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Flickr for non-profits – 8 lessons learned

Timo — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 07:45:11 +0000

I have been using Flickr for about two years to increase visibility of the work of Red Cross Red Crescent. Today, I’d like to share some of the lessons I’ve learned.

Why Flickr?

I believe that most non-profits spend too much time preaching to the choir. Flickr is a great website to show what your organization is doing or why it is doing it to people whom you haven’t reached so far.

1. Know your audience

Quality is important

A large group of Flickr users is really passionate about photography. A second important group is people who are looking for free stock photos that they can use in presentations etc. Both groups have in common that they are looking for high quality photos. Respect that and be extremely critical about which photos you share. I ask myself every time “Could this photo be on a postcard or on the front page of a newspaper?” and try to post only those photos that meet this standard. Please note: photos of conferences or internal meetings never meet that standard.

2. Newsworthiness beats quality

This photo attracted 15,000 views - most of them in the fist 24 hours.

The only time when you can forget about quality and simply post whatever you have is when you have fresh, exclusive photos from a breaking news event: when cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar in May 2008, we were the only organization that had current photos from the affected areas during the first few days. As a result, the photos attracted more than 70,000 views in 48 hours.

Update: Please read this post about the impact we had with Flickr after the Haiti earthquake.

To a large degree this was because Yahoo! decided to link to them directly from their news homepage, but I’ve have seen similar, smaller surges when we had photos from other, hard to reach areas. Timing is essential for these kind of photos: to be successful you have to be lucky and fast. Once Reuters and AP get their photographers on location, interest in your less-than perfect pictures will wane fast.

3. Less is more

On Flickr, if someone likes your photos, he can add you as a “contact”. This means that his personal profile page will show your latest photos. However, it will only load a maximum of five photos. I have found that there is no significant difference in extra traffic beyond five photos. Unless the photos are urgent, you will gain more by spacing them out over a few days.

Tip: It seems like you can batch-upload and prepare all photos at once as long as you keep them “private”. I think that the trigger for showing up in your contact’s photo streams is not “last uploaded” but “latest photos that have been made visible.” In other words: I might upload 16 photos at once but then switch them from “private” to “public” four or five at a time over the next days.

4. Understand what you want to achieve

Flickr is not a good tool to fundraise or even to drive traffic to your site. Most people will stay on Flickr and not make that extra click to your donations-form or your site. This can make it difficult to measure impact. I consider Flickr to be a valuable tool to showcase the work of the organization and to increase visibility, particularly with people we normally can’t reach.

In addition, National and local Red Cross Red Crescent societies and branches can take our photo feed (through RSS or the API) to highlight the international work of the organization on their websites without any extra work on their part. I think this a good idea for any non-profit or NGO that has branches.

5. Groups, groups, groups

Almost every time I hear someone complaining that his/her Flickr stream doesn’t attract enough people, the reason is that they are not using groups. Think about it: most people don’t go to Flickr with the intention of seeing your photos. Most of them want to see photos that have a certain topic and it is in these topical groups that you find your audience. So, if you are an animal-rights organization, upload those puppy-photos to one of the many “dogs” group. If you work in DRC, upload your photos to the “Congo” group etc. I normally add each of our photos to at least ten groups.

Tip: Be on topic, but be different. You want your photos to stand out from the crowd so try to surprise people. Adding Tsunami photos to a “beautiful beaches” group or photos of malnourished children to “children portraits” is absolutely acceptable and can be very effective. Just make sure that they fall within the topic of the group.

6. Appreciate the work of others

You should also consider creating your own group and ask others to contribute to it. As administrator of a group you’ll see a new comment-button under all photos on Flickr, which makes it very easy for you to ask others to add their photo to your group. Ideally this will make them join your group and become a regular visitor and/or contributor. As the size of your group grows it becomes more and more likely that others will be exposed to your issues.

