If you’re like me, you’ve known about youtube for a long time now, but you’ve probably never posted there.  Maybe you don’t film things or maybe you’re not ready to share anything just yet.

But there’s a lot to be gained from taking those steps into establishing your own Youtube channel.  Youtube is THE place for online video.  In January 2009, 147 million U.S. internet users watched an average of 101 videos per person.

Videos role in communicating can not be underestimated.  In today’s web world, attention span is measured in seconds.  Video is an excellent way to deliver content.

At Planned Parenthood, we’ve used youtube in a couple different ways and are still searching for the perfect strategy.  Here’s what we’ve tried so far:

Our first foray into youtube came about two years ago.  For our 25^th anniversary, we hired a videographer to make a short film about our history.  It turned into a very beautiful 8.5 minute piece[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hidlRTc_D0E], which we debuted at our 25^th anniversary celebration.  Due to server constraints, we couldn’t load the video on our site and it was WAY to big to send in an email. 

We decided to distribute our video in two ways. One we created about 30 copies and sent to all who had participated in the video, like the founding mothers, and then to some very close and special donors who we knew would not go online to watch.  Second, we loaded the video to youtube under a staff persons account and created a link from our website to the video.  We mentioned this link in our quarterly newsletter, the President’s Update.

This posting of the video received about 160 views and no comments. [unless you count the one by me- which I don’t.]

In 2009, we decided to expand our efforts to connect with our constituents online.  We began a twitter account, facebook page, myspace page, and even our very own Youtube channel (sounds exciting doesn’t it?)

We announced a video Public Service Announcement (PSA) contest in March.  The idea being that it was a great way to involve people in our prevention mission, build excitement for our new web initiatives, and incorporate video into our communications.

Our video announcing the contest was posted on March 26.  We had 60+ views.  We later posted an update and then an example PSA. We also added these to our facebook page, not as linked, but as fully loaded video, so the view count on youtube is low.

We specified in the PSA rules that entries should be posted to youtube.  [This was really smart of us.]  By doing so, we reduced a barrier to entry- mailing in copies, and we allowed the entry to be accessible for other viewers.  Also by having the entrant post to their own youtube account- the statement is theirs and not Planned Parenthoods. (comes in handy, if you don’t agree with the message)

We had 10 entries.  We created a page on our site with each of the ten entries embedded.  This is very easy to do- on youtube to the right of video there are two boxes, Link and Embed.  Click on the blue button at the end of the embed box and pick your settings.

You set whether or not you want related videos to show [no], want a border- what color, cookies or no, and what size.  Then copy the code that is in the embed box to your webpage.

We had viewers vote on their favorite PSA.  We used a free online tool called MicroPoll, which worked brilliantly for this purpose.  We had more than 150 people vote in our poll- pretty accurate because we could set our poll to allow only one vote per IP address. 

We took our winning videos and made them favorites on our channel.  We also created a new web page with just the winners. 

In total we had 2,662 people check out our contest rules, 134 views of our videos, over 1500 views of entries, 167 votes, and from 2 to 600 fan/friend growth on our social network sites.

Next step on our youtube progression, building a subscriber base.

screen shot from YouTube shows settings for embedding video

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