Need some inspiration to enhance the offerings from our Campaign Toolkit? Take a look at these table tents produced by BP. Very cool stuff!

As we celebrate this year’s 75th Anniversary, we wanted to recognize some of our longest supporters. Happily, we have some outstanding corporate partners who, year after year, show their commitment to helping people in our community through robust campaigns, sponsorships, volunteering and teaming up with us for new approaches to addressing needs.

The below ad will be featured this Sunday, October 14, 2007 in the Chicago Tribune.

Judging by the requests to help create email announcements and download event photographs, I can tell that the 2007 Campaign is full swing. So instead of just talking about our wonderful Campaign Toolkit (the very best place in the world to view and download Campaign materials!), I’m going to go one step further, and teach you how to effectively distribute some specific Campaign materials to your employees. I now present, “How to [almost] email videos”.

Can I really email videos?

The short answer is, unfortunately, no. Of course, there’s always the exception that makes the rule. Although some videos can be embedded into email (Quicktime/.mov comes to mind), you can’t guarantee that email programs are going to a) understand the video format, b) have the necessary codecs to play the video, and most importantly, c) not throw the video (or email) out all together. I recommend not trying this approach.

So inserting the movie into the email is out. What about attaching the movie to the email? There’s at least two major issues with this idea: 1) sending large attachments (>1MB) to multiple recipients is never a great idea. You email server will not appreciate it. Plus, if the file has an .exe (such as a self-contained video projector) extension—forget about it. Email firewalls will quarantine it as a potential virus. 2) The videos on our Toolkit are in Flash/.swf format (not the .exe projector mentioned earlier). Most computers don’t have a separate Flash video player installed to be able to play Flash without first going through the internet browser. The videos are you’ve seen are actually embedded onto our website, which allows your browser to view them in almost real-time. They are embedded using Google Video, which does allow you to download a propriety player/video program, but that’s takes us back to problem #1.

So what’s the solution?

I thought you’d never ask. I suggest a little workaround that will allow you to present your video to your employees without actually placing the video into/upon your email.

1. Decide which video you’re interested in. Let’s use United Way is Working.
2. Here’s the optional, tricky part—you’re going to want to make a screenshot of a clip in the movie (I know, we should probably just do this for you—soon we will, I promise). But how?

   Windows gives you the ability to take a screen shot of the entire screen. To do this, you have to press the PrtSc or PrintScreen (look right above DELETE and INSERT) button on your keyboard. When you press this key a copy of your current screen will be placed in the Clipboard of Windows. The easiest way to save/edit this copied image is through Paint (Start>Accessories>Paint) or whatever image program you like to use. Paste in your image, crop to your liking, then resize and save. After that, you can insert the image into your email. You can see an example screenshot below. If you would like more detailed instructions, check out this iOpus internet guide.



3. If that sounds too complicated (it gets easier after the first time), you could just copy the site’s web address (either from the Google Video page or just our Videos and Flash Presentations page) into the body of your email. I recommend adding this link to behind your image and into the email no matter what, though. The idea is to get your employees to go to the video’s online location so they may view it there.

Good luck with your emails and of course, you are always welcome to leave a comment below if you have a technical question you want answered.