using video in advocacy action

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Just wanted to do a quick post to highlights a new tactic we’re using to get people to call Congress. In this email that we sent recently, we asked supporters to call their Senators: http://cdf.childrensdefense.org/site/MessageViewer?em_id=17781.0&dlv_id=18362. We thought we’d try incorporating a video of an employee from our organization calling their Senator to show how easy it is to call and to hopefully overcome our supporters’ anxieties and uncertainties about calling. Adding this video component took very little additional time - we just recorded the video on a Flip camera, uploaded it to YouTube, and embedded it on the webpage. Unfortunately, we don’t have a toll free number that we can use to track the number of calls to see if this was more or less effective, but we added a comment feature (available with Convio CMS) to the bottom of the page to get feedback (although some of our supporters didn't really get the idea of that comment feature).

Anyway, just thought I would pass it along to share with everyone just how easy adding this feature was. We'll certainly incorporate video more often in the future (perhaps a staffer explaining exactly why it is important for them to take action?).

P.S. We also just sent this to email to supporters who have taken action (i.e. sent at least 1 email to Congress) in the last year – non-action takers received a similar email, but were asked to email their Senators instead.

Heidi Hess

Children's Defense Fund

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Comments

  • Wow, this is really great, thanks for sharing!

    I'm curious if there's a reason you chose to use CMS and its commenting tool to handle this, rather than the Call Alerts tool in Convio's Advocacy module?

  • Noah Cooper:

    Wow, this is really great, thanks for sharing!

    I'm curious if there's a reason you chose to use CMS and its commenting tool to handle this, rather than the Call Alerts tool in Convio's Advocacy module?

    Good question, Noah.

    It was pretty much a matter of time. We had to turn this around pretty quickly and we could either get the video done or the Call Alerts tool. We went with the video this time. However, I've used the Call Alert tool in the past and really liked it. Easy to use and I think it was pretty intuitive to our users too.

  • hhess :

    Good question, Noah.

    It was pretty much a matter of time. We had to turn this around pretty quickly and we could either get the video done or the Call Alerts tool. We went with the video this time. However, I've used the Call Alert tool in the past and really liked it. Easy to use and I think it was pretty intuitive to our users too.

    Ah OK, makes sense. I just wanted to make sure the reason was not due to an issue you might run into if you try to embed YouTube videos on secure pages like Call Alerts -- by default, YouTube's embed code will cause a browser security warning, but I came up with a workaround, documented here:

    http://code.google.com/p/ytplayer/

  • Noah Cooper:

    Ah OK, makes sense. I just wanted to make sure the reason was not due to an issue you might run into if you try to embed YouTube videos on secure pages like Call Alerts -- by default, YouTube's embed code will cause a browser security warning, but I came up with a workaround, documented here:

    http://code.google.com/p/ytplayer/

    Thanks for providing that! We actually run in to that problem a lot and it's good to know there is a workaround!

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