Fun and Visual Ways to Say Thanks to Donors

Full Transcript:

Steven Shattuck: My clock just struck 1:00. Do you want to go ahead

and get started, Kivi?

Kivi Miller: Sure. Let's do it.

Steven Shattuck: Cool. Well, good afternoon, for those of you on the

East Coast, and good morning if you're on the West Coast or

somewhere in between. Thanks for joining us for today's

webinar "Thank-You Videos and Other Visual Ways to Show

Your Donors Love." My name is Steven Shattuck. I'm the V.P.

of marketing here at Bloomerang, and I will be moderating

today's little discussion.

Today I'm very happy to have Kivi Leroux Miller joining us today.

She's actually here live at Bloomerang headquarters. It's

something that hasn't happened before, but we're really

happy to have you here, Kivi. So thanks for hanging out

with us for about an hour or so.

Kivi Miller: It's my pleasure.

Steven Shattuck: So for those of you who don't know Kivi, which I

doubt that is true for anyone, but just in case, she is

President of NonprofitMarketingGuide.com, which is a top-

ranked blog on nonprofit communications. If you haven't

read that blog, if you don't have it bookmarked, actually,

you should make it your homepage. It's that good. You've

got to check out her website.

She is the author of a couple books. One is "The Nonprofit Marketing

Guide." There is "Content Marketing for Nonprofits," both

of which we'll link to at the end of the presentation.

Also, very excellent books. She's a great writer. She's a

certified executive coach. She trains coaches and consults

with small nonprofits and large nonprofits who have a small

communications department. She helps out with marketing,

communications and fundraising. She's no stranger to

webinars.

She's an excellent speaker, and all of you are in for quite a treat

today. I peeked at a little bit of the content. It's going

to be really, really great.

So Kivi, thanks again for being here. This should be a lot of fun.

Kivi Miller: Yeah. Looking forward to it.

Steven Shattuck: So what's going to happen is I'm going to hand

things off to Kivi really quickly here, and then we're

going to jump into a Q&A session at the end. So as you're

listening, feel free to chat questions our way. We'll see

those. Both of us will see those. We may even take some as

we go along. So do not be shy if there's something you want

to ask her or have clarified, and will save some questions

for the end as well.

In case you have to leave early or get disconnected for some reason,

I will be sending out a recording of the presentation a

little later this afternoon, so you'll be able to relive

all of the content again and even show it to some of your

staff members if you'd like to.

So I'm not going to take up any more time. Kivi, why don't you take

it away?

Kivi Miller: All right. I'm actually hearing a little bit of an echo,

Steve. I don't know if you have me on speaker anywhere, but

now I'm not hearing it. So I think we're good. Okay.

Steven Shattuck: Okay.

Kivi Miller: So . . .

Steven Shattuck: I think were good.

Kivi Miller: . . . the first thing I want to do is ask all of you a

question, which is, what is your No. 1 question for me

today about thank-you videos or graphics? What brought you

to this webinar? What do you want to know? I've certainly

got a lot of stuff I want to tell you, but I want to make

sure that it's really customized to answer your questions.

So let's just take a minute for you to fire in some

questions to me. Don't worry about typos. Nobody's going to

judge you for your typos. Just go ahead and send it in.

So we have some questions about platform. You should all be able to

see the questions, I believe. "What's the best links?" "Can

we use a cell phone to film them?" "Interested in doing

other kinds of thank-yous." "What are some of the different

tools for infographics, video being complicated?" I don't

blame you, Mark. "How can we turn this around?" "Who should

be featured?" Okay. So good questions coming in.

I want to tell you right off the top that I'm not going to spend a

lot of time talking about the types of technology that you

used to do this. I'm really focused on the content of the

graphics in the videos. So for example, and so talking

about how a video was filmed or edited, what we're going to

do is usually analyze the script, the video, because just

like in Hollywood, if you want to get your project

approved, you have to start with a good script. It's the

same thing for you. If you want your video to work for you,

it has to have a good script.

So we're going to really focus of the content of your graphics and

your videos, and not so much on the technology, but I am

going to answer some of the questions by pointing you to

other resources.

So before we get into the real specifics, I need you all to remember

that graphics or videos are just another communications

channel. It's just one other way for you to get your

message out. So you really have to keep your Basic

Marketing 101 questions in mind.

At first question you want always ask yourself is "Who am I

communicating to?" So in this case, the question is "Who

are we thanking? Are we thanking individuals? Are we

thanking our community? Are we just thanking the universe?

Who are we thanking?" and then, "What are we really

thanking them for? What's that all about?"

On the "Who" side, here's an example for sort of a video "Thank you"

campaign that Charity: Water ran a couple years ago.

Charity: Water does really good online marketing, and they

love to do video, and they did a series of videos thanking

different donors.

So you can see from the screen capture that some of these are

organizations, Silverpop for example. Some of them are

individuals, Jody and Jimmy and Brian and Michelle. Some of

them are larger members of their community, thank-you

bloggers, and they did all of these videos thanking all of

these different people. So you can have multiple goals and

multiple people you're thanking, but you want to think

about it. You want to know if you're doing this for a

particular human being, versus a broader community.

Here's an example of how one organization, The Trust for Public Land,

thanked individuals, but did it in a very public way. So

this is what we call "social proof." I see Alyssa made this

contribution to T.P.L. and so I see that on Facebook and I

think, "Oh. That's neat. Somebody's donating, and look,

they made her this cute little thank-you graphic from an

animal."

