Thanks for the mention of DoGooderTV. You are asking the right questions! The goal of nonprofits are not to get views for videos. The goals are to educate or advocate or raise money or change the world.

I do believe that it is hard to measure what impact specific actions had on long-term cultural change. For example, the world recognizes that there is a climate crisis. How much did Al Gore’s movie make a difference? We intuit that it did, but it is not so easy to measure.

On the other hand, most of what organizations want to do can be measured more directly. Did I get email sign-ups, did we raise money (or did we raise more money than we would have without this action), did we get the legislation passed.

We have many case studies of using video for real impact at See3 Communications (http://www.see3.net) (the firm where I am the CEO and the firm that developed DoGooderTV)

For example, we did a series of videos for Amnesty International. Including this one http://www.dogooder.tv/Orgs/AIUSA/default.aspx?MovieID=282
And they broke their fundraising record for a non-December month and their list building record for any month. But it wasn’t just the video. It was a campaign that included a multifaceted approach with campaign landing page, PR and other activities. The videos made it interesting and made it viral.

Bottom line for us is that the web and TV are coming together. TV was never available to most nonprofits. Your website is becoming a channel and people expect to be able to see and connect to the work organizations are doing more directly. Organizations should be documenting their work on a regular basis and creating a library of content that they can re-use and re-purpose. They have to change their culture to begin to SHOW and not simply tell.

All the best,

Michael Hoffman
CEO
See3 Communications