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.

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.

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?

This seminar sparked  creativity and out of the box thinking.  Participants were encouraged to think about how their fans can, not only be donors to a cause but can also be active fundraisers for you, and all without too much effort.

What has facilitated this dramatic shift?  Daryl says, Facebook and its peer-to-peer tools.  And to make it even more attractive, PayPal has partnered with Facebook, providing a turnkey process for payments and donations.  The result, this new open graph seamlessly integrates the functionality of both platforms to facilitate the sourcing of donors, the raising funds and the collecting money.

So how does this work? Because of the many social media sites, the way we access and consume content today is changing and that is very important when you think of how you currently connect to your fans. Facebook helps you identify like-minded fans who have similar goals, making it easier to get them interested in you and your cause, and once committed, the payment process is easy.

Besides attracting liked-minded fans, social fundraising on Facebook is even better if you have your friends and acquaintances talk in the community about you.  It is not just enough to have a “like” on your page, you need to get people to comment and reshare your fundraising efforts and take part in the effort.

This is where a new and effective method for fundraising has immerged.   It is called crowd funding, where your supporters raise money for you.  Letting the fans run great campaigns is the way of the future in the world of social media fundraising.  The speaker told the audience that they would be very surprised how effective these volunteer managed campaigns can be. 

Once engaged, the role of the fundraising organization is to think of ways to incentivize the volunteers with such tactics as short 1 day sprints of encouragement (goal is to accomplish at least one fundraising activity for that day), make daily status updates about them, have prizes for them, let them make videos to post  or shout out individual volunteer efforts.  He says if you pay attention to your volunteers and trust them to run great campaigns, they will.

In summary, what is the future vision, where is this going? Think of fundraising in social media on a campaign level not an organizational level.  Embrace analytics for these campaigns which can demonstrate new and different demographics than ever before.  Put that data into use and aggregate it each time a campaign runs.  Start today, start small and see where it takes you.

Gamification is next! Social marketing to incorporate game dynamics to drive participation within your content, stacking incentives along a pathway of actions you want users to follow.

To start off my second day at MyCharityConnects was Andrew Schiestel of tbk Creative. Schiestel (say that 5x fast) gave some really interesting facts and points that all non profits need to implement or at least consider in their social media strategy.

First off is that blogs are still alive. There has been some talk in the social media world that blogs are not worth the time, money and energy because some companies/brands are not seeing a ROI. Schiestel disagrees with this and so I do. Blogs are worth it. Blogs give us a special view in the world of your organization, a unique voice…but it has to be unique. The problem with many blogs is that that are not unique, they are words gathering dust. Make yours unique, interesting, funny, outside the box.

If content is a problem in your organization Schiestel suggests that you should write words that best describe your organization and chose the best 3 and build around that. Also that you must create content that adds value to the audience i.e. recognize them, demonstrate values and that wheat they are doing whether it is volunteer or monetary value is doing something really beneficial.

Also email marketing is something of a topic in the social media world that people are questioning whether they are effective. Schiestel says they still are, even if they don’t read the newsletter, THEY SEE IT. They see your organization and it is in their subconscious.

Throughout the talk Schiestel gave many tips as to how your organization maximizes their social media campaign.

Schiestel's Tips

• create infograph on the progress your organization is doing
• people don’t read so use PICTURES
• have more Donate Now buttons on your website
• use professional photography (many will do it at a reduce rate for charities)
• consider pop-up buttons
• have an editorial calendar
• the world is going to mobile and so should you
• consider Pinterest if you have a lot of women volunteers and donors
• communicate brand promises
• photo albums have 31% higher click through

These tips will help you with you organization's social media campaign.

This seminar on content was very compelling and, reminded us, once again, that  traditional communication have either died or is dying.  Brands trying to “one way communicate” with their audience and trying to keep control of their message will not succeed.  Welcome to the world of social media.
Great content and conversational marketing work in this world, so if you cannot have a grass roots conversation, then forget about using social media.  People (your fans) want to know the people behind the brand.

If you want people to make purchases, give donations, grow your subscriber base,  you have to engage them by being approachable, human and have terrific content.  This means having stories to tell about your brand.

So how do we do this?  Seeing that conventional marketing is dying, marketers are rapidly migrating to online initiatives without thinking it out.  What is the tone of the conversation? How do you use the tools? What defines success?

