Giving in a digital world

Last week YouTube launched a new feature called ‘Call to Action’ for Non-profit Partners, allowing them to place overlay ads linking direct to their own website on their YouTube videos – for free. The clickable ads can direct viewers to any webpage, such as a secure donation page – essentially making YouTube videos into online DRTV ads.

To test the new feature, last Sunday YouTube placed a video for charity:water on its homepage, complete with a clickable overlay encouraging viewers to donate to fund water wells – and generated a very impressive $10,000 in donations in one day. So it certainly seems to work!

Before you get too excited about the potential to upload your latest video, add an overlay, and sit back as the money just rolls-in, you need to bear in mind that the test video was on the YouTube homepage – which guaranteed it a whole load of traffic.

However, ‘Call to Action’ still represents an opportunity not to be missed for any non-profit with good quality video content looking to find a way to monetise their YouTube uploads. At least it does for US and UK non-profits – as I’m afraid that at present YouTube’s Non-profit Partner Programme is only available to organisations from those two countries. Although they are apparently intending to expand the programme.

So, if you’re a UK or US non-profit what’s stopping you? Click here to register as a Non-profit Partner and then all you need to do is go to ‘edit Video’ and complete the ‘Call to Action’ fields for your headline, promotional copy, and destination URL. If you’re feeling really adventurous you could even combine clickable overlays with YouTube’s ‘annotations’ functionality to develop interactive direct response ads.

And do leave a comment to let me know how you get on with it.