They didn't do this for every single donor, but they didn't need to.

The fact that they did it for some donors was all they

really needed to do. It's cute. It's fun. What it conveys

is that Trusts for Public Land cares about its donors,

makes a direct connection between the donors and the good

work that they're doing. "Join Alyssa in helping to save

the Greater Yellowstone area. $38 saves a quarter acre,"

and they run a number of campaigns like this to raise money

to save different areas of land.

Next, after who you want to talk to, you have to think about "What's

the message to them?" So the basic message here is "Thank

you." That's what we're talking about is thank-you videos

and graphics. However, there may be sort of more

sophisticated elements to that message. "Thank you for

doing a certain thing," "Thank you for sharing a certain

value by being a donor or supporter," so you want to think

that through. You know, what's the real message besides

just the core thank-you message?

Then the third question is "Where is that message going to be

shared?" and in this case, we're talking about a visual

format, but we don't just want to leave the visuals on

YouTube, for example. The worst thing you can do is make a

video and just leave it on YouTube. You want to make sure

that you're embedding that video in other places, your

sharing that video and you're really making sure that

you're driving some of that traffic to YouTube yourself.

And so marketing questions, it doesn't what you're doing, you always

want to answer these questions in your head: "Who am I

talking to? What's my message to them?" and then, "What's

the right communications channel to get that message to

them?" and video and visuals are no different; you need to

keep going through those questions.

So let's go ahead and jump right into video. What I'm going to do is

share with you four different kinds of thank-you videos

that nonprofits are doing today, and I'll tell you a little

bit about the video, just in case those of you haven't seen

the links yet. We did send you some links for the videos on

YouTube that you can watch. If you haven't watched them

yet, it's okay, because really going to focus on the

scripts anyway.

The scripts were one of the handouts that Steven sent you as well. So

if you've already printed that out, great, you can follow

along. If you haven't, don't worry about it. I'm going to

show it on screen and you can look at it later.

So for video, there are some good resources out there for you.

YouTube actually has a really strong program for

nonprofits, and they have lots of tools for you; they have

lots of help menus and educational videos that you can

watch on how to make a good video. So that's a good place

to start for those of you who are little confused about how

to actually do this.

See3 is a consulting company that does a lot of work with video. They

partner with YouTube on the Nonprofit Video Awards, and

they also have a nice guide to nonprofit video, and they

call it their "Guide for Creators," and if you go to

See3.com/intofocus, you'll get the information there. So

again, another great resource for those of you looking to

do this well.

There are lots of tools out there to create video. If you just Google

"How to create an online video," you'll find them. Animoto

is one that I like and a lot of nonprofits use that allows

you to take both still photographs and live video and to

combine them into just a -- you know, the panning and the

zooming in and all of that on still photos and add a

soundtrack to it, and your text to it. It's a nice, easy

user interface to put these things together.

Okay. So I think those are all the resources I want to share with

you. Let's go ahead and get into some of the videos, and

I've actually put together a number of different playlists

on YouTube. So in addition to the ones I'm going to talk

about specifically today, there are lots of other thank-you

videos. I've grouped them by year, just to keep the size

manageable. So there's a 2013 nonprofit thank-you videos

playlist. So you can go to YouTube.com/KiviLM to get to my

playlist.

And I encourage you to just sit there and watch a bunch of these

videos and take some notes to yourself about the ones you

liked, what you liked about them, the things you didn't

like. I don't particularly like all of the videos in the

playlist, but I wanted to have a good example, a range of

examples for you, see you can decide whether you like them

or not. The ones I share with you today, I actually do

like. So you're going to hear about my favorites today.

Okay. So let's go ahead and look at our first type of video, type of

thank-you video. I'm calling this "The 'Thank you for'

model," okay, and the first time I saw this done really

well was with The Nature Conservancy in 2011. They did a

video called "Our Scientists Say 'Thanks,'" and I have the

script and the script handout for you. I'm not going to

actually look at that one today. I'm going to look at one

that was modeled off of it, but they basically just say

things like "Thank you for helping us to protect is the

Gulf of Mexico," "Thank you for supporting our work in

Utah's Canyonlands," "Thank you for helping us to protect

rivers and streams in Texas."

On each frame, there's a different scientists who works at T.N.C.

saying those things, and so what that allows you to do is

see this great diversity of places that the Nature

Conservancy helped save. You get to see this great

diversity among their scientists. You get to hear their

accents from all over the world, see the different ways

that they're dressed. You know, sometimes you hear birds in

the background. Some of them look like geeky scientists.

So it's a nice, fun, very authentic, real video, and I've shown it in

a number of different conferences I've gone to over the

years, and one organization that saw me present that video

decided to basically copy the model, which is what I'm

encouraging all of you to do today is to copy these models.

That's why we're talking about them.

So the Bray, the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts, copied this

model, and I put some screen captures here for you on the

screen, just so those of you who saw it can remember which

one it is. The Bray is sort of a residency program for

ceramic artists, and so it's a combination of the artists

and the staff at the Bray who are saying "Thank you" for

these different elements.

What I'm going to do now is switch over to the PDF of the scripts. So

hopefully that is coming up on your screen here. Like I

said, Steven sent you this, so you should have it. This

first one is the Nature Conservancy one that we're going to

skip over, and I'm going to show you the script for the

Bray, okay?

So couple things I want to point out here. This is two and a half

minutes. That's on the long side, I would say. Generally

you want these videos to be one to two. If you're pushing

it to three, you start to lose people, so you want to be

really careful about that.