No matter what, it is all about connection.  Whether you are speaking to the government, planning events, asking for donations or raising funds, you need to know how to reach out to people…and that is creating excellent content.

Content is tied up with the brand and this is a manifestation of the story you tell.  Yes, you have to have great products or great causes but to get attention there has to be a good story and content tells that story.

Where to find the content?  Some organizations have lots, some have little, but all have some.  Identify employees or early adopters in your organization who might be interested.  Put our a general request and crowd source, asking for those who would like to blog, Twitter or post on your nonprofit Facebook page.

Do not impose from the C Suite as you want people to cooperate.  If you show not tell, you will be more successful finding the people who can help you create content.

Most importantly emphasis people over the process, your relationship is more important with the people to ensure good content or your will be doing this on yourown.  If you can, work with outside suppliers such as Hubspot, Workpress or Drupal who can develop and manage content for you.

Mark provided some tips for those who are already communicating in the social media world…there is an inconvenient truth that you overestimate the connection you have with your audience.  Based on his experience, nonprofits assume they have a strong connection with their audience, and that their audience consumes anything  you create.  Just as an example of scale, there are over 450,000million blogs in the English world…..more reason to have compelling content.

In summary, just dip your toes and get started,  make content that appeals to a broader range of people, keep it fresh, be slightly controversial (take a position or say something advocacy based) and finally do not over think it.

“A story won’t save the world, but we cannot change the world if we don’t change our stories.”

People choose to give to organizations from various reasons, among them, the desire to be part of a success story. Their decision-making process to give consists of a rational and an emotional component. Stories appeal to people’s emotions and thus have enough power to drive them to action.

Rather than providing your audience with facts and figures about your organization (which often will be quickly forgotten), tell them a story. Stories are memorable because they show, rather than just tell: stories give meaning and bring value to your cause. People can see themselves in stories or relate them to other personal experiences and stories of their own. Furthermore, a story puts your audience in a relaxed mood: people like being entertained a lot more than they like being recited information to or asked for money. A story can spread: people will tell and re-tell it, each time adding new flavour to it and thus they can last for years and keep inspiring people.

What kind of stories can organizations share? There are explaining and donor-centric stories. An explaining story brings facts to life and shows the human impact of what your organization does. Donor-centric stories, however, are the kind of stories that will compel people to act. These stories turn donors into heroes and show them the impact that even one person can have.

Successful stories tend to incorporate one protagonist or hero to which the audience can relate. These stories also involve an obstacle that may or may not be overcome, but in the process the protagonist undergoes a meaningful transformation. This last part is an important element that your stories should focus on: show your audience their future state, where will they be at the end of the process.

Planning which stories to share with your audience is an important step. Find out what stories resonate with your intended audience, what stories are more engaging for them. Equally important is keeping your stories alive. This involves acknowledging that not every story will be relevant to your audience, but you can encourage them to share the story with someone who might identify with it.

This seminar uncovered a greatly kept secret: that grant programs are available through most online channels, except Twitter, simply by applying.

One of the best known search engines on the planet is Google yet did you know that you can receive a grant to advertise using their highly targeted advertising program?  The Google Grants Program empowers nonprofits, like never before, as it allows recipients to access one of the most powerful advertising tactics available, Google AdWords.

Submit your application and there is a chance your nonprofit would receive up to $10,000 per month in AdWord credits that would go towards a Pay per Click (PPC) campaign on Google.  It is as simple as going to Google, filling out a form.  It takes about 48 hours to be approved…or not.

YouTube, now owned by Google, also offers a grant program and it operates just like Google.  The visual application of this medium is its strength therefore very effective for charities and for fundraising.  Combine other social channels by embedding Facebook and Twitter into the feed, making the combination a very holistically approach to marketing online.

Facebook is not to be forgotten as it too has a grant program, however, it works significantly differently and not available if a nonprofit has little or no budget to apply to this advertising.  Facebook asks for $10,000 cash and they will match with a $10,000 credit for a total ad spend of $20,000.

Once approved through any of the grant applications, the nonprofit can effectively use to promote and geotarget fundraising activities, regionally, nationally or globally.  Great way to drive awareness, engagement and ultimately donations.

Not only did the seminar cover the grant options, Leslie took the participants through how to create the ads, maintain the campaigns and leverage the campaign results.

In summary, Leslie said, people are ready to donate online, you just need to find them.