There may have been a time when using video was something a small nonprofit needed to think about: next year. That time is history. Many people expect videos; almost everyone enjoys it. Without it, you will lose no small number of visitors to your website and you can expect your loss to grow dramatically in the months and years to come.

As 2008 wound down, the research firm comScore Inc. released online video viewing figures for October. Nearly 150 million Internet users in the United States watched an average of 92 videos each that month for a total of 274 minutes. How many of them were your videos? How many people read that many pages of a book? Or so many articles in a newspaper?

Google, which acquired YouTube in 2006, has a 40% market share, accounting for about 5.4 billion of the 13.5 billion videos viewed that month. Almost 100 million viewers watched videos on Google sites.

Video viewers make up 77% of US Internet users, comScore said.

You don’t have to remake Gone with the Wind. The average online video was just 3.0 minutes long, the research showed. And viewers don’t watch a web video for very long. Web video service provider TubeMogul reported that only about two-thirds of original viewers are still there after 30 seconds and if more than 5 minutes go by, only 10% are still with you. So hook your hook quickly and get your point across even faster, just like you would a news headline. This is no place for slow introductions or dramatic build-ups.

If you agree that video will be good for your organization, here’s a three-step plan:

1.) Get yourself a video camera. Don’t start with HD; The time hasn’t come yet, and you probably don’t have enough horsepower in your computer to do it justice. Plan to spend a minimum of $200 to $300 and get a camera that uses tape or records to a built-in hard drive. Large size and expense is not really necessary for web work.

2.) Learn to use a video editing program. When you start, Windows Movie Maker or iMovie for Mac should do the job, and they come free with your computer. They’re pretty intuitive and can do a lot of the things you need to do for basic movies. Worry more about getting good audio from the camera’s microphone, with as little background noise as possible.

3.) Set up a YouTube account and get in the habit of uploading videos. Go ahead and get a YouTube “channel” for your organization and start linking to individual movies from your website.

Have fun doing it. While creating a video takes a bit more time than writing a press release, it can also be more rewarding. He will probably soon discover that there are several members of his organization who are quite “comfortable” in front of the camera. Let them go for it. You will improve as you gain experience. And your group will reap the benefits.