7. Flickr needs attention

I find that traffic to our photo stream falls very rapidly once I haven’t uploaded anything for a few days. Each time I let that happen, I slowly have to work the traffic back up from 40-50/day to 500-600/day, which is realistic for us outside of newsworthy events. This normally takes four or five uploads or about a week.

8. Use creative commons licenses – with care

A good example of the kind of photo to which we assign creative commons licenses. The photo shows our work and the branding is subtle.

I’m a big fan of creative commons licensing and believe that you should license your photos on Flickr accordingly, if you have all the necessary rights. The biggest advantage is that it allows people to spread your message without any hassle on their part. It also means that your photos show up when someone is looking for CC-licensed material using Flickr’s or Google’s image search. However, the important thing is to only license photos under CC that actually contain your message.

You should also think about how you would feel about seeing your photos in a competitor’s annual report. In our case that means that I only apply a CC license to photos that contain a visible red cross or red crescent emblem. Basically I don’t want another organization to be able to use one of our non-branded photos without having to ask for permission first. I am far more flexible when it comes to photos that are branded, since it is in our interest that these photos are shared as widely as possible.

What I’m missing

What I find disappointing about Flickr is the lack of integration with Facebook. There are a number of apps, but none of them do what I want. What I’d like to see is something akin to the existing “Blog this” feature in Flickr that would allow me to selective add photos to the album of our Facebook page. I’m also missing a “share this” button that would allow visitors of our photostream to post a link and a thumbnail to their own Facebook news feed.

From advocacy to authority – how to create an open source documentary to help your cause

Timo — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 06:30:43 +0000

Last week I wrote about the British documentary “Us Now” and what I thought about its content. Today I want to talk about the lessons that can be learned from the films website: www.usnowfilm.com.

In case you are wondering what this has to do with non-profits: I know many NGOs who produce feature-length advocacy films to state their case against e.g. climate change, human trafficking, dragnet-fishing etc. And I am certain that many of them could be greatly enhanced by an approach like “Us Now”.

1. Make a film project, not a movie

The biggest difference is in what you see as the outcome. Many people consider their work to be done once the final cut has been made and the film has been screened, burned on DVD, uploaded … whatever. Most of the time, the audience is simply seen as a mass of people towards whom you then project a certain message – a classic one-to-many approach.

But if you see your product as a film-project, then this implies that the work is not done after your final cut; it implies that this is something that can be built on.

2. Think “resource” not ”movie”

If you are looking at the film as a project and not as a 60 minute audio-visual presentation, then the next logical step is that everything that you have collected to produce the film is a resource. In the case of “Us Now” they made the original, uncut interviews available on the site and through YouTube. The BBC is currently working on a similar project called “Digital Revolution” where the rushes are already being made available while the film is still in production.

Both the BBC and “Us Now” offer interview transcripts which helps them with search engines (remember, search engines cannot read videos but love text).

Ideally you would assign meta data to both the text files and the videos so that users can find related interviews from different projects. If you have the resources to go one extra mile, you could even create an interactive transcript for each interview, like they do for the “TED talks“.

The point is, that you are suddenly offering people a resource that they can use in their own work. Think about how many videos were produced about climate change. Now imagine, you could use what other NGOs have already produced on the same topic. If enough non-profits would act like that, then everybody would win. But it obviously requires a change in attitude. Not only do we have to become comfortable with having others use material that we have paid for, we also have to become comfortable with using other peoples materials. I don’t know how comfortable the WWF would be to reuse bits of an interview performed by Greenpeace.

Interestingly, some of the big players are already working together on non-branded joint advocacy videos for big events like the climate change conference COP15.

3. Open a dialogue

This should be a no-brainer to everyone working with social media. You should give people a chance to discuss your topic with you. Obviously, by uploading the video to YouTube as a whole, as well as in parts, you can invite people to post video responses. However, you should find a way to display these on your site as well and not only have them sit on YouTube. Keep in mind though that such a dialogue requires resources. “Us Now” for example obviously doesn’t have those resources which is why this part of their site falls short of expectation. It’ll be interesting to see what the BBC has in store once they have completed their project.