As I said, you have different staff members, resident artists who are

speaking each of the flowing lines . . . Sorry about my

sort of squiggly lines there, but you can see it follows

this same sort of pattern: "Thank you for giving me space

to work," "Thankful for the opportunity to be here," "Thank

you for your support enabling this and that." Then they've

got the office dog.

It's always cute to have one or two of the people be a little funny,

like a dog with the sign. The Nature Conservancy one has a

scuba diver underwater, holding up a thank-you sign for

saving a coral reef, I think. So it's fun to have something

a little unexpected.

In this one, again, they make it personal: "I met my snow angel at

the Bray. Thank you," and then they're holding hands and

they fall down and make snow angels. So again, it's kind of

light and cute and fun, and that's what you want these

videos to be. They should not be really heavy-duty

tearjerkers. These should be nice, light, fun videos. Okay?

And then you have the Executive Director doing a wrap-up.

The E.D. opened the video and closed the video.

So what you think of this model? Is it something that you might be

able to pull off? Again, we're starting with an opening by

the Executive Director, followed by maybe 10 to 12 people

saying one thank-you line, "Thank you for" either helping,

supporting, protecting those [inaudible 00:15:24] . . .

duplication of the verb there, and then after that, each

person is saying something individual. Okay?

Any sort of questions or thoughts on this one? I like to take

questions as we go along. I think it's more interesting for

both you and me that way.

Steven Shattuck: We had one from Terry that's pretty interesting,

Kivi. Terry says, "I have concerns about an owner's

confidentiality. What's your experience with that?" It

seems like you probably want to get their permission to be

on video.

Kivi Miller: If you include them in the video then yes. Are you asking

more about the infographics for the person's name was used?

I'm assuming that's probably where the question was . . .

Steven Shattuck: Yeah.

Kivi Miller: . . . really coming from?

Steven Shattuck: Yeah. Terry says "Yes."

Kivi Miller: You know, I have two minds about that. So on one level I

think, "Yeah. It would be best to get their permission."

However, if it's a $25 donor and you're having a baby

caribou say "Thank you" on Facebook, I don't think that's

really going to really make anybody mad at you. It's not

like you're making a huge fuss out of it. I think it's fun

and light. I think you probably have a little more leeway,

and I think people will be sort of pleasantly surprise and

excited about that kind of thing, and if they're not, you

can always take it down.

So you know, it's like the Charity: Water videos, when people made a

video to say "Thank you" to the individuals. I doubt that

they call those individuals up and said, "Hey, is it okay

if we make a thank-you video?" They just did it and posted

it, and I think that's probably okay, but you know, if

you're a little more risk-averse than I am, then get

permission.

Okay. Let's see. Kathryn, I saw your comment about the tearjerker,

and I absolutely believe that . . . I'm not against

tearjerker videos. Let me put it that way, but for thank-

you videos and in particular, I think it's nice for it to

be a little more on the upbeat side, and you know, upbeat

things can make people weepy too. So that's fine. But the

more sort of traditional tearjerker can definitely work

well for other purposes in your communications and

fundraising strategy.

Okay. Let's go ahead and move on to our next model. So now I need to

go back to my slides. And our next model is the "Because of

you, I am able to do this thing," so first-person

accomplishment. This is going to work for those of you that

do direct service work, where the people you help, you see

every day, and it's very clear who that clientele is, you

know, very sort of on-the-ground, grassroots direct

service. This is not going to work as well for those of you

that don't do that. I think you can still make it work, but

you've got to be a little more creative.

So the example that I'm showing you here is one of the The Arc's.

Forgetting which one it is right at this moment. Let me

find my list. Okay. This is The Arc of the U.S., so it's

the national one, as opposed to one of the state or local

ones. So what they did in this video is -- there's no voice-

over. It's music, and instead what you see our individual

clients of The Arc holding up the little whiteboards with

their first-person messages. I think almost all of them are

first-person.

So again, what I'm going to do . . . Now flip back over to the

scripts. Here we go. Okay. So in this one, you can see how

short this is. Look how much text this really is. So again,

when I'm talking about doing the script, this is your job;

this is what you're trying to figure out. Okay? So the

person who did this didn't just willy-nilly tell people to

write things on a whiteboard and throw it all together.

Some thought went into, again, what that message is and

making sure that the message is consistent. It says

something you want people to remember.

Not everybody wrote the exact same thing on the whiteboard. You know,

the order that the messages were in was orchestrated in

terms of how the thing was edited together. So you've got

to put some thought into this. Okay?

Now, on the screen it says, "We want to offer you our thanks," in

just regular text, and then we have a bunch of the clients

holding up the whiteboards, and again, this is really kind

of poetic when you read it. "Because of you, I live in my

own apartment." "I've been happily married for six years."

"I can work." "Because of you, I educate my community about

disability." "I work to end bullying." "I get to do what I

love." "I'm a better speaker." "I found a job." "I serve my

community." "I have a job I love." "I'm a powerful

advocate." "Thank you."

This is really powerful, and it is almost a tearjerker, and for some

members of this community, it probably was a big

tearjerker, and it's so simple and so easy to do. So again,

sometimes the production values of getting people's voices

is a challenge, and don't do it; do signage like this

instead. Have them hold up something.

