How Vine can help build your online fundraising audience

Nonprofit fundraising has always been deeply associated with engagement of your audience and in 2014 this applies especially in the online arena and getting the most from the various tools, platforms and social media channels that are available to you.

I’ve been doing research on what might become the newest social media buzz (more on that to follow) and decided it was time to briefly shine the spotlight on a more recent addition to the social media world which until recently had me wondering whether there were practical applications for nonprofits to employ it towards.

The mystery tool is Vine, the short-form video sharing service. While only a youngster in social media terms, Vine was launched in June of 2012 and it created such initial interest that Twitter acquired the product just 5 months after it launched. You’ve no doubt seen Vine, those quick elapsing videos which loop (presentation time is limited to six seconds) that you often see people post via Facebook and Twitter. Until now I’ve been on the fence as to whether six seconds provides ample time to not only capture attention but also drive any marketing influence within the nonprofit arena. Videos often feature something that may be comedic, newsworthy or simply odd but more this year the potential for using Vine as a promotional social media tool has fully entered into the equation.

Throughout today’s post you’ll be able to see a few examples of Vine videos created by nonprofits, take a look and see what you think. You can search for and view many more via this page on Vine. A major catalyst for this growth was perhaps the 6 second commercial spot that was simply a Vine video released by Dunkin’ Donuts in January of this year.  It was a huge success and for much of its audience their first exposure to Vine, whether they were aware of that or not. Since that time we’ve seen the overall use of Vine accelerate further to firmly establish itself as a new leading contender in terms of overall social media use and regularly clocking in as one of the 1,000 most visited sites.

So is six seconds enough time to effectively convey a message for a non profit organization? Does such a short time frame become a message that is quickly forgotten or creates the type of embedding that we all seek from social media?

It turns out that in the ever evolving online world of quick messages, video views and mobile browsing that Vine is actually well matched to a growing segment of the online audience and there’s no reason at all that this can’t also be the case for a charity looking to add a new twist to their social media strategies. It might not be at the heart of your online fundraising but does afford you the opportunity to post videos that build awareness, provide event updates or simply say thank you.

To learn more about Vine or to build an account and get started visit Vine.co. Naturally the tool provides easy to use embedding and sharing features as you’d expect and is now such a well recognised name that it adds instant potential to a new approach worth exploring.
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Miratel Solutions is a Toronto call centre, eBusiness, and letter shop mail house specializing in professional fundraising services including inbound telephone fundraising, outbound telephone fundraising, online fundraising, lottery fundraising services, donation processing and receipting and direct mail fundraising services. We are committed to our CSR business values in all our business decisions and advancing the missions of the nonprofits we proudly serve.