A lot of non-profits have stacks and stacks of valuable media: lectures, conference talks, books, articles, courses, etc. Too often though the lion’s share of this media is gathering dust on the top shelf. Sometimes this happens literally in the form of cassette tapes or hard drives in someone’s basement. Sometimes this happens figuratively in the form of old videos buried billions deep on YouTube. Either way, the media that these non-profits have been diligently creating - often over many years - is difficult to find and is no longer serving the mission.
If this sounds like your non-profit, consider this solution: launch your own branded streaming service as a dedicated home for all of your content. Give your donors and your audience a single place where they can find everything you have ever created. Make sure that your hard work is not buried by someone else’s algorithm, but is instead served on your own terms to those who need it.
Define your streaming goals
Every non-profit is unique. Many could benefit from their own streaming service, but often for different reasons. At least some combination of the following goals will likely resonate with you:
- Building an email list: Trading content access for email addresses is a common pattern. Having all of your content available in a premium streaming app can make that email-for-content trade a compelling one.
- Serving donors: A streaming service can be a great way to keep your donors in the loop, show them the tangible impact of their donations, or just say “Thank you”. Consider giving donors free access to paid content or special access to donor-only content.
- Growing revenue: As you well know, being a non-profit doesn’t mean you don’t need to pay the bills. Consider offering paid subscriptions to your content. You might be surprised at how many people would be happy to support your mission while getting something in return.
- Increasing engagement: If your content is your mission, increasing engagement with that content is everything. Creating your own dedicated streaming platform can be a very effective way to do that: you can build a direct relationship with your audience, determine what the algorithm serves to them next, and get detailed analytics that can help inform your strategy and future decisions.
Choose a streaming model
A “streaming model” is the method that you use to serve your content to your audience. There are a myriad of streaming models out there. The one that you choose will depend on your streaming goals. Common options include:
- Free-for-all: Everything is free for everyone! No email or credit card required: just download the app and stream. This is a great option if you’re trying to reach as many people as possible with your content and your donors have your financial needs covered.
- Free-for-email: Everything is free, but a user must hand over their email to access it: “Create a FREE account to listen!” This is a great option if you are trying to balance wide reach with the need to build an email list and communicate with your audience.
- Freemium: Select content is free, but the bulk of your catalog is behind a subscription paywall. The free content creates a low-friction path to engage users so that they’re more likely to pay for a subscription. Most of Treefort’s customers who are optimizing for revenue growth utilize this model.
- Paid: Users must pay before accessing anything. This model works best if you have great name recognition and a reliable audience. Offering a free trial with this model is a good way to earn trust with users who may be unfamiliar with your offering and otherwise unwilling to sign up.
- Group memberships: Users can access your content via invite-only group memberships. For example, a church might purchase access for their congregation or a school co-op for their teachers and students. This model isn’t necessarily standalone: you can operate group memberships alongside a freemium or paid model that is targeted at individuals.
Select your technology
Once you’ve outlined your high-level goals, sit down and think through the lower-level technical requirements that align with those goals. For example, is a website enough or should you have mobile apps for increased engagement and support of offline downloads? Is video streaming enough, or would you like to offer audiobooks, ebooks, and articles as well? Do you have existing CRMs, marketing tools, or other systems that your streaming service will need to integrate with?
Answering these questions will help guide the technology choices that you make for your streaming service. For example, if you come up with a highly unique list of features, you have deep pockets, and you have a long timeframe, then you might consider developing your own app in-house. Do be careful though: for non-profits especially an in-house app can end up as a significant long-term distraction from the main mission.
For most non-profits I would recommend finding an existing off-the-shelf streaming solution that meets your requirements. I mean, I would recommend that since that’s what Treefort does ;) We allow you to launch your own premium, branded streaming platform with support for any kind of content and streaming model. I suppose you don’t have to pick us though. If you search for “white label streaming service” (white-label is the term for a ready-made service that is designed to be re-branded and launched as your own) then you’ll find lots of options.
One word of caution regarding white-label streaming services though: be careful to download and try real apps built with each provider before choosing one for your service. Many providers have extremely compelling feature lists, but the actual apps are low quality and will give your audience a frustrating experience (ultimately making you look bad). We are very proud of the quality of our product at Treefort. You can find links to several of our customers’ apps from our homepage.
Launch your service
After the high-level planning is done, it’s time to execute. This includes a variety of tasks such as:
- Generating brand assets like color schemes, app icons, graphics, and copy.
- Uploading and organizing your content.
- Creating artwork, thumbnails, and banners for your content.
- Designing the information architecture and user experience of your streaming apps.
- Building your apps (if you’ve chosen to do that).
For some organizations this process is a cinch, especially if they already have a well-defined brand, organized content, and are going the white-label route. We’ve had a Treefort customer go from contract to launch in just over three weeks! For others execution can take much longer, especially if they are rethinking their brand, if their content is not easily accessible, or if they’ve chosen to build their own app. Either way, this process is well worth the effort!
Promote and improve
After launching your service you’ll have a few ongoing tasks:
- Promotion: Let everyone know about your service! Link to it from your website. Share it with your donors. Announce it at your conference. Offer gift cards, coupon codes, free trials, or other special deals.
- Improvement: Analyze how your audience is using your service. How are they interacting with your apps? Which content are they playing the most? What are they searching for and not finding? The answers to these questions can help you set long-term strategic goals to improve your offering and further your mission.
- Maintenance: This only applies if you’ve chosen to build your own app. If that’s what you’re doing, then expect to spend a good amount of time in perpetuity squashing bugs, maintaining infrastructure, and updating your apps to meet Apple and Google’s ever-evolving requirements.
As you might have guessed, Treefort can help you with all of these things. Our apps support universal links, allowing you to easily share any screen with anybody. We support gift cards, coupon codes, free trials, and group memberships to help you promote your apps. We have a Google Analytics integration and our own engagement analytics system to give you a full understanding of your audience. And of course we handle all of the code, maintenance, and technical details so that you can focus on what you do best. Sound compelling? We’d love to chat!
