First of all, make sure you have a well-done video to promote. There are so many well done non profit videos out there nowadays that a shoddily done video can leave a bad impression of your non profit as a whole. These non profit video-making tips should help.
After putting all that time into making a video, make sure you put some effort into promoting it. Grab a calendar and make a promotion plan with your target audience(s) in mind plus who is in charge of promoting it. Do it well the first time and you are bound to use it again for your next video or other pieces of content.
These tips below should help you work out your plan of attack.
- Youtube is the second biggest search engine. Make sure you optimize the description and title and youtube will do the work for you.
- Remember, you can post the video on a number of outlets. On Vimeo, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc. For some of the social media outlets such as Facebook, you will probably see better results by posting the video natively versus posting it from youtube.
- It is ok to post it more than once to social media accounts, just space them out. Videos take much more effort than a blog post, and the few fans that end up seeing it in their feed twice will survive. Note that you should follow the best practices of the social media site (i.e. posting many times to LinkedIn is less acceptable than twitter). You can schedule these on Hootsuite for example (sometimes a month or two later even – you will hopefully have new fans then who would like to see it).
- Put it in your email newsletter. If possible (it is on MailChimp), embed it so they can play it directly from their email browser.
- Get your volunteers/employees to promote it. Someones it is just not worth the effort to ask people to share, but if you put a lot of effort into this video, it’s worth going the extra mile for the ask. And of course, ask for a share in the video description or at the end.
- Consider paid advertising. Video advertising on facebook and youtube, for example, is ridiculously cheap at the moment compared to other advertising mediums. Versus banner ads, you get people’s attention sometimes for minutes.
Pro tip: This is a good task for an intern/volunteer if you do not have someone on communications already. It is important, but if you are an executive director.