Google for Non-Profits Blog

Introducing The Learn With Google Webinar Program

2012-03-05T10:27:00.002-08:00

(Cross posted from the Inside AdWords Blog)

At Google, one of our goals is to help make the web work for your business. Today we're introducing the Learn with Google webinar program that does just that, by sharing best practices and tips across a variety of products, including search ads, mobile ads, display ads, YouTube and Google Analytics.

We're kicking off the program with eight live webinars in March:
March 13 at 10am PDT: 5 Tips to Start Marketing your Business with Video
March 14 at 10am PDT: Introduction to the Google Display Network
March 15 at 10am PDT: GoMo: Mobilize your Site and Maximize your Advertising
March 20 at 10am PDT: Understanding Mobile Ads Across Marketing Objectives
March 21 at 10am PDT: Reaching Your Goals with Google Analytics
March 22 at 10am PDT: GoMo for Publishers
March 27 at 10am PDT: Manage Large AdWords Campaigns with Less Effort
March 28 at 10am PDT: 3 Tips to Get More out of your Video Advertising Campaigns
Check out our new webinar page to register for any of the sessions or to access on-demand webinars. We'll be adding new webinars as they're scheduled, so check back regularly for updates. You can also stay up-to-date on the schedule by downloading our Learn with Google Webinar calendar to automatically see upcoming webinars in your Google Calendar.

Whether your goal is to engage the right customers at the right time, make better decisions faster, or get the most from your marketing dollars, we hope that you'll use these tips and how-to's to maximize the impact of digital and grow your business. We're looking forward to having you join us!

Posted by Erica Tsai, Product Marketing Manager

Webinar Tomorrow - Getting Your Business On Google+

2012-02-27T11:28:00.004-08:00

(Cross posted from the Inside AdWords Blog)

Are you interested in connecting with your customers in new ways? Join our live webinar on Tuesday, February 28th at 10am EST (3pm GMT) to learn more about how you can bring your business and your customers closer together using Google+.

Key topics that'll be covered in the presentation by Google+ experts include:

Setting up a Google+ Page for your business
Best practices and great example cases for using Google+
Promoting your Google+ Page
Improving the performance of your online marketing with +1

Follow In Darwin's Footsteps With The iNaturalist Mobile App

2012-02-24T09:44:00.002-08:00

(Cross posted from the Lat Long Blog)

Editor’s Note: Today’s guest author is Dr. Scott Loarie, a fellow at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford and co-director of iNaturalist.org, a biodiversity citizen-science website. Pepperwood Preserve was the recipient of a Google Earth Outreach Developer Grant, funded through the Google Inc. Charitable Giving Fund at the Tides Foundation. We’re excited to share how the iNaturalist Android application developed as a result of this grant is being used in action at Pepperwood Preserve.

Last weekend, as I rolled back a piece of bark at Pepperwood Preserve to reveal a big black beetle, I was reminded of a great story about Charles Darwin. Out collecting beetles, Darwin already had a beetle in each hand when he spotted a third. To free up a hand, he popped one of the beetles in his mouth. No sooner had he done this when it excreted some sort of burning liquid onto his tongue forcing him to spit it out, drop the second, and miss his chance for the third.

Now in 2012, all I had to do was point my phone at the beetle and snap its picture with the iNaturalist app (available on iOS and Android). Beetle mishaps aside, following in Darwin's footsteps wasn't really something non-scientists could participate in until recently. Specimens had to be collected, stuffed and shipped to museums where they were identified, labeled and catalogued. But with new technologies like Google Maps and smartphones, contributing data to museums now only takes a single click.

Pepperwood Research Specialist Morgan Kennedy demonstrates how to use the iNaturalist app to observe a native grass at Pepperwood Preserve.

Last Saturday, Morgan Kennedy introduced the Pepperwood Vital Signs project on iNaturalist.org, a citizen-science website I help direct, to a group of about 20 community members at Pepperwood Preserve. The project aims to map the distribution of plants and animals across the preserve with geo-referenced photos contributed by community members. The community members participating in the project often don't know the name of the species they are photographing, but by passing the contributions on to international museum consortiums and conservation organizations, iNaturalist photos are usually identified by scientists and experts within a few days.

Over the last year, community members have documented more than 400 distinct species by uploading more than 900 geo-referenced photos from Pepperwood. As the pilot preserve participating in the new Bay Area Open Space Council BioAtlas initiative, Pepperwood is developing ways to use iNaturalist to assemble the contributed data into digital education materials that can be used by the preserves to further engage and educate their community members.

This Google Map shows the Pepperwood Boundaries and more than 900 contributions to the Pepperwood Vital Signs project on iNaturalist.org.

Saturday's training was especially exciting because Morgan demoed the new Android App that iNaturalist developed with the support of a Google Earth Outreach Developer Grant to Pepperwood. By making the contribution of data to museums easy and fun, the Android app clears a major barrier towards recruiting non-scientists to participate.

These reinforcements couldn't have arrived sooner. Plants and animals are disappearing about 1,000 times faster than normal with ongoing climate and land-use change, and one of the most difficult hurdles towards addressing these challenges has been the basic scarcity of information about where plants and animals persist and where they do not. Without the help of non-scientists, the handfuls of museums and graduate students tasked with providing this information simply can't scale to meet these challenges.

Want to get involved? Download the app (on iOS or Android), get outdoors, and start documenting nature from wherever you are in the world! If you want to start your own regional project, like the Pepperwood Vital Signs project, you can do that here. You'll be following in Darwin's footsteps - just don't be tempted to put any beetles in your mouth!

Posted by Scott Loarie, co-director iNaturalist.org

Encourage Students To Get Involved With Doodle 4 Google

2012-02-21T16:16:00.002-08:00

You are probably familiar with Google's decorated logos, or "doodles." But did you know that for the last five years Google has invited students across the US to submit their own doodles for a chance to be featured on the Google homepage? The Doodle 4 Google contest encourages students to use their imagination and artistic talents to redesign Google's logo for millions to see. The doodling theme for 2012 is "If I could travel in time, I'd visit...." and we can't wait to see the great drawings kids come up with! For some inspiration, click here to meet last year’s winner, Matteo Lopez.

In addition to seeing his or her art on the Google homepage on May 18, 2012, the Doodle 4 Google 2012 National Winner will also receive a $30,000 college scholarship and a $50,000 technology grant for their full-time school. 50 State Winners will win a trip to New York City and 10 finalists per state will see their art displayed in a local museum or gallery.

With little more than a month left in the contest, we wanted to let you know how your organization can help raise awareness of this opportunity:

If you work with students:

Tell students you know about the Doodle 4 Google contest
Pass out submission forms
Host a doodling party
Share the story of Matteo Lopez
Engage students in discussion of the theme "If I could travel in time I'd visit...."

If you work with schools or educators:

Send an email to local schools and educators about the Doodle 4 Google contest
Use your social media networks to raise awareness
Share the Submission Packet Request Form, where schools and after-school programs can receive free submission forms in the mail
Tell schools about the opportunity to win a $50,000 technology grant

Happy doodling!

Posted by Megan Stevenson, Local Consumer Marketing Team

A 'Next' Step For YouTube Nonprofits

2012-02-17T08:49:00.000-08:00

(Cross posted from the Official YouTube Blog)

Last year we launched YouTube NextUp to accelerate the growth of the next big YouTube stars. Then in October, we announced YouTube Next Chef and YouTube Next Trainer to turbocharge up-and-coming cooking and fitness channels by great YouTube video creators. We’re excited to share the latest addition to the Next Creator family of programs: YouTube Next Cause for nonprofits.

YouTube Next Cause is designed to help organizations that are already changing the world better use online video to drive action. At a one-day summit in San Francisco on April 2, selected participants will get access to everything from training in YouTube fundamentals, to promotion and community engagement tips, to one-on-one consulting sessions to grow their YouTube presence.

We’ve always sought to make YouTube a platform for nonprofits to broadcast their messages. And we’ve seen amazing things happen when the YouTube community comes together in support of great causes. With 4 billion views a day, we want to make sure nonprofits have the tools they need to reach the global audience on YouTube and turn video views into donations, volunteerism and awareness.

Applications for YouTube Next Cause are due on February 27, 2012 at 11:59PM PT, and the selected nonprofits will be announced on March 5. This program is open to organizations that are part of the YouTube Nonprofit Program (full eligibility requirements). You can apply online at: http://goo.gl/ODbI6.

Check out what nonprofits are doing on YouTube at youtube.com/nonprofits. And tune in around March 5 to learn more about some of the great nonprofit organizations chosen and what they’re doing to change the world!

Posted by Hunter Walk, YouTube Team

Lay Claim To Your Personal Conservation Plot With Adopt-an-Acre

2012-02-15T13:14:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite quotes is by American anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

We can each play an active role in changing the world for the better by preserving areas we care about. The Nature Conservancy has just made it easier with their Adopt-an-Acre program. They’ve updated their mapping tool today as the result of a Google Earth Outreach Developer Grant, which offers funding to organizations that create clever, cutting-edge applications using Google mapping technologies.

One of the solutions for widespread habitat loss is to acquire large plots of land for conservation. Since 1991, the Adopt-an-Acre program has protected more than 600,000 acres spanning from North America to Africa and Australia, even protecting offshore areas critical for delicate coral reefs and humpback breeding grounds.

Adopt an acre through the Nature Conservancy
There are two featured areas that allow you to adopt a specific acre, the Nash Prairie Preserve in Texas and the Warm Springs Mountain Preserve in Virginia. Simply fly to ground level on the embedded Google Map and choose your acre. You can also select your plot through Google Earth by clicking on the “View in Google Earth” link. This map enables any interested individual to make a pledge and help restore an acre of land to its pristine state.

The Nash Prairie Preserve in Texas is a beautiful and vital tall prairie grassland. These prairies used to cover wide expanses in the Bottomlands region of coastal Texas, but these areas have been reduced due to metropolitan encroachment. More than 120 bird species and 300 plant species thrive in this disappearing ecosystem, which you can help protect.

The Warm Springs Mountain Preserve in Virginia is the other area within a 77,000 acre wildlife corridor where you can adopt a specific acre. If you have a connection to the Allegheny Mountains in Virginia, or if you are passionate about preserving species like the interior dwelling songbird, you can choose from a variety of landscapes, pristine rivers and mountain forests to conserve.

Best of all, you can adopt an acre in the name of a loved one or as a gift to someone else. Their name will appear on the map alongside others who have entered their names in support of preserving our wild America.

Learn more about what nonprofits have done with mapping technologies on the Google Earth Outreach website.

Posted by Tanya Birch, Google Earth Outreach

Lights, Cameras, Causes: The 2012 Nonprofit Video Awards

2012-02-10T10:26:00.000-08:00

For the third year, YouTube is teaming up with See3 Communications to present the DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards, a celebration of the best non-profit videos on the site. If you’re a nonprofit who made a video in 2011, you’re eligible and encouraged to submit.

It doesn’t matter if your organization is small and scrappy, large and global, or somewhere in between. We’ll award prizes like $3,500 grants, free admission to the Nonprofit Technology Conference, and a spotlight on the YouTube homepage to small, medium and large organizations, plus a special award for “Best Video Storytelling.”

Need more details? Watch this video:

The deadline to enter is February 29, 2012 and you must be a member of the YouTube Nonprofit Program at the time of judging, to enter. Full rules are available here.

Get those cameras rolling and good luck!

Posted by Ramya Raghavan, YouTube For Nonprofits Team

Public Alerts Now On Google Maps

2012-02-01T13:06:00.000-08:00

(Cross posted from the Official Google.org Blog)

Last week a new Google Crisis Response project launched: Google Public Alerts, a platform designed to bring you relevant emergency alerts when and where you’re searching for them.

If a major weather event is headed for your area, you might go online to search for the information you need: What’s happening? Where and when will it strike? How severe will it be? What resources are available to help?

The Google Crisis Response team works on providing critical emergency information during crises. Our goal is to surface emergency information through the online tools you use everyday, when that information is relevant and useful.

With the launch of Public Alerts on Google Maps, relevant weather, public safety, and earthquake alerts from US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Weather Service, and the US Geological Survey (USGS) will be accessible when you search on Google Maps. For instance, at the time of this post, “Flood Indiana” triggers an alert for a Flood Warning in Northern Indiana.

If you click through to “more info” on this alert, you’ll find a page showing more details about the alert, with the full description from the alert publisher, in this case the National Weather Service, a link to their site and other useful information.

Whether you see an alert depends on which alerts are active at a given location, their severity, and your search query. If you’re interested in seeing all of the active alerts in one place, visit our homepage at www.google.org/publicalerts. This page also provides a link to more information on our new platform and gives instructions to interested organizations who want to make their emergency data available through this tool.

We’re learning as we go and we’re working hard to continuously improve the range and relevance of the content you see, so we’d really like your feedback. Please send feedback our way using the link at the far right of our Google Public Alerts homepage.

We hope Google Public Alerts provides you with information to make better decisions in times of crisis.

Posted by Steve Hakusa, Public Alerts Engineer

Resources To Support A New And Open World For Learning

2012-01-26T15:16:00.000-08:00

(Cross posted from the Official Google Blog)

Googlers are the types who never really leave the classroom. Guest speakers come to campus to give talks on subjects ranging from fiction to physics. Diverse groups of people work together to understand and solve big problems while groups of Googlers engage in passionate debate in our cafeterias. Given this environment, it’s no surprise how highly we value our external work in education. We have a growing number of successful education programs from primary school through to university, as well as a suite of free and open tools that reach families and classrooms around the world.

Recently, we decided to gather our resources and lessons learned into one place for educators everywhere. “Google in Education: A New and Open World for Learning” highlights how people are using Google resources to enhance teaching and learning. This booklet isn’t your typical annual report; it’s a living document for educators to use year-round. We’ve also revamped our website, google.com/edu, to be a one-stop shop for teachers, students, parents and organizations to explore all of our offerings. We’ve launched a Google+ page, where everyone can stay updated on our educational tools, products and programs, and join the conversation.

To develop all of these new materials, we went straight to the source, relying on dozens of educators to provide stories and feedback. We hope these resources will inspire and enable teachers, while affirming our commitment to increasing access to an excellent education for all.

Thanks to educators, students and supporters everywhere for helping to extend our spirit of lifelong learning into classrooms around the globe.

For more information about Google in Education, visit www.google.com/edu/about, and to stay updated on the world of education at Google and connect with fellow educators, follow us on Google+.

Posted by Jordan Lloyd Bookey, Head of Global K-12 Education Outreach

YouTube For Nonprofits, Reloaded With New Tutorials And Features

2012-01-23T13:15:00.000-08:00

(Cross posted from the Official YouTube Blog)

Nonprofits are an important part of the YouTube community, and their videos have educated and inspired audiences since the early days of the site. We launched the YouTube Nonprofit Program in 2007 to help organizations take their work to the next level, and since then, more than 16,000 nonprofits have joined the program. There are hundreds of nonprofit organizations with millions of views on YouTube, and dozens with more than ten million views, like Greenpeace, Khan Academy and UNICEF.

We’ve made a couple of updates to the program that we hope will help nonprofits use video in new and compelling ways.

The Playbook Guide: YouTube for Good. This is a how-to resource specifically targeted at nonprofit organizations, with sections on how to create content, raise funds, connect with other community members and more.

Improved features. As part of our new Channels design, we’ve made the donate button on nonprofit channels even more prominent, making it easier than ever to support the causes you care about.

If you’re a YouTube Nonprofit Program with other ideas about how we can make the program better, tell us your suggestions in the comments below! If you’re a nonprofit in the U.S., U.K., Canada or Australia and not yet a member, visit www.youtube.com/nonprofits to learn more and apply.

Posted by Valerie Streit, YouTube Team

Biodiversity On The Move

2012-01-19T12:52:00.000-08:00

(Cross posted from the Lat Long Blog)

Editor’s Note: Today’s guest author is Ari Daniel Shapiro from Atlantic Public Media (APM), a non-profit public media organization in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. APM was the recipient of a Google Earth Outreach Developer Grant, funded through the Google Inc. Charitable Giving Fund at the Tides Foundation. We’re excited to showcase how Atlantic Public Media has weaved Google Earth and KML tours into engaging stories about the diversity of life.

Life gets around. Tiny Arctic Terns soar from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and back, in a single year. A kind of sea algae known as “sea grapes” roam from Australia to the Mediterranean as stowaways, and then promptly conquer their new home.

As a radio producer, I’m used to telling these kinds of stories with audio, weaving together interview tape, ambient sound, and narration. For the last two years, I’ve worked with Atlantic Public Media and the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) to produce an audio series entitled One Species at a Time. Each episode pays homage to a different organism that gallops or creeps or pulses on our planet. We collaborate on these stories with Marie Studer, the EOL's Learning and Education Director, who has championed our podcast as way to make the natural world come alive and generate excitement amongst people who want to learn about it and explore.