For example, if you have locations all of the country, and you are

not confident in the ability of all your different field

staff to get high quality audio on their phones, and you're

afraid it's going to be a nightmare and really

inconsistent, don't worry about it; do something like this

where you then put a soundtrack over it and you don't have

to worry about any of that audio quality.

So what do you think about this one? Let's hear some -- get some

feedback about this. Any questions about this? How might

some of you see yourself following this model from The Arc?

Share some examples of maybe who could hold up your signs,

what they might put on those signs. Again, this one was

only a minute long, so for all of these, I'm saying a

minute to two minutes. It's really your sweet spot.

[Inaudible 00:22:12] Lisa. You're looking forward to using it. That's

great, "simple and sweet." I'm trying to read these before

they disappear off the screen. A number of you are saying

that it's effective, emotionally powerful. I really love

this one too, and I thought it was very powerful for the

organization, in terms of what they do in his messaging,

and I also just love that because its production values

were so easy to copy, and that's really sort of my

criteria, because I'm always looking for things that I can

share in trainings like this one. So whenever I see

something, it's like, "Ah. People could do that. People

could copy it." Then I really love it too.

A number of you are [inaudible 00:22:52] . . . need to make sure that

you get the right music, and I would encourage you to pick

things, again, that are little more upbeat. When you listen

to the different videos that are in those playlists I

created for you, you'll see that some of them have that

kind of slow sort of sappy music, and I don't know, I just

don't feel like it has the same energy that some of the

others that have music, but it's a little more upbeat, have

to them. So music is really important and the only thing

that people hear, and I would really experiment with that.

For those of you that are like, "Where do I get music?" if you just

Google "royalty-free music," you can get a bunch of sites

that have music for cheap or free. It's really not that

expensive to get decent music. You may have to sit there

and listen to 50 or 60 clips until you find the one you

want, but you can do it pretty quickly and easily.

Laney is emphasizing, yes, you do not want to violate people's

copyrights. So that's why I'm saying you want to Google

"royalty-free music." That means that you're allowed to use

it. The person you getting it from usually has cut that

deal, and so you're sort of pain the go-between when you go

to those world music websites. I think that's the easiest

way to do it. I'm all about easy.

Okay. Let's go back to the deck and look at our next one. It's not

bringing me back to where I was. I'm having to scroll to

find where I was. Okay.

So the next model we're going to look at is multiple readers, okay,

so multiple voices, multiple people on screen, with key

phrase repetition. This goes back to the idea of you

knowing what you want to say. What is your message, again?

Remember, you're focusing on your three key marketing

messages at all times: "Who am I doing this for? What's my

message to them?" and then "How am I delivering that

message?"

So with this one, you really need to think about what that repetition

is, okay, and I've got a couple examples for you in the

strips. There's one of Girls Inc., right here in

Indianapolis. I actually didn't realize that until just

now. And they have a bunch of young girls who they serve

standing up and repeating a number of phrases.

So I won't read the whole thing for you, but just to give you a sense

of what I'm talking about, one girl says, "Thanks for your

support." Another says, "Thousands of Greater Indianapolis

girls like me," and then another "like me," and another

"like me are participating in Girls Inc. programs and

learning what we are capable of. We are capable of . . . "

Okay? So what happens is they've basically written one

paragraph.

They had, I don't know, I think there may be 15 different girls in

the video, reading that entire paragraph, and then they've

edited it together. So the 15 girls are saying the one

paragraph, but there are key phrases that we hear multiple

times out of multiple girls' mouths, so "Thanks to you,"

"Thanks to you," "Thanks to you," is repeated by -- I'd

say, over half of the girls are uttering that phrase.

And there's also some repetition later in the video. The word

"smart," "strong and bold," "bold," "bold," "bold," are

repeated as well, and that's on purpose. That's going back

to the core mission of Girls Inc., which is to really make

girls feel like they are smart, bold, in the world and can

be leaders and decision-makers. So again, you need to think

about that, what is going to be a key phrase repetition?

The other one I want to talk about is another Nature Conservancy

video. Nature Conservancy used "The scientists say

'thanks'" video for, I think, two or three years in a row.

These typically come out around Thanksgiving, and they use

that one at least twice in, I think, maybe three years, and

then they decided to do a new one. Okay?

So this was a more recent one. This is a 2012 version, and they sort

of did this model where we have some repetition of the

concepts. So again, let's flip back over to our script.

Here is the Girls Inc. one I was talking about. Then we get

to the Nature Conservancy. So at the beginning, again, we

have maybe 10 or 12 people speaking, and they're talking

about the weather, so "Hot," "Chile," "Rainy," "Hot and

dry," "Wet." [Inaudible 00:27:49].

No matter where you are, no matter what your weather is, this is

where we start to get into the core messaging, "The Nature

Conservancy is protecting some of the most beautiful

places." Okay? And it's this "places" word that they've

chosen as their keyword that they're going to repeat:

"Amazing places," "Cool places," "Drop-dead gorgeous

places," "Pristine," da da da da da da da, "Places that

ensure we have fresh water to drink," "Places that breathe

clean air," "Places to provide a home for wildlife,"

"Places we can protect," "Places we will protect thanks to

people like you." Okay?

So we have that repetition of the weather all around the world, which

is a subtle nod to climate change, I think. They don't

really come out and talk directly about climate change, but

that's certainly a big issue of concern for them, and then

they repeat this idea of all the places, and then you can

see, they close with the words "Thank you," in I think six

or seven different languages. So again, it's that key

message repetition among a number of different voices.

So what you think about this one? What do you think about Model No.

