YouTube Channel Revitalization

If there’s one thing you need when running a non-profit, it’s resourcefulness. Fortunately in this digital era, there’s endless ways to promote your brand and reach your audience for little to no cost through Social Media. While working at the Arthritis Foundation as a Multi-Media Designer, my goal was to revitalize their 14 year old YouTube channel in order to better promote resources for arthritis patients, such as juvenile arthritis conferences, webinars, podcasts, and events.

Why YouTube?

YouTube ranks under Google as one the most popular websites in the world with over 2 billion active users. Not only is it the social media platform with the highest penetration, it’s the 2nd most popular search engine used. The Arthritis Foundations mission is “championing the fight to conquer arthritis with life-changing science, resources, advocacy and community connections.” Making our content more accessible on YouTube would further the Foundation’s cause by building that community and reaching audiences of doctors, advocates, and patients alike.

The State of our channel 2021

The Arthritis Foundation’s YouTube channel was first created in 2008 in order to upload patient testimonies. It had since evolved to be a place for interviews with doctors, explainer videos on different types of arthritis, and arthritis friendly exercises. However, a lot has changed in the last 14 years; ownership of the YouTube channel passed between many employees as the structure changed internally and YouTube standards and settings changed, thus leading to a rarely updated quiet YouTube presence. This was perfect. When I joined the Marketing team in May of 2021, I was given full reign of the channel.

Goals

To orient myself, I went through our channel and made a list of goals and improvements I wanted to see implemented:

• Sort videos into comprehensive playlists

• Give videos branded custom thumbnails

• Organize and brand our homepage

• Update old videos to comply with the YouTube COPPA standards.

• Create a video description template to help improve SEO

• Add tags to videos

• Check subtitles and language for accessibility

• Add chapters to videos longer than 20 minutes

• Clean up subscriptions

Thumbnails

My research showed that successful thumbnails typically had immediate brand recognition, included text using key words from the videos, and included people’s faces. I implemented these factors in our YouTube thumbnails by including our logo, our branded colors, the name of the playlist or event the video was from in the top left corner, a few key words in the bottom left corner, and, where possible, featured screengrabs of the people featured in our videos. When branding thumbnails to a specific playlist, such as the webinar playlist, I tried to utilize cross platform branding by making our thumbnails similar to the webinar promotional graphics so people would have a visual idea of what they’re looking for.

Video Description improvements

There were no guidelines beyond our brand writing style for the marketing team to go off of when writing YouTube descriptions. Typically they were 1-3 short sentences briefly summarizing the video, and the writing styles varied greatly across the past 14 years of videos. I knew a couple of key factors in improving our videos visibility relied greatly on SEO of what’s written in the description so I formalized it as such:

• 1st paragraph
  Standard description of the video

• 2nd paragraph
  names and titles of speakers
  ex: Olivia Kwan, MD - Pediatric Rheumatology Fellow at Indiana University School of Medicine

• 3rd paragraph (for videos longer than 20 minutes)
  Timestamps/Chapters/Bookmarks with a short description of what is being discussed at that timestamp
  ex:
  1:23 – introduction
  4:55 – DEI initiative outline
  12:30 – Q&A: What’s the best exercise?

• 4th paragraph
  Links relevant to the content to drive people to our website
  Must include link to arthritis.org and the arthritis helpline
  8 maximum links allowed per video

COPPA improvements

In 2020, YouTube was required to update their services in order to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule (COPPA). In doing so, videos that were posted before 2020 had to be updated with a simple check box indicating whether or not the material in the video was directed towards children in a safe and appropriate way. YouTube was less likely to recommend your videos if you did not update this standard, so updating it is essential to your channel receiving impressions and views.

Measuring success

I implemented these changes slowly over the course of 2 years, so I took the data from the first month I started and the data from the most recent month and compared the two.

The numbers we were getting in one month at the beginning of my revitalization efforts vs the numbers we started having in one 28 day period after are frankly a vast improvement. Views had a 9.5x increase, watch time increased by 10.6x, subscribers increased by almost 8x, impressions went up 4x and impressions to click through seemed to have doubled.

Next, I decided to look at our improvements from the beginning of 2009, close to the time the channel was created, all the way to the month I started in 2021 and compared it to the 2 year period in which i implemented these changes.

Overall, I was able to deduce that our view time year over year has actually increased. We have had 100,000 more impressions in the last 2 years than we did in the first 12 years combined. Our impressions to click through rate has increased a lot as well.

Plans for Channel maintenance

Currently, I’m working on an outline to train employees in writing YouTube descriptions and picking out titles that are best optimized for SEO. I have updated a good chunk of our videos to be COPPA compliant and I will be continually doing so. We discovered that once the COPPA compliance had been updated, our older videos started performing well again. I will also continually be going through our older videos to sort into playlists, update descriptions, and add thumbnails. This will be a long process but it’s very doable. Continued maintenance of who we are subscribed to will be essential to growing our audience. Follower count went up when we unfollowed old inactive accounts and started following new accounts of disability and chronic illness influencers/educators and accounts for medical centers and research. Hopefully we will be able to open up avenues to more partnerships and collaborations as we grow our online presence.

Plans for the future

While maintaining the channel, we hope to expand our content and methods more in the future. We will start by uploading our backlog of podcasts to the YouTube channel. Posting podcasts on Youtube has been shown to increase awareness and drive more listeners to a podcast. The wonderful thing about YouTube that sets it apart from other sites is the comprehensive analytics available. We will be using these analytics to understand what viewers are want in order to implement more user-driven content.

You’ll hear almost every famous YouTuber say at some point that the internet is the Wild West. It’s ever growing and expanding, with constant changes. You never know what’s going to viral one day and out the next. We will have to be flexible and willing to try new methods, but we must remain loyal to our goal: To build a community for patients and health care providers to learn more about arthritis and hopefully someday find a cure.