How Video Marketing And Social Media Can Improve Any Charity’s Outreach

Before we start to look over the reasons why charities and non-profits around the world are using video marketing, we first need to establish exactly what it is.

Video marketing is a way in which organisations – private companies, public bodies, non-profits - use short films and videos to promote and advertise themselves, often focusing on a specific brand, product or service.

As technology has advanced, particularly online, organisations have adapted to consumer demands for engaging, well-produced video content. It has quickly become one of the most common ways for web-users to find information for both business and pleasure.

For charities and non-profit organisations, a video can deliver a message in a way that text simply cannot. People relate to people. As a result, a video can exert a powerful emotional pull, while letting people know exactly what a charity hopes to achieve and how it hopes to do it.

Generally, web videos need to be kept relatively short. Many successful online promotional videos are in fact around the same length as televised adverts, between 30 and 60 seconds. Online viewers have notoriously short attention spans and viewer abandonment is an issue faced by all online video marketers. So … you need to ensure that your charity’s message comes across strong, direct and gives the viewer an experience he or she will remember.

Done correctly, online videos can generate a huge amount of exposure for non-profits, but only if propagated and optimised appropriately. For example, charities must ensure that their videos are posted to all relevant video-sharing sites in the appropriate video categories, with high amounts of active users.

Social media is also a great way to raise awareness of a charity and the best part is that it costs nothing, only time. Creating a fan page on most social media website takes about 30 minutes, but the key to success is to be regularly active on these websites, posting news, writing to fans, engaging with the community. It only takes about an hour a day, but that time is worth its weight in gold.

A good example of successful charity marketing on Facebook, can be seen by looking specifically at two UK “Fan Pages”. Firstly, Oxfam UK which has 34,681 Facebook fans and Unicef UK, which has 11,028. Both of these charities post regular news about their work, they prompt fans to invite friends to join and advertise donation links. This is a fantastic way of advertising directly to your audience and to also bring in new followers.

However, creating a great social media page doesn't happen over night, it needs quality visual content. One thing you will notice about these pages is that they all contain a range of video content.

These videos are constantly promoting the charities work and what the donations go towards, as well as prompting users to promote the charity with their friends. This form of marketing is fantastic, because it lets the fans do the PR work for you. On average, a UK Facebook user has around 84 online friends. So in theory, if 100 fans repost your video online and around 50% of their friends view it, in one day your video could receive around 4,000 views. That is potentially 4,000 new people to sign up to your charity’s cause.

For charities and non-profits, video marketing is crucial for success online. Not only can video help build brand awareness and attract new supporters, just having video content on your website will boost you visibility in search engines rankings!