A few months ago YouTube announced that organizations that are in the YouTube Nonprofit Program would be able to use the overlay advertising feature to create donation links. They call the feature “Call To Action” and said that in their first test of this, Charity:Water raised $10,000 in one day.
Later after requests to enhance the features, they added a feature to allow for outside links in the annotations features that allow non-profits to link videos to their websites.
Unprecedented! The annotations feature has been availableto all YouTube video makers and allows for the user to put an overlay box on any part of any video. However, YouTube has only allowed links to other YouTube videos or YouTube channel pages. Until now — but only for non-profits. Fantastic! Check out this video for more.
Make no mistake, this is a game-changer. If you still aren’t sure what all of this means, it means that nonprofit YouTube videos can have buttons built into the videos that say DONATE NOW or SIGN THE PETITION and these buttons will work—they will link to any site you point them to. You can even go back to all your old videos that are on YouTube and make your logo into a clickable link, add annotations to donate with a link, and otherwise make your video into a center of engagement. This is now, by far, the most important reason to be in the YouTube Nonprofit Program.
People who watch videos on YouTube are very likely to do one thing when they are done…watch another video on YouTube. Not any more. With this new feature, YouTube can become a center for creating effective calls to action and engagement. Major props to the entire YouTube team—you rock!