I posted some basics about how nonprofits can use video here. If anyone has any examples of videos they’ve posted on the web, please leave links in the comments below. I’d love to see what you’ve come up with! And other readers can learn from your experiences.

In the meantime, I ran across another blog post about using video at See3′s blog called see what’s out there. He gives a lot of tips about effectively using YouTube and telling your story with video. He also includes links to lots of great examples of nonprofit videos online.

Camps have great personal stories to tell. The internet has offered an easy way to share those stories via video. Please share any of your videos in the comments below.

The team at CommonCraft has created a number of short videos like this one on Social Networking to help people understand various technologies, why they are helpful, and how you can use them. I highly recommend checking them out. Their videos are both informative and entertaining. They discuss many of the topics from my blog post on social networking, including blogging, RSS feeds, and social media.

Your firewall may prevent you from viewing the videos on the CommonCraft website. If so, they have helpfully created a YouTube community where you can find all of their videos, free to view and share.

As always, let us know what you think. Which videos were most useful? Did any truly help you understand how you can use these technologies?

I recently picked up a copy of the Spring 2008 edition of the Amherst College Alumni magazine. The cover story was a profile of 15 different graduating seniors. Each profile included a picture and answers to a series of questions such as:

• What activities have you been involved in while at Amherst College?
• What will you do after graduation?
• What’s been your most defining experience of your four years at Amherst?

You can find these profiles online. Amherst College has also provided the option for ANY alumni to provide their own answers to the questions, to learn even more about their alumni and what they care about.

To make this their cover story is a big statement about the importance of these personal stories. Obviously the Amherst College Alumni Association feels that this information is a useful way to continue to build connectedness among their alumni.

I believe camps can harness the same power of the personal story.

One thing the camps truly have an abundance of is personal stories from their campers and alumni. Camp touches each camper in a unique way. Alumni, campers, and parents can all relate to these unique stories of camp experiences. These are stories that can and should be captured each summer. They can be captured as simple interviews with standard questions, as Amherst College did. They can incorporate formal pictures (like Amherst) or candid pictures of the camper/alumni while at camp. They can even be shared online on the camp website and/or at video sharing websites like YouTube as short video interviews. Obviously permission to share the camper’s information (from the parent and/or camper) must be granted.

No matter how the information is captured, it can be shared via the camp website, a camp blog, and/or an alumni eNewsletter.

There are many questions that could be asked of current campers and alumni about their experiences at camp. For example:

• What is your favorite camp memory?
• What is the greatest lesson you learned at camp?
• Do you plan to keep in touch with friends from camp? How?
• Etc.

There is a great side effect of this effort, too: Building connectedness with profiled campers before they even leave camp. Try it out and – as always – let us know about your successes and lessons learned.