Conflicting opinion on whether it makes more sense to host video community on Nonprofit Social Networks or just bring ’em to Facebook

Should the content be portable?  Sure.  Should it also be targeted at a self-selecting audience?  Sure.

Heather Mansfield brings up a good point, about how YouTube, Facebook and Myspace weren’t created for Nonprofits and they don’t have the social networking factor, and groupings by cause. They also don’t work well with the donation factor, with the exception of Causes, but they won’t turn off the ability to sell your snail mail addy, which, as I mentioned in the blog entry below, makes your $20.00 donation invalidated, to some extent.

However, Michael Hoffman of See3 Media and David Neff, of the American Cancer Society disagree. They point out, validly, that the user is complicated, and generally doesn’t go to Nonprofit-only social networks. YouTube has tens of millions of users. DoGooder.tv, Michael’s Nonprofit product that makes it easy and unbranded for a Nonprofit to upload a video, and they make their video embedding purposefully easy to make the videos portable. He said that they will also soon make the videos interactive, such as this one, That’s Not Cool where you, can click into the video without leaving. This has great implications for nonprofits and community building.

David Neff points out the problem with YouTube’s dynamics devolving into that of a school yard playground. Sharinghope.tv is trying to create a safe space for users to promote their videos without this inane rambling.

I haven’t yet seen a nonprofit effectively connecting those who submit videos with each others at this point. They are telling their stories, and they are commenting on videos, but where is the actual community interaction and networking going on, as a result of a tagging functionality assigned to a video, for example?

The question I have is how do we do both, achieve critical mass, promote interactivity in videos, and still keep a nonprofit conversation going?