3? How could you make this one work for you? I see a bunch

of you typing. Avis says, "What about doing an ask at the

end?" You know, I kind of prefer these to be more of the

soft ask if you're going to do an ask. You know, there's a

lot of debate in our community, development community,

about where you ask in a thank-you, and sometimes it works

and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it's appropriate.

Sometimes it's not.

So I don't think there's any super-hard-and-fast rule. I kind of come

down on asking less in thank-yous than asking more, but

that's just sort of my personal preference. So you know, I

think you can definitely have the donate U.R.L. at the end

of the video, but I wouldn't necessarily have someone come

on screen and say, "Give now." I think that's a different

video.

Reading some of the comments here. Emily says, "I worry that this is

overused and may seem generic unless it's executed well."

You know, I hear your concern, Emily, but at same time,

what I would say is that is, following this kind of stuff

as we are as professionals, I think lots of times, we are

in marketing and fundraising -- we are really in tune to

what other people are doing, and so we get concerned about

things getting trite more quickly than they actually do,

sometimes.

So that's not something that you've tried with your community before,

and it's not something that's old trend, trendy. You know,

some of the Internet memes you definitely have to do it on

time, otherwise you do kind of look like a fool, but for

this kind of thing, I think most of these are going to be

pretty long-lived. I think these formats, you could give

them a try.

Okay. Let's go ahead and look at our last version, and let me just

slip back one more time, for those of you that didn't see

the videos, so you have a little bit of a clue about what

we're talking about today. Okay.

So this one is the last one and, in some ways, the easiest really.

It's your physically spelling out the words "Thank You,"

and again, I have another example for you from the Bray.

The Bray is a really small organization. They have Rachel,

their Communications Director, was also their Program

Director until recently, and so they have a separate

development team, so she had help their, but she's got a

lot of other stuff going on. It's not like she's making

videos full-time or anything.

So they were thinking, "Okay. What else could we do? Well, we make

things here at the Bray, so let's actually make the word

'Thank you,'" and so the video shows the different artists

creating the letters and putting the letters together, and

at the end, they take them out of the kiln and they're all

kind of standing there holding it, and then we hear them

actually say "Thank you" out loud, the construction of the

letters have music over it, and again, it's sort of sped up

video, so it's got this kind of fast-paced music, as well.

And let's see. Let me flip back over one more time. And here you go.

So On the Bray, you know, there is this spoken inference

about "Thank you for your support. We couldn't do this

without you. We wanted to say 'Thanks' the best way we know

how," and again, because they are ceramics [inaudible

00:32:58]. Then we see this time-lapse video with them

building the word "Thank You." Okay?

So what's a way that you could physically form the letters of "Thank

You?" Who could be in that video? What could your letter be

made out of? Anybody have any creative ideas for how they

could put this one to work for them?

Diane says, "Student dancers." Yeah. I like that. That's great.

Anytime you have kids, you have plenty to work with. They

can use their bodies. They can make art. So there's all

kinds of fun stuff that you can capitalize on with creative

young minds.

"You can make them out of school supplies," says Leslie.

Daniel, "Having that organization that deals with kids and

addiction."

So sometimes there are a lot of you who can use your clients in

videos like Mark did, and there's others of you who cannot,

for a variety of reasons, and I just think it means you

have to be a little more creative about it, and maybe you

don't make the thank-yous with people. Maybe you find the

metaphor for the hope or the security that you're giving

your clients and you come up with form letters in some

other way. I just think you have to have some fun with it.

Okay. I'm going to flip back over to the slide. We're done with the

flipping back and forth. We're just going to stay in the

presentation now. Let me find where we were. Okay.

So quick summary, in your handouts you have a longer "do's and

don'ts" for both video and infographics, but here are just

a few points in the video. You want to think about what

we're seeing and what we're hearing. The audio on video is,

in some ways, more important than what we see. Okay? People

are more forgiving of a visual that is out of focus than

they are forgiving of really bad audio quality on a video.

So you want to think about that. I'm not saying you can

shoot a bunch of blurred videos and put those online all

the time, but you want to pay attention to the audio. That

audio is more annoying than bad visuals.

Again, if you, for whatever reason, are just going to have too much

trouble getting the audio quality right, then strip it off

and just throw on some music, or have somebody record a

voiceover in a really quiet room, and put that on, instead

of using the audio that's native within the video that you

took.

You want to keep it to one minute, I think, two tops, and like I

said, I believe for thank-you videos in particular, that's

what we're talking about today, the upbeat music and pace

is really a must. I think the slower stuff just does not

produce the same kind of happy energy that you want to

create for your donors about the good work that they've

made possible.

There are other kinds of videos were, I think, that slower, sadder

pace . . . You know, the classic is those videos with

A.S.P.C.A., with the sad dogs and the sad Sarah McLachlan

music. Those videos rake in a ton of money for A.S.P.C.A.,

and they are just sad and mopey and they work. Okay? But

that's not what I'm talking about today. I'm not talking

about a video that's raising money. I'm talking about a

video that's saying "Thank you for giving the money," and

the A.S.P.C.A. thank-you videos are happy wagging tails and

have big kitties and puppies. Okay? They're much more

upbeat.

It's fine to combine still photography and live videos. So if you

don't have live, don't worry about it. Like I said, you can

use something like Animoto to put together something that

looks great, based off of photography.

