The Nonprofit Website Insider
Issue 21: Offer Your Content in Multiple Formats 📺📚🔊
Video, audio, text – oh my! Why serving content in multiple formats can boost accessibility and engagement. Plus: a free webinar and more free power hours.
Dear website champions,
Detailed information can be hard to digest. Research shows that people absorb content differently: Some prefer to watch videos, while others (like me!) find that annoyingly slow. Some prefer to listen—or may even need to listen if they're not highly literate.
An effective trend is gaining traction: offering information in multiple formats on the same page.
Imagine giving your audience the freedom to choose how they engage with your content. It's not just about convenience; it's about accessibility and inclusivity.
Here's how some innovative platforms are making it happen:
Listen While You Work (or Relax): Ohio Legal Help has a "Listen to this article" button at the top of their articles. Using AI-generated voices (which have become impressively natural), they're turning written content into audio on demand. Curious about implementation? Check out How to easily turn all your articles into audio articles in the Deep Dive section below.
Want to hear more about Ohio Legal Help's experience? Sign up for the free mini-webinar below!
Image used with permission from OhioLegalHelp.org
From Screen to Script: If you're producing video content, consider offering a transcript. Place it prominently below the video or link to it clearly. This allows people to choose either method to digest the information.
This approach works best for well-structured, thoughtfully produced videos rather than those recorded off-the-cuff. Why? While viewers can easily follow meandering thoughts in a video, readers expect more coherence in written form. Even if your video is well-structured, you'll need to clean up a word-for-word transcription. Transcription tools aren't precise enough to produce a polished version, and people’s speech patterns tend to be more rambling and less grammatical than what works in written content. Remember, the goal is to create a transcript that stands as a valuable resource on its own, not just a word-for-word record of the video.
Check out Moz's approach: they pair videos with well-edited transcripts, complete with relevant images. You can tell the site didn’t just drop in the transcript—they created coherent sentences, cleaned up the grammar, and added the images needed to follow along. This type of transcript is called an “edited” transcript, distinguishing it from a “verbatim” one, which includes things like “ums” and stutters, and a “clean” one, which removes obvious stumbles but preserves nearly all the original wording.
You can always try just a few articles or videos, to see how it goes.
Here's to reaching every reader (and listener),
Laura
Dive Deeper
How to easily turn all your articles into audio articles | The Fix
A more substantial look at why you should consider providing an audio version of some or all of your articles, and a number of tools you can use to do it.
My Video Transcription And Editing Process | David Orban on LinkedIn
David describes his great process, which relies on both AI and a human editor, to create a friendly transcript.
Free Webinar
Mini-Webinar: Ohio Legal Help’s “Listen to Article” feature
Tues, Sep 24th, 12-12:30 ET
Join us as Laura Quinn interviews Susan Choe of Ohio Legal Help about the website's Text to Speech feature. Susan will demo this functionality, which allows users to listen to the text of pages and articles, and talk about how it's working for them. I'll ask her how big a project it was for them to implement it and what advice she would give to others who are thinking about doing something similar. After this 20-minute or so deep dive, we'll have a bit of time for your questions.
Want an Hour of Free Consulting?
The Free Power Hours in August were such a success that I’ve decided to continue them. I answered questions about increasing site credibility, improving donation flow, choosing the right CMS platform, moving potential donors up an engagement ladder, and enhancing search engine optimization. I even rolled up my sleeves to figure out how to get a specific type of content to display correctly in WordPress (not my specialty, so don’t count on me for that!).
I love doing these sessions—they’re a great way to understand what organizations are struggling with.
Interested in a one-on-one hour with me, no strings and no sales pitch attached? I’m only offering three per month, so sign up now to secure a spot.