How Video Can Elevate a Nonprofit Digital Marketing Strategy

It can be difficult for nonprofits to stand out in a crowded digital landscape, where countless messages demand the attention of current and potential supporters. However, one effective way to break through the noise is to incorporate nonprofit video content into your digital marketing strategy.

Video is a powerful medium that can maximize engagement across your marketing channels and inspire meaningful support on behalf of your cause. In this guide, we’ll explore four ways in which video can help you achieve your digital marketing goals. Let’s get started!

1. Connect with online audiences on a deeper level

Videos provide viewers with an intimate perspective of your nonprofit’s work and the impact it has on your beneficiaries. By crafting engaging video stories and disseminating them across your various digital marketing channels, you can build stronger, more authentic relationships between your organization and its online audiences.

To foster more meaningful connections with viewers, consider using video to:

• Highlight your mission. Create videos featuring your supporters, volunteers, and beneficiaries to show the human side of your organization and inspire others to get involved. Use video to showcase the direct impact of your nonprofit’s mission and communicate your vision to potential donors and supporters.
• Educate and inform audiences. Use video to explain complex issues and increase target audience awareness by providing relevant educational resources related to your nonprofit’s cause.
• Showcase your initiatives. Promote your fundraising events, volunteer opportunities, and other activities to attract involvement and create buzz around your organization.

Whether you’re filming an explainer video or fundraising campaign content, keep the principles of videography in mind as you shoot your scenes and edit your final product. This includes maintaining visual hierarchy and using expert equipment to record interviews and provide ambient sound. By allowing your audience to see and hear the people directly impacted by your mission, you can generate genuine emotional responses and inspire potential supporters to get involved.

2. Boost social media engagement

Whether you’re using Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, social media videos receive far more engagement than simple photo posts. In fact, video generates 1200% more shares than text and image content combined.

If you want to reach a wider audience and take your social media posts to the next level, consider incorporating these videos into your nonprofit digital marketing strategy:

• Live streaming: Engage audiences in real-time with Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok live streaming capabilities. This can include live broadcasts of events, Q&A sessions, or behind-the-scenes looks at your organization’s work.
• Interactive videos: Interactive elements, such as quizzes and polls, are a new trend in social media that nonprofits can incorporate into their videos to generate engagement.
• 360-degree videos: 360-degree videos provide viewers with an immersive experience, allowing them to explore your nonprofit firsthand. Showcase your organization’s facilities or take them on a journey through the communities that you serve.
• Supporter-generated content: Encourage supporters to create and share videos that highlight the organization’s mission. For instance, if you run an animal shelter, you might have a volunteer post a series of videos to your nonprofit’s Instagram story showing themselves feeding animals, cleaning kennels, and speaking about their positive experience.

As you create and share these social media videos, NXUnite’s guide to nonprofit influencers recommends reaching out to industry leaders who have a large following and asking if they would be willing to share your content with their own networks. It’s likely that their mission-driven audience will resonate with your posts and take action in support of your cause.

3. Increase email open and click-through rates

Concise emails are often the most effective, as they ensure that your message is clear and doesn’t get lost among unnecessary information. If you have a lot of information to share or are looking to diversify your email marketing strategy, you can share the bulk of your message through video while keeping the text in your emails relatively short.

Not only does combining email with video foster clearer communication, but it also improves engagement. Simply using the word “video” in the subject line increases open rates by 19%, click-through rates by 65%, and cuts the number of unsubscribes by 26%.

There are several ways to incorporate video into your emails, including:

• Attaching a static image of the video with a play button, which takes the reader to the video on your website or social media platform.
• Using a GIF of the video to give the subscriber a sneak peek of the content.
• Embedding the video file directly into the email. However, this should be reserved for shorter video content due to file size limitations.
• Using a video thumbnail image that links to the video hosted on YouTube or Vimeo.

For the best outcome, place your video content below the email copy and write a compelling subject line that includes the word “video,” such as “A video message from our board members to you.”

4. Improve SEO rankings

Your nonprofit website is another key aspect of your digital marketing strategy that can benefit from video. Embedding videos across your site not only increases the chances of your content being seen, but it also aids in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The goal of SEO video is to rank highly on search engine result pages and attract more visitors to your website through:

• • Increase dwell time: When website visitors watch a video on your page, it can increase the time they spend on your site, which is known as dwell time. Google’s algorithms use dwell time as a signal to determine the quality and relevance of a webpage, so longer dwell times can positively impact SEO ranking.
  • Enhance engagement: Video can help engage users and keep them on your page longer, reducing bounce rates and increasing the number of pages visited. This, in turn, can lead to higher engagement rates and better SEO performance.
  • Be featured in rich snippets: Including video on your website can also result in the appearance of rich snippets in search engine results pages (SERPs). Rich snippets, such as video thumbnails or previews, can attract more clicks and improve your website’s visibility in search results.

To further improve your site’s content strategy and ensure that your organization appears in search results, you should optimize your video content with keywords. Include relevant keywords in the title, description, and tags that users may be searching for, such as “nonprofit video content.” This can help your video content rank higher in search engine results pages for those specific keywords and improve your overall search engine rankings.

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Now that you know how video can support your digital marketing efforts, you can begin filming content that will engages your audience. Whether you choose to create your own video content or outsource the process to a nonprofit video production company like Tectonic Video, leveraging the immersive power of video will help your nonprofit succeed well into the future.

Author: Doug Scott

Doug is the Founder & CEO of Tectonic Video. He has more than 20 years of nonprofit communications experience as a filmmaker, communications director, chief marketing officer and leader of two creative agencies for nonprofits. Doug is a global citizen having traveled to more than 50 countries. He earned his B.A. in Strategic Communications from DePaul University, and he’s a frequent guest lecturer at Stanford University on topics related to nonprofit storytelling and storytelling ethics.