Many nonprofit or charitable organizations are at a loss when trying to recruit volunteers with a specific skill set or gain pro bono assistance for special projects. Nonprofits often are able to find people to serve meals, coach teams or lead Bible study groups.
It’s often a struggle to find volunteers with specific communications skills. Paid staff members are often focused on completing many fundamental tasks to keep their organizations functioning. When faced with producing marketing and communications materials to promote their mission or raise funds, they often must spend significant financial resources. Producing quality videos is one of those daunting tasks. Who is going to do this for us and can we trust them? How much is it going to cost? Will we get a return on our investment?
Now, YouTube’s Video Volunteers page is connecting charitable organizations with video producers to develop fund-raising and promotional videos. (Read CNN report on the topic.) The video posted above is by Shawn Ahmed, who produced a video for the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank. It’s been viewed more than 365,000 times. Ahmed previously produced a video in Bangladesh and raised funds for poverty relief there through his personal project, Uncultured.
“Telling Your Story With Video” is the topic for Tuesday’s luncheon of the Community Service Public Relations Council (CSPRC). More than 80 people are expected to attend. (Attendance is almost 25 percent higher than most luncheons. However, attendance is trending upward because of the outstanding content presented by marketing and communications professionals in our community.) Click here for online registration.
(Disclaimer: Joe Mueller is president of CSPRC in 2009-2010.)