And also think about using multiple voices. Sometimes it's nice to

have the opening and the closing be the same person, like

we've seen some of the Executive Directors, but having

different voices keeps people interested. It keeps them

more engaged than listening to someone drone on, like I am

on this webinar for an hour. No one wants to listen to

that.

Okay. Any questions about video? We're going to move on to

infographics, but before I leave that, leave video, I just

want to see if we have any final questions about video. I'm

going to take a sip of tea here, so type for a minute.

Roxanne has shared a resource for digital music. Please, if you've

got favorite websites, favorite sources of -- there is such

a thing as stock video and music -- feel free to share

those in the chat with each other.

Lynn says, "How do we let people know about the video?" So this goes

back to, you want to think about who you're trying to reach

and why you're trying to reach them. Sometimes you want to

make sure that the people who went to this certain

fundraiser or responded to a certain campaign [hear] about

it, or hear about your video, see your video. So in that

case, it would be more of a targeted send, usually via

email and social media.

You can certainly tell people via print about your video and give

them a link to it, but typically a place where people can

click direct to the videos is going to be the better way to

go. So you're going to want to think about who should get

it via email, and sharing it in your social media channels.

When you send it via email, what I recommend you do is take a screen

capture of the video, including the little player buttons,

and actually embed that graphic into your email, just like

you would embed any other picture, and people will click on

the graphic and then that will either take them to your

website or take them directly to YouTube, depending on what

you pick, what you make as the link on that video screen

capture, and they'll actually go watch it there.

Okay. Let's go ahead and move on to infographics. So I have created a

board at Pinterest. There are a ton of examples on that

board right now, in part because I just sort of slacked

off. So I need to go be actively on the hunt, and if you

find good examples that you think should be in this

collection, please, by all means, let me know, and we'll

add them, but we do have a Pinterest board and encourage

you to check that out.

Here are some examples that I thought were particularly cute. So this

is a paper thank-you card that is being sent out to

different donors, and then what they also did is uploaded

that thank-you card as a graphic to say "Thank you" to

everybody who gave. So everyone in the organization signed

it, and it's just a cute picture of a dog with a thank-you

note. How can you go wrong there, right?

So if you got cute people or cute animals to take pictures of, then

you definitely have a little easier job than some of your

colleagues who do not have cute kittens and puppies and

kids. So stop complaining if you do, because your job is a

little easier, but there are other ways to do this too.

So again, we talked about the Trust for Public Land, and here's a

picture that doesn't even have the moose in it, and that

person donated $38. "Now a quarter acre of the Hoback is

safe." So if you have anything you can take pictures of,

even if it's not living and breathing, just the

environment, that's fine too. You know, here we have

another version of that, the baby moose thanking Hillary.

It's cute.

Again, I don't think Matt or Hillary probably were upset about this.

They probably thought it was really fun and enjoyed it and

wanted to share it with their friends. That's typically the

reaction that people have to this kind of stuff.

Here is more of a sort of generic thank-you to all of our donors.

Where the previous examples were a little more specific,

this is more of an infographics, "Seven amazing things

donors have made possible," and then we've got the little

factoids. Of course, we've got the cute kid with her

fingers in the heart shape. That's a nice touch too, but

it's really trying to express to donors the good work that

they make possible in this infographic form.

Here's another approach to this. This is actually an interactive mini

website that the Humane Society of the United States did.

So the screen capture that I have here, they've used that

graphic itself independently, "You've taken a stand for

millions of suffering animals. To them, and to us, you're

hero. Thank you."

So this, in and of itself, has been shared in lots of different ways,

but if you actually were to click over to the site, you

would be able to hover over -- they have a larger version

of their logo, this thing, down below the graphic, and as

you hover over each of the animals, an extra box pops up

with more videos and more factoids about what donors have

made possible to help animals. So you can get pretty

interactive with these things. It's a lot of fun. It's just

really up to your imagination.

So a few quick pointers on the infographics. Gratitude at a glance is

your goal. People are looking at these graphics very

quickly. For the most part, these are social media. They

can also be embedded into your website and into email, just

like we talked about with the video, but these are nice to

be shared and to encourage people to share them. So that

means people are looking at them very quickly. So we want

that thank-you to the donors to really pop. We don't want

people to actually have to read too much.

I would build the graphics thank-yous into your campaign plan from

the start. So think about what you're fundraising for.

Think about ways you can share your gratitude as you're

fundraising. So the Trust for Public Land examples with the

animals thanking the $38 donors is a great example of that.

Those things were posted as the campaign was happening.

It wasn't just at the very end, and again, that's what we call

"social proof," "Oh. Other people are doing it. I guess

it's okay for me to do it, too." You want to encourage that

kind of behavior. It's the same concept to between those

thermometers that a lot of people use for fundraising

goals. "Oh. Other people got the thermometer up 75%. I

guess I can give too." That's another version of social

proof.

So build these things into your campaign from the start.

If you're going to do a full infographics, and we have more

[inaudible 00:44:49] boards on bigger infographics, you

want to make sure that you give the eye a path to follow.

So for example, on this little when I showed you, it's very

linear, "Oh. It's seven things, and I can read straight

down the [inaudible 00:45:05]."

Lots of times when we get infographics, there are numbers everywhere

and it's just the sort of hot mess, and it's hard to know

what you're supposed to look at. So you want to be careful

and try to avoid that and really make sure that people can

see it, you know, really see the message. If you crowd it

up, they're not going to be able to see it. Okay?

