Making a nonprofit video for your organization can be very exciting. It can also be tricky and difficult if you don't set a proper foundation for the work ahead. Before I start any nonprofit video production, I ask the following questions:

1. Why are you making the video?

2. Who is your audience?

3. How will you promote it?

4. What is your call to action?

5. How will you measure success?

Let's look at each of these questions individually.

1. Why are you making the video?

It seems like an obvious question but you'd be surprised at how many people don't have an answer for it. What we're getting at here is the purpose of the video. Are you trying to recruit volunteers? Are you trying to raise money? Are you trying to thank donors? Are you trying to explain a complicated issue that relates to your cause? Understanding and agreeing on the purpose will help drive all the creative and content decisions moving forward.

2. Who is your audience?

Identifying your audience goes hand and hand with the purpose of the video. Are you targetting volunteers? Donors? Is the audience young or old? Are you targetting a specific geographic area? Knowing your audience will make sure that you communicate in a language they use and understand. Never lose sight of the audience. When making content decisions and casting characters, keep them in the forefront of your mind. Will your ideas or messages resonate with your audience? Will the audience respond to your speaker? Do the music and graphics make sense? The more you cater to a specific audience, the more successful your nonprofit video production will be.

3. How will you promote it?

This is the most overlooked part of nonprofit video production. We live in a YouTube era and everyone thinks if you throw something up on YouTube and it's good, a million people will watch it. That's just NOT reality. And if they do happen to watch it, they might forget it quickly and move on to the next viral cat video :)

A great place to start with promotion is to look at all your current marketing activity. How can you integrate your video into what you are already doing? Can you blast it out to your email list? Can you thread it into your social media program? Do you use more traditional media like ads, postcards, etc. Go ahead and put a screengrab and link to the video on those. Do you have a big gala coming up? Debuting the video at a live event is a great way to kick it off. You could also make a promo teaser to send out to guests ahead of time to build buzz.

One last piece is thinking through how and where you're going to host your nonprofit video. As you can probably already tell, I don't think the answer is YouTube. YouTube does get a lot of views but those views are on YouTube, not your website. You can embed videos on your site from YouTube but I still think that's missing the mark. There are a bunch of video hosting companies that have been created to address the shortcomings of youtube. My video host of choice is Wistia. They have been thought leaders on maximizing video assets. A few that I think are particularly powerful are email integration, optimization for google searches, analytics that give you powerful insight into how your nonprofit video is being viewed and the ability to create a clickable "call to action" at the end of every video. Which leads us to our next question...

4. What is your call to action?

You're probably not making your nonprofit video just for fun. Don't get me wrong, I make videos for a living and it is a ton of fun. But it also takes time and effort, so you want to think about what action or next steps you want the audience to take after watching your video. The answer should never be nothing. Here are a few call to action examples specific to nonprofits:

• "Ready to help? Click here to volunteer!"

• "Help us by clicking here and making a donation"

• "Please help build awareness on this issue by sharing this video"

• "Take action now by contacting your legislators about this policy initiative"

I think you get the point. You want to connect the dots for your audience and encourage them to take action.

5. How will you measure success?

It's important to set a goal for your nonprofit video production. Without a goal, you have no way of measuring how you're doing. Your goal should align with your call to action. Let's take the example of trying to recruit volunteers. A classic acronym for goal setting that I love is SMART. SMART stands for:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Achievable

• Relevant

• Timebound

So plugging this into our example, a smart goal may look something like, "Recruit 20 volunteers for our annual food drive by April 1st."

Need help producing your next video? Check out our video tutorial below. We have an easy process and guide you can use that will guarantee great results.