Future:Media:Change

Josh Warner, founder of Feed Company, which promotes and distributes brand videos has selected the 10 best Viral Videos of 2009.  None of the are videos produced by nonprofits.  While this list is probably biased towards videos produced by agencies since that’s the business Josh Warner is in, there are still things to learn from the list.

Among the list are a few grassroots hits like the JK Wedding Dance (33 million views), and the Single Babies video (5 million views) but the majority of the chosen videos are from ad agencies that created viral videos for products.  Videos like Piano Stairs for Volkswagon and Guy Catches Laptop with his Butt, for MSI X series laptops.

But why are there no nonprofits in the mix?  The easy answer is money.  Nonprofits don’t have the deep pockets of corporations to hire ad agencies to develop innovative viral videos.  But I think it’s much deeper than that.  In our interview with FreeRange Studios, co-founder Joshua Sachs outlined some of the reasons why many nonprofits aren’t hitting the mark with viral media.  A quick recap of his arguments; 1) nonprofits have been working on their issues for so long they fail to see the humor in what they do 2) nonprofits are afraid many times to step outside the boundaries of normative advertising for a fear of not being taken seriously 3) they aren’t able to effectively boil down their message into something the general public can respond to.

The third point is something I want to elaborate a little on.  While I was working at the UN Millennium Campaign, one of the biggest problems our communications team had was being able to filter the complex messages of ending global poverty through the 8 UN Millennium Development Goals into something simple for the general public.  The communications team even went to the extent of hiring the Global PR firm Young and Rubicam to do the work for them, but at a cost that was so high I feel dirty thinking about it.  The message Y&R came up with was a simple, ‘End Poverty 2015′ alluding to the fact that every government promised to end global poverty by 2015 by signing the Millennium Development Goals.  But most nonprofits don’t have the kind of resources the UN does to hire Y&R to come up with a catchy slogan, so what should be done?

I remember in our MBA classes one of the first things they teach you to do when thinking about re branding is to take a step back and not think about slogans or headlines but to really think about what your organization does.  What makes you unique and what is your value added?  For nonprofits the same theory applies, what are you delivering to your community?  Why you and not Joe nonprofit down the street?  I know at the UN, we constantly struggled with communications because we never really went through this process of defining who we were first.