Currently the limit on video length is 10 minutes.
- Rotation into the "Promoted Videos" section on YouTube's homepage.
- Listing in the Nonprofit Channels and Nonprofit Video areas
- The ability to collect donations using Google Checkout (with no processing fee).
- The option to participate in the user partner program, which allows you to show partner ads on video - and share the ad revenue. However, there is currently no way to filter ads, which may not work for some organizations.
YouTube has 30 million visitors daily and over 100 million videos are viewed each day. By connecting nonprofits to the world's largest online video community, the YouTube Nonprofit program will allow these organizations tap into a significant pool of potential small donors. While large nonprofits are able to receive 10-15% of donations from online fundraising, smaller organizations have the most difficulty establishing a web presence. By offering a dedicated channel on YouTube, YouTube's Nonprofit Program hopes to empower smaller organizations to significantly expand their reach. Now its just the matter of these, often, short-staffed nonprofits finding the manpower to manage their YouTube presence.
YouTube Best Practices for Nonprofits
Maryrose recommended these tips to help nonprofits engage successfully with the YouTube community:
1. Keep it fresh, keep it short. Best not longer than 10 minutes
2. Be genuine, no public service announcements (PSAs)
3. Engage and interact with the community - have a dialogue, allow people to post video comments, be sure to respond to comments
4. Create a call to action
5. Invest in your channel - update content, make sure links and videos work
7. Do not fear comments, ratings, related videos - while you can moderate user engagement, do not disable the commenting or rating features as this tends to upset the community
New Plans for Nonprofits on YouTube
New developments coming down the pipeline include:
1. Extending the program to include international nonprofits.
2. Incorporating more calls to action that are important to nonprofits, petitions, signup forms.
3. Improving nonprofit discovery on YouTube's website.
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