Again, those are just a couple of quick pointers. You have handouts

that have a more complete sort of "do's and don'ts" list,

so check those out as well, and at this point, I'm happy to

take any additional questions that you have. We're at the

end of the formal presentation, so let's hear your

questions and your suggestions on how you would put some of

this to work.

Steven Shattuck: Yeah. Cool. That was great, Kivi, and thanks

everyone who was asking questions as we went along. It was

fun to have this kind of interactive. So that was great. So

yeah, we do have about probably 10, 10 or 12 minutes, for

questions. A few maybe were sitting on your hands or didn't

get to ask is we were going along. Please do. Ask away.

We've got Kivi her. She's an expert. She's at your disposal

for the next 12 minutes or so, and David, I will be sending

out the handouts that she referenced, a little later on

[inaudible 00:46:19] listening, I'll get all those

materials.

Okay. We've got one from Judy here, Kivi. It says, "Is it important

to put the amount that someone has given as part of that

social proof concept?" Would you include the dollar amount

also?

Kivi Miller: You know, I think it depends. On smaller-dollar social

campaigns, I would, where you're really trying to do sort

of the crowd funding effect. The dollar amount is a signal

to other people about what you consider an appropriate gift

size, and so, especially in social fundraising, your

typically dealing with smaller dollar amounts, and you want

to sort of let people know what that right ballpark is.

Now, when you start to get into higher-dollar donations and you start

to do more individual video creations, like some of the

"charity how-to" -- sorry -- Charity: Water videos, some of

those include the dollar amounts; some don't So for

example, some of the ones that were thanks to corporations

where it was sort of a full staff effort, the whole

organization donated a certain amount, that is common to

include the dollar amount in those cases.

When you're thanking an individual donor who maybe gave $500, you

know, I would probably lean against the dollar amount at

that point. So again, I think it's a judgment call, knowing

sort of what the culture is with your donors about that

sort of thing, but the smaller, more sort of the crowd

funding, social fundraising, I would probably lean towards

using the dollar amount.

Steven Shattuck: What do you think about super-short form videos like

Instagram and Vine? Aaron was wondering about those.

Kivi Miller: I think those are great. I encourage you to experiment and

play around with this. Don't wait until you've got it all

figured out, because by the time you've got that all

figured out, people are going to be on to something else.

So we are living in a very fast media environment now, and

you really can't afford to just sit on your hands and wait

until you have everything perfect and figure it out. So

play around with it.

I know an organization that thanks major donors with custom videos.

It happens to be an organization that helps kids do

different afterschool camps and summer camps, so they had

the benefit of having great kids who can goof around in the

videos, but they do custom videos for their major donors,

where the kids actually get on video and say "Thank you Mr.

and Mrs. Smith for making it possible for me to come to

camp this summer." You know? And it's adorable, and you can

bet those donors are watching those things over and over

and loving it. So I think you just have to be creative and

be willing to play around with it and see what works.

Steven Shattuck: What about cost, Kivi? Some of the examples that you

showed from Girls Inc. and from Arc, how much do you think

those videos actually cost, and what kind of budget should

people put aside for things like these?

Kivi Miller: You know, it's so hard to say, because it depends on what

market you're in, honestly. Those of you that live in

bigger cities are going to end up paying more, but you also

probably have access to more people that are also willing

to cut you a deal and maybe even willing to work for free.

So I think it's hard to say.

For the short videos, it's not a lot. It's probably more than

hundreds, but it's not a lot of thousands. You know, when

you start to get into the longer-form videos, where there's

tons of editing and lots of original video, where the crew

has to come out and take all of the video, that's where it

gets expensive. If you can really take the original video

yourself and then give it all to someone who really edits

it and cleans it up for you, you're going to be better off

and you're going to be able to get it done in a much more

affordable way.

Steven Shattuck: Cool.

Kivi Miller: Where it gets expensive is where you're paying people to

come out and film. That's where the price can go through

the roof. So if you can do some of that ahead of time and

really just pay for the editing and the cleanup, that's

better.

Steven Shattuck: Great. Jerry here is wondering -- Jerry's got a

major campaign that's done through special contributions

and churches. Jerry's wondering "How do you do a quick

response thank-you to the church as a whole?" Any ideas for

them?

Kivi Miller: I'm assuming you have multiple churches, is that the idea?

Steven Shattuck: Yeah. It sounds like.

Kivi Miller: Okay. You know, you can do something where the first 10 to

15 seconds of the video is customized for that congregation

where you actually "Hey. Church of whatever . . . " You

know, you say their name, and then you throw it on another

minute and a half that's the same thing that every church

sees, that's more about the result.

I mean, you want these videos -- if you look back and you look at

these scripts, there's a lot of results and progress in

these videos. They're not saying, "Thank you for giving us

money." All right? None of them are saying that. They're

saying, "Thank you for improving our lives. Thank you for

saving these places." It's all about the results that the

donors created. That's what people are being thanked for.

So in that situation, you can probably reuse that part of

the video over and over and over and just change the

beginning, to customize it.

Steven Shattuck: Yeah. That makes sense, and it's personalized that

way.

So if you're shooting your own video, Kivi, do you need pro

equipment? Lynn here is asking about equipment. "Can you do

this on your iPhone? Do you need to go out and buy" . . .

Kivi Miller: Yes.

Steven Shattuck: . . . "an expensive camcorder?"

Kivi Miller: You can do it on . . . If you have a smart phone that's

not like really old, I mean, if you've got it in the last

couple of years, then you're fine. You have everything that

you need to be able to do this.

