Changes to MyCharityConnects

Since 2009, CanadaHelps' MyCharityConnects program has connected charities to the technology they need to succeed through an annual nonprofit technology conference, webinars about social media, www.mycharityconnects.org,and how-to workshops across the country.

As of August 2012, MyCharityConnects will look a bit different. While we're not offering cross-country workshops or the conference next year, we will still be offering webinars that are focused on helping charities make the most of their CanadaHelps accounts and demonstrating some account changes we will be making this year. Stay tuned for announcements about our exciting webinar line-up!

If you have any feedback about the MyCharityConnects program, please do not hesitate to email us communications@canadahelps.org.

Webinar - Elements of a Great YouTube Video

Did you know that Canadians are the world leaders when it comes to viewing YouTube videos? If YouTube search queries were tallied separately from Google, it would be the second largest search engine in the world.

YouTube has an incredibly diverse and engaged global community who not only post videos, but interact with each other through text comments, video responses, and messages. The network provides content and community, providing nonprofits with both a media outlet and a social networking site.

Every second, one hour of video is uploaded to YouTube - that’s more than a day of video in under half a minute and almost a decade of video in just one day. With so much competition for viewers’ attention, how can Canadian nonprofits and charities ensure their videos get watched?

Join Kara Golani, Nonprofit Training Associate at Canada Helps, as she goes through the elements of a GREAT YouTube video and other things your organization can do to create the best quality and most impactful videos on a budget.

Find out:

• Wwhat kind of equipment to consider investing in
• How to make your videos stand out
• How to ensure the best quality for your videos

Missed the webinar or want to review? Check out the video below.

#mcc12 Session Recap - "Being Social Inside and Out"

By: Antonio MG - @rantoniomg

Having an account on many different platforms can be useful to reach different segments of your intended target audience. This may also have the adverse result of information getting lost amidst the noise or being duplicated instead of adding any real value. One strategy to overcome this problem is to have a blog that allows your followers and fans to put all the pieces together.

Creating widgets around your YouTube clips and then embedding them on your blog is another useful option. A widget can allow users to engage immediately, for example, you can add a “donate” button right next to the clip.

Social Content Optimization
The concept is similar to Search Engine Optimization and basically means understanding the algorithms used by different social media platforms to decide what contents are shared with whom. The more engagement your contents create, the more likely is that they will appear on people’s feeds.

How to achieve it?
Start by reviewing the performance of your posts and see which ones have been more successful. Knowing your levels of engagement can assist you to present your case to sponsors. For example, Facebook offers “Insights” which are statistics about your page’s performance.

An important thing to remember is that the definition of “engagement” can vary across different platforms. For example, on Twitter you have re-tweets, favourites, mentions, whereas on Facebook you have likes and shares.

The following  steps can assist your efforts:

• Define: your organization’s objectives.
• Research: Analyze relevant data to understand what is working.
• Insights: Apply what you have learnt to enhance your contents.

To have an accurate idea of what is working, look at your engagement trends on a weekly and monthly basis. Evaluate the engagement success by checking variables such as:

• Time of day contents were published.
• Title used on a post.
• Length of the post.

Your review should also include measuring which platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Google+) are getting you more response. Then you might choose to focus your resources on those platforms or come up with new strategies to increase engagement in the networks that are not working as well.

Realize that different levels of engagement can be achieved depending on the format of your post: is it text, a picture, a video?