Positive Contact: Email vs. Video

I've been thinking today about a part of our Deconstructing MFA post. Mark Ristaino, MFA's communications director, asked: how do you make a national organization with a huge membership more personal? How does a staff of 6-12 maintain meaningful, personal contact with 70,000 kids?

With email - as many of our commenters noted - you really can't. But why does email need to be the way that you maintain contact with your membership? For a group like MFA, where your people are young and much more tech savvy, why not find a charismatic staffer and record 60 seconds of video every week to post on your YouTube and MySpace pages? Why wouldn't your emails just consist of a big-ass image with the "play" symbol on it that took you to that YouTube or MySpace, or Home page? Or maybe its possible to just embed YouTube videos in an email . . . ? Do that long enough and you won't even need the emails anymore, people would just go to one of those locations where they could play the video.

Case in point: MFA has a member on their Board of Directors - Dan Lipski. Dan was a volunteer nominated and elected to the board by the MFA membership to serve out a term on the board as their representative. Dan got that job because he was a kick-ass volunteer that lots of members could identify with or had personal contact with through the many, many shows he worked. Why not have Dan Lipski record a video about what he does, what MFA is up to, shows that need volunteers, etc. as a way to stay in touch with your people? Why don't other youth focused orgs do the same thing with their own Dan Lipskis?

With Widgets that let you fundraise off your MySpace page, and the flexibility of these sites to let you custom build your profile, most functions of an organizational email could probably be transferred successfully to this format. And even if there are some things that work better in an email (I'm sure there are holes in this idea, so start shooting), this isn't an either-or choice.

Overall, it probably won't give you "meaningful contact" with 70,000+ members,but it will make your organization more personal, and it will probably bump up your "clickthrough" rates.

Just a thought.