Your Online Presence > Strategy & Development

Making the Most of Your Multimedia Content

By Simon Fairway, Juvi Media

This article discusses how Third Sector organisations can make best use of their multimedia content, by integrating it into fundraising, advocacy, and feedback campaigns.

Get yourself noticed

More and more emails drop into our inboxes from good causes that we have expressed an interest in, providing information about a particular campaign, asking us to sign an online petition, or inviting us to make a donation. For organisations that are operating within such a competitive environment, the imperative to distinguish themselves from others has become vital. A fantastic way of doing this is to integrate multimedia content into the process – if you can get someone to watch your video or listen to your audio content, you have engaged them in a much more meaningful way.

Equally, web users have come to expect their information in a media-rich format that will inform or entertain them with minimum fuss. A web user may have plenty of goodwill towards a charity, but a short concentration span. It is therefore imperative that they are guided through the process of being contacted, being informed, and given their call to action (be that making a donation, or emailing their MP), in an efficient way. 

So the need for a well-integrated, easy to follow, visually striking campaign is incredibly important. By using the right new media tools, it can be surprisingly cost efficient too.

Preparing Content

The key to making a campaign that includes an audio or video element work, is to ensure that the multimedia content is easily accessible.  In most cases it is best to have this content hosted on your website, and in a format that is easily accessible for as many of your audience as possible. As soon as someone has to download software, or alter their computer’s settings, they will lose interest.

For video, Flash is considered the most efficient and a medium for distributing videos, with a smaller file size for an equivalent quality relative to the other formats.  Flash is also the most widely accessible form of video with around 95% of Internet enabled PC’s able to play it (compared to 83% for Windows Media, 67% for Quicktime, and 55% for Real Player). For audio, MP3 format is the best choice, with all web browsers supporting it. For more information see the Knowledgebase articles An Introduction to Effective Use of Audio on the Web and An Introduction to Effective Use of Video on the Web.

Contacting Your Audience

Whatever the ultimate aim of your online campaign, the likely first step is to send an email to your audience. This email should provide information about your campaign, before directing the reader to the multimedia content through well-placed links.

The most effective emails are visually striking, with good use of images.  For this you should use one of the many bulk email services.  Dotmailer and Campaign Monitor are popular choices. A more detailed discussion of the options, and advice on creating newsletters can be found in the Knowledgebase articles Choosing Bulk Email Software and Best Practice for Building and Designing Email Newsletters.

Try (where possible) to personalise your emails by including the first name of the subscriber. It is also important to make sure that the branding that is used in your email template is as close as possible to the branding of the website in which your content is hosted. Your audience will feel uncomfortable if the email looks significantly different to the website where the multimedia content is held, whereas consistency will keep them calm. Don’t give them an excuse to give up!

If you are linking through to video content, a good idea is to include a screenshot from the film. For audio, you could use an image of a CD or musical note.

There are a number of ‘video email’ clients available, such as Stream City’s Vmail product, that play video within an email message, but these are not fully supported by all email applications.

Next Steps

Once you have contacted your audience, provided them with some information about your campaign, and shown them your multimedia content, it is time for them to do some work!  The ‘call to action’ will differ, depending on the nature of the campaign but the principle is the essentially the same.  The most important issue is to make sure that it is clear to the audience what they are expected to do next. Make sure that instructions and links to the next steps are displayed prominently next to your multimedia content, so that once engaged and motivated by your compelling content, they can easily see what they can do to support your work.

Advocacy / Campaigning

There is a vast array of web-based advocacy and campaigning tools that you can integrate into your campaign. In each of the following examples, you simply set-up an account with the service provider and are provided with a link that you will put alongside your multimedia content and call to action.

If you are looking to canvass the opinion of your audience on certain issues, Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo let you create your own online surveys, allowing you to customise templates, analyse survey results, and download the data.  Small-scale surveys are provided free of charge.

If you want your supporters to lobby local MP’s or central government, there are a host of tools to support this.  Advocacy Online, Political wizard, and Write to Them, all support lobbying activities. The UK Government’s own e-Petitions portal allows groups to set up a web-based petition that is directly communicated to Downing Street.

Fundraising

If the aim of your campaign is to secure donations, then you will need to provide a link alongside you multimedia content and call to action, to an appropriate payment processing provider.

An example of an organisation that used this approach is Magic Bus, who sent out an email campaign to supporters which directed them to a page which combined a promotional video, with a feedback form, and a link to a donation page (using CP Web, a payment processing service provided by Charity Technology Trust). In this case, the video is hosted on the Juvi Media site, rather than the Magic Bus site, as they did not have FTP access to the website at the time of sending, but in general this would be hosted on the organisations own website.

More information on the various payment processing options is available from the knowledgebase article Online Payment Processing.

Final Tips

Whether your organisation is embarking on a high-profile fundraising campaign, or is just looking to get some feedback on multimedia content, by combining various web-based tools, you can achieve excellent results at low cost. Incorporate video and audio into your communications strategy, and try different things to see what works and what does not. All of the tools discussed have reporting facilities, allowing you to analyse the actions of your supporters. The more you understand them, the easier you will find it to engage them.