YouTube’s Nonprofit Program
YouTube’s nonprofit program helps organizations with a limited budget connect to donors, volunteers, and supporters. This is perfect for schools that are crippled with a minimal marketing budget.
Program Benefits
- Premium branding capabilities and increased uploading capacity
- The option to drive fund raising through a Google Checkout "Donate" button
- Listing on the Nonprofit channels and the Nonprofit videos pages
- Ability to add a call-to-action overlay on your videos to drive campaigns
- Posting a video opportunity on the YouTube Video Volunteers platform to find a skilled YouTube user to create a video for your cause.
For more information about YouTube’s nonprofit program, click on the link above.
(YouTube also offers an EDU program. However, currently, this is only available for colleges and universities.)
Limited Resources? Find a Volunteer!
If your school is like most private schools, you might not have the resources on staff to create a video. No worries—YouTube has a Video Volunteer program that will help you find a skilled video maker.
Each month, the top three videos are featured on the YouTube homepage. Even if your school’s video doesn’t make the homepage, just having the exposure is worth it.
It’s not just enough just to have a video about your school though. You first must decide what it is you want to share with the world. Is it your school’s performing arts program, your student body’s trip to South America to work with poverty stricken communities, or your school’s self-sustaining “green” program? Perhaps your school’s mission and culture has a multitude of highlights worth sharing and you’ll need to launch a video series? Whatever it is you want to share with the world about your program or campus, take some time to plan a strategy that will make the most impact.
Optimize Your Videos for Search Engines
Search drives the social Web in the same way it drives the informational Web—you’ll want to leverage this. Google is fond of integrating YouTube videos in its search results. Having a video that links your school with current issues—even pop culture topics such as Web lingo or the silly band craze—can really drive your school’s visibility on the Web.
There are several easy ways to optimize your search engine optimization (SEO):
- Tag videos liberally
- Title well
- Upload consistently
Measure Your SEO
Having a video strategy and a social media strategy is simply not enough. You need to measure the success of your efforts to help you determine how to best optimize your campaigns.
YouTube has a built in program for nonprofits—YouTube Insight. This resource allows you to learn your audience demographics, video popularity, traffic sources, and how effectively overlays are performing both on and off YouTube. It also allows you to export monthly reports in a PDF format.
