YouTube Campaigns Captures the Essence of Kickstarter but for Non-Profits

YouTube wants to be the place where you go to watch any video, long, short, news or music, but it also wants to keep you there after you're done watching. One obvious way is by recommending more stuff to see, a less obvious way is by keeping you engaged via comments, reply videos and so on.

The community is a very important part of YouTube even though the YouTube "community" isn't always of the highest standard.

But it's this community aspect that YouTube is trying to leverage with its new tool for nonprofits that want to run campaigns on YouTube.

Actually, that's the name of the new tool, Campaigns. The idea is to enable groups to run a campaign, for whatever they want to promote, on YouTube and make it possible to track progress towards success, which is defined before setting up the campaign.

"This new feature allows nonprofits to create campaigns with goals like increasing views or subscribers, track their progress, and let people to contribute to their goals," YouTube wrote.

"A campaign consists of one or more videos," it said. "Once a campaign is created, videos in that campaign will show an overlay on them, encouraging viewers to contribute to the campaign."

Apart from the videos and pages strictly associated with a campaign, the campaign itself will be linked to from the organization's channel page and they'll even get a big progress bar there to allow visitors and subscribers to both find out about a campaign and track it.

"With more than 18,000 organizations in the YouTube Nonprofit Program we are always looking for ways to help nonprofits turn video views into greater awareness, petitions signed, laws changed, dollars raised, and lives saved," YouTube explained.

The new tool should come in handy in quite a lot of situations, though it's only available to non-profits, so don't expect this to turn into something like Kickstarter, though that's certainly an interesting possibility.