4. Go Creative Commons

In order to achieve maximum distribution, give your film a creative commons license! “Us Now” can be downloaded in any format you can think of – including as a torrent! I don’t know whether that was the intention from the beginning, or whether it just happened, but it shows that once you set you content free, there is no limit to how and where your message might be distributed to.

From advocacy to authority

If you create your next advocacy film according to what is outlined above, you will see that you are suddenly no longer in the business of producing advocacy films, but you are in the business of establishing your organization as an online authority for the topics that your non-profit or NGO is fighting for. And isn’t that one of the reasons you were asked to produce that original advocacy video to begin with?

What do you think? Please share your thoughts below.

TED – a lesson in how to use video online

Timo — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 16:33:10 +0000

Today I’d like to share one of my favourite sites with you: TED – Ideas worth spreading.

For those of you, who have never heard of them: TED is a non-profit organization that invites interesting people to talk about interesting things. Or as the put it, they are “devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading”.

I absolutely love some of the talks on their site (one of my favourites is embedded below). And the great things is: it’s all free and licensed under creative commons license.

But even aside from all that goodness, what really caught my eye the first time I explored the site is how good TED is at using video and how well they understand video presentation online.

Screenshot of a TED video

What makes TED videos stand out:

They offer subtitles in multiple languages. Subtitles are created by over 200 volunteers as part of the TED Open Translation Project which has created subtitles in over 40 languages.
They divide each video into chapters
The make an interactive transcript available with the talk. If you click into a sentence in the transcript the video will jump to that exact spot.

(Note: Unfortunately only the subtitles are available in the embeddable version of the videos)

Do you know of a site that is as good or better? Then please leave a comment and tell me about it.

Respect your customers: Commentary on the AP license model

Timo — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 17:19:54 +0000

As many of you have probably heard, the Associated Press (AP) expects not only to be paid when substantial parts or all of it’s content is being reused but even when you quote a headline and link back to them.

I understand where the AP is coming from: they make their money from news – unlike newspapers who make their money from advertisement – and they are afraid that they are losing their business. At the same time people aren’t willing to pay for news – but producing news is expensive.

What annoys me is that by trying to save their revue stream, they completely overshot their target and now have to explain and backpaddle while suffering the ridicule of many colleagues, potential and current customers. What remains is the impression of a desperate company that is grasping straws in an attempt to stay afloat.

Five words cost $12.50 – but a whole article is free ?

The sad thing is that by demanding that people pay for a headline and link, the really interesting part of the license model was completely lost: you can use AP articles on your web site or blog for free as long as you use the whole article and include AP ads. Alternatively, you can pay and use the article without advertisement.

In fact AP is using the same company (iCopyright)to manage their content as Reuters. And when Reuters did it, it was applauded as an important step into the right direction. The difference: AP is expecting to be paid for excerpts (5 words cost USD 12.50) whereas Reuters doesn’t. Instead, Reuters reminds people to observe fair-use criteria and links to an explanation of what “fair use” means. That explanation is carefully worded to suggest that, if in doubt, you should always get a license.

A question of respect

What this demonstrates to me is how even showing minimum of respect for the people whose money you want can make huge difference. Whereas AP apparently perceives most bloggers and website owners as thieving profiteers who cannot be trusted, Reuters appeals to their judgement and fairness, which doesn’t mean that Reuters wouldn’t sue if you stole their content. The result: Reuters is seen as a pioneer, AP as dinosaur who doesn’t get it.

Some information in the interest of full disclosure:

I have worked for two wire services in the past, the dpa and ddp and I fully expected to be paid for my work
I built the first web site for AP Germany
I once found out that a ten page feature of mine had been copied in full and put on a web site with Google Ads left and right of it. I was absolutely furious and threatened to sue the guy who had done so. However, in the end I was too lazy and since this was some poor student I figured that he probably learned his lesson.

Related links:

What do you think about the AP license model? Leave a comment and tell me!