You don’t have a video on YouTube, with a link on your own web site, that talks about how great your nonprofit is? Or a video that shows what volunteering is like at your organization or celebrating volunteers at your program? SHAME ON YOU! In this era of
Here’s how you can get such a video produced and online QUICKLY, with the help of volunteers.
First: make sure every volunteer, employee
From among your current and previous volunteers, or through whatever volunteer recruitment tools you use (like VolunteerMatch, AllforGood, posts to your web site, posts to Facebook or other social media, etc.), recruit volunteers who will pair up during volunteering activities: one volunteer will do the actual task, as usual (this should be one of your veteran volunteers) and one will record the volunteer for a few moments doing the task with his or her smartphone (always landscape – hold the phone sideways!).
So, for instance, at a nonprofit animal shelter, if you paired up volunteers, you would have raw video footage from various
- a volunteer staffing the front desk and interacting with clients
- volunteers interacting with animals
- volunteers dealing with inventory
- volunteers pouring dog food or cat food
- a volunteer taking photos of new animals for your web site
- etc.
Recruit a video editing volunteer who will gather all of the videos together in one place online, a place where staff at your organization can always access the raw footage in case this volunteer is unable to complete the task. For instance, all volunteers could be asked to upload their footage to a YouTube account set up specifically for this project, and for footage to be uploaded so that it is not public. If they don’t know how to upload footage, they could get guidance from someone at your organization the next time they are onsite at your organization.
Where to recruit a video editing volunteer? From your current volunteers (and have them ask their family members), previous volunteers, via a post on your web site which you link to from an announcement on your social media channels, via a video production class at the nearest high school, college or university, via employees at a large company where they have an in-house marketing staff, etc. What about asking the faculty of such a class to turn your video needs into a class assignment, with different teams of students each producing a video based on raw footage and then your voting on which you think is the best? Be sure to write a full description of what the volunteer video editor’s duties are, that you will include in all recruitment materials so expectations are clear.
This video editing volunteer will be charged with:
- editing bits and pieces of the raw video into a 2 or
3 minute video - adding in copyright-free music (easy to find such via archive.org)
- adding in titles and captions that say whatever it is you want to say about your organization and how great it is, perhaps also about why your volunteers are so wonderful and essential
The video editor presents the first draft of his or her work to appropriate staff and, once staff approves, up it goes onto your organization’s YouTube channel.
You could do something similar regarding interviewing clients to talk about how they have benefitted from your services, or talking to volunteers about why they enjoy
For any video where words will be spoken, you will need to recruit a volunteer who will caption the video on YouTube. I have recruited online volunteers to do this for my short video
There is no excuse whatsoever for NOT having such videos about your organization’s work! And video editing is shockingly easy: I do it myself, self-taught, on my ancient Macintosh computer. Here’s a video I put together for Knowbility, a nonprofit in Austin, Texas, showcasing nonprofits it was working with in its OpenAIR program. I had video footage from various organizations, all remote to me (hundreds, even thousands, of miles from me) – none of the video was what I had shot myself. I also had some slides of information as visuals. I spliced it all together using the free video-editing tool that was on my ancient Mac, then laid in some music – something I’d never, ever done before – using copyright-free music I found on archive.org, and finally transcribing using the free captioning tool on YouTube. My video is not going to win any awards: my transitions between videos and “moments” arent’ very good – but I had just one day to do it, and the video was VERY effective at the event at which it was shown. Imagine what a volunteer who DOES have some video editing experience, with several days, could do for YOUR organization!
If you have benefited from this blog or other parts of my web site and would like to support the time that went into researching information, developing material, preparing articles, updating pages, etc. (I receive no funding for this work), here is how you can help.
Also see: