I'm normally not surprised by many e-campaigning initiatives these days, but when I was exploring the 2008 Christian Aid Week Facebook Fan page, I went through to the email signup page out of curiosity and saw this.

That top image is a video that explains why Christian Aid want you to to provide your email address and how they will treat it.  What is great is that normally this information is buried in a privacy policy or in a statement that no-one reads.  But here it is in a very friendly and succinct format that communicates the key points without cluttering the page.

This is the type of simple but brilliant idea I love. I'd love to know how it performs vs. a signup form without the video. My hunch is that it would perform better in getting people to complete the signup page (vs. abandon it).

I also looked at the Mencap site recently and noticed they'd integrated video in each of the key sections that was not only relevant to the section, but make the work Mencap do more tangible and emotive.

It will be interesting to know if video increases visitor's understanding of the issues and if more of them become supporters or if these are just another way for design agencies to impress managers (who sign-off the project) but have no real positive impact on an organisation's education, recruitment and mobilisation work.

I suspect it will help, but by how much and at what cost. Anyone have an evidence on this to share?