Now you need to know how to use your phone. So you want to spend a

few minutes understanding where the settings are. A lot of

them have settings, especially for the lighting and the

audio. That can be very helpful.

If you're going to upgrade anything, I would get a mic to plug in to

your big -- usually plug into the little headset part of

your phone, and an external mic can do a better job of

capturing the audio than what your phone will often

capture, and again, like I said earlier, people are more

annoyed by that audio quality than they are annoyed by

picture quality, so that's where a mic makes some sense to

spend 100 bucks to get a decent mic that you would plug

into the phone to capture the audio.

Then what you do, is that is recorded in a different track. You'll

have an app on your phone that records the audio for you,

and then you'll have to go into some software and sync that

audio track that you recorded with the microphone to the

video track, and you can do that yourself, or that's,

again, where you can pay somebody else to do that editing,

if that's a little too scary for you.

Steven Shattuck: Cool. Well, we've got probably about one more

question, time for one more question. So I'll answer the

next question I see has [inaudible 00:54:21], but I want to

give [inaudible 00:54:23] . . .

Kivi Miller: It's laundry time.

Steven Shattuck: Yeah. This is serious. I want to give Kivi some time

to talk about where you can find out [inaudible 00:54:29] .

. .

Oh. Someone from Scott. What about software? So if you want to tackle

editing yourself, any tools for that that you can think of?

Kivi Miller: You know, that's a landmine of a question. Everybody's got

their favorite piece of software. So it depends on whether

you're a Mac person or a P.C. person. So I personally am on

a P.C. I use [inaudible 00:54:57] Studio, and it's fine. I

think it's a middle-of-the-road kind of tool. It's not

super basic, because I need to do a couple of little

splashy things that I like to do, but it's not the super-

high-quality professional hundreds of bells and whistles

either, where it's so complicated I can't figure out what

I'm doing.

So for me, that works, but you need to find the thing that works for

you and your type of computer.

Steven Shattuck: The iMovie on Macs is pretty good. That's what I

use, personally. It's not too bad, and I think comes with

[inaudible 00:55:33] . . .

Kivi Miller: There you go.

Steven Shattuck: . . . Mac too. Yeah. Well cool. This is really fun.

This has been really helpful. I really enjoyed listening to

this and looking at all those examples. Hopefully everyone

else did who listened in.

And Kivi, I think you broke our attendance record for webinars. So

congratulations on that.

Kivi Miller: Well thank you all for being here today.

Steven Shattuck: Yeah. This is fun. I want to give you the last word.

Where can people find out more about you, find your books,

read your blog, follow you on twitter, all that good stuff?

Kivi Miller: Sure. So NonprofitMarketingGuid.com is our website, and

it's a regular website with lots of downloads and articles,

and then we also have the blog, so that's

NonprofitMarketingGuide.com/blog. We blog Monday through

Friday. So you can subscribe to that if you want to hear

from us every day in the inbox.

If that's not for you, we also have a weekly e-newsletter, and will

often link to the better stuff on the blog. So you can do

that as well.

If you go to NonprofitMarketingGuide.com and look for the "Freebies"

link, there'll be a sign up for the newsletter and for a

bunch of free e-books, all kinds of good stuff, and then of

course we have the two books that I've written, too. For

those of you that want the handbook on your desk, we've got

a couple of those as well, and Amazon has them for just

about the best price. Amazon actually gets [inaudible

00:56:49] prices and I can sell them to you for as author.

So . . .

Yeah. Check it out. We'd love to hear from you, and of course, follow

us on social media.

Steven Shattuck: Yeah. Definitely do that, and do check out that

newsletter. I recommend everyone subscribe and check out

that blog. Really, really good content. If you liked

anything at all that you saw on this presentation, you're

going to get that there as well, and they do have "Content

Marketing for Nonprofits." Really excellent. As soon as

this webinar ends, Kivi, I've got to get you to sign

[inaudible 00:57:16].

Everyone [inaudible 00:57:17] by that . . .

Kivi Miller: I'll be happy to.

Steven Shattuck: It's thick, too. So it's definitely worth whatever

[inaudible 00:57:22] . . .

Kivi Miller: It is. It's a tome. I mean, I could not sit down and read

my own books in one sitting. So it's a function of the

publisher. Jessie Bath Wiley [SP] really likes to create

these handbooks, all-inclusive handbooks. So they're big

books, and you can definitely flip through them and just

read the part you need to read.

Steven Shattuck: Yep. That's really good. I think everyone should buy

it. So that's my recommendation.

Well, this is a lot of fun. We give you these webinars once a week.

We're actually taking next week off, but one of us --

actually me -- I'm going to be presenting on the Nonprofit

Hub webinar next week. So go to our webinar page. You can

register for that. I'm going to be talking "Social Media

for Nonprofits" next week.

And then beyond that, lots of cool topics coming up here in the

future. We're going to talk "Strategic Planning," things

like that. So check out our webinar page. Look at the

upcoming webinars. You can register for those for free.

There 100% free and 100% educational. So if you see any

topics that look interesting to you, please do register,

and you can attend those.

So Kivi, thanks again. This is great. I'm going to be sending out all

the materials are later this afternoon, so look for an

email from me. You'll get the recording. You'll get all the

handouts that we referenced today. So look for that, and

with that I'm going to say a final "Goodbye." So thanks

again for hanging out with us, everyone, and we will talk

to you next week.

Kivi Miller: Bye-bye.