Host your videos at YouTube or your own site?

A client and colleague were in a discussion about where the client should host their videos. The colleague rightfully pointed out that if we direct visitors to a YouTube page, we run the risk of having them get distracted. The client likes the ease of hosting there.

My colleague is right, of course -- we don't want email subscribers or site visitors to end up at YouTube watching skateboarding accident videos, or whatever.

But so is his client. Hosting the video on your YouTube nonprofit account has great value. There are about as many YouTube views as there are Google searches, so a strong presence there will help people who've never heard of you find your videos if they're searching on relevant terms (which means your video pages in YouTube need to be search-optimized as well as your landing pages at your site).

You should already have a nonprofit account with YouTube. For more information on the benefits available to nonprofits at YouTube and the rest of the Google empire, see http://www.google.com/nonprofits/

In addition, it's easy and free to host your videos at YouTube.

So, it seems to me that you'll want the best of both worlds. You can have that by embedding the html code from YouTube in the code of your landing page. For example:




This way, you can design a great landing page at your site to “capture” visitors and keep them at your site, while still hosting the video at YouTube and enjoying the benefits of YouTube exposure.

Where have all the donors gone?

I know it sounds like a pop song from the 60's. But seriously, how true is it that donor files are decreasing in size steadily, and what does it mean for our industry?

Studies have shown that, while overall donations to charity have increased slightly in each of the past few years, it has been the result of slightly fewer donors giving slightly higher average gifts. Until this year, in the economic meltdown, when those slightly fewer donors started giving slightly less.

We're looking for insightful comments on this, as well as profound thoughts on what we, as an industry, can do about it. Are traditional low-level direct mail donors just dying faster than their children are taking their places? Are they being turned off? Or are bigger nonprofits making the mistake of "mailing smarter" and cutting back on the kind of acquisition and reactivation that loses money in the short run but increases long-term donor files and revenue?

Please add your comments here, or see Rick Christ at next week's DMAW/AFP Bridge Conference in DC and give him a piece of your mind there.

Rick...

TeeBeeDee is closing down

TeeBeeDee is an online community for the 40+ crowd. Was. It's just given two weeks notice.

I don't think online communities can support a niche crowd like that at a profit right now. I think that advertisers are pouring their money into FaceBook (despite data that indicates MySpace is the social network of choice for adults). Someday the market may splinter, but I think that with sites like FaceBook, we who are over 40 can also network with those substantially under 40. My friends on FB include my kids, many of their friends, and fellow volunteer firefighters. They range in age from 16 to, well, even older than me. And that's one of the benefits of the social network.