While our podcast and public radio programming brought these tales of the natural world to listeners all over the planet, we always look for ways to tell these stories better and share them more widely. Eduardo Garcia Milagros, a biologist and KML developer in Spain, approached us last year with the idea to use Google Earth as a platform for these mini-documentaries. Brimming with enthusiasm, he shared “When I first opened Google Earth, I went to see my hometown. Once I started exploring KML capabilities, I realized that Google Earth can be an amazing educational tool, especially when you have a good story.” Inspired by his excitement, we decided to identify species whose stories could really be best illustrated through a map, such as the Arctic Tern’s annual migration.

Our tour on Arctic terns can be viewed on YouTube or downloaded and explored in Google Earth.

Incorporating Google Earth into our narratives proved to be an interesting challenge for me and Jay Allison, my editor on the project and the Executive Director of APM. We wanted to make the most of the map as a medium to bring to life the tale of the Arctic Tern and other species for viewers. By integrating geographic animation and imagery from all over the world with the audio and images from contributing scientists, we were able to support and enhance the story. For example, in the sea algae tour below, we circle the globe to the Amazon rainforest to illustrate a phenomenon in the ecology of the Mediterranean.

Our sea algae tour can also be found on YouTube or downloaded for viewing in Google Earth.

These tours combine voice, sound, images, video, and data-driven animations to explain how two creatures have been able to travel so much of our planet. Coming from a public radio documentary background, we tend to approach things from a purely narrative or poetic angle, but Google Earth tours allow for audio/visual dialogue as well. The movement isn't purely in the story. The map can become part of a “conversation,” and we're just beginning to explore the possibilities.

We hope to produce more of these Biodiversity on the Move tours in the future; we’d like to hear what you think of them and what we can improve next time. Drop us a line on the Encyclopedia of Life blog.

Posted by Ari Daniel Shapiro, Atlantic Public Media and the Encyclopedia of Life

Celebrating Martin Luther King Day By Giving Back

2012-01-17T18:28:00.000-08:00

(Cross posted from the Official Google Blog)

Yesterday, Martin Luther King Day of Service in the U.S., Googlers around the country worked with community service organizations to lend a helping hand in their area and commemorate the holiday.

The Black Googler Network (BGN), an employee resource group made up of volunteers, spearheaded this effort to set up service projects in multiple offices. In the California Bay Area, we joined The Center for Music National Service in the MLK Day of Service & Song in various projects to beautify John O’Connell High School in San Francisco’s Mission district. Projects included mural painting, landscaping and organizing books and materials, and the celebration included time for students and volunteers to share their art and voice their feelings about the importance of the day.

In New York last week, we teamed up with the Harlem Children’s Zone for a full-day workshop with college students to review their resumes and conduct mock interviews, aimed at supporting the organization’s goal of ending the cycle of generational poverty. And in Ann Arbor, Mich., we joined the Ann Arbor Community Center and University of Michigan students to serve hot meals and give out winter garments to homeless families in need.

We’re proud of the ways Googlers came together to celebrate and we’re committed to diversity and cultural inclusion year-round, with a focus on closing the technology gap. Last year, our FUSE, CSSI, BOLD and BOLD Practicum summer programs brought hundreds of students from culturally diverse backgrounds to Google offices worldwide for summer internships. We hosted national pitch night for The Technovation Challenge for girls. The BGN’s efforts to aid minority and low-income communities included its annual BGN New Orleans Outreach Trip, and we hosted speakers Condoleezza Rice, Alice Walker, Belva Davis and Soledad O’Brien among others. We have even more plans for promoting diversity in 2012.

If you’re interested in volunteer opportunities in your area, visit mlkday.gov or allforgood.org.

Posted by Chad Sanders, Global Learning Systems, Talent

Ask Your Question In The 2012 Google Science Fair

2012-01-17T11:43:00.000-08:00

(Cross posted from the Official Google Blog)

Are human beings born curious, or can curiosity be nurtured through environment, competition or a good teacher? Everyone’s got a question—that’s ours. But we’re sure you’ve got tons of questions, too. Today, we’re inviting students around the world to pose their most pressing questions about the world around them and answer those questions through scientific inquiry.

Along with our partners CERN, The LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American, today we’re launching the second annual Google Science Fair, the largest online science competition in the world, open globally to students ages 13-18. Either individually or in teams of up to three people, students pose a question, develop a hypothesis and conduct science experiments to test it. The entire process is detailed and submitted online, via a website template participants fill out themselves, so all you need to participate is curiosity, an Internet connection and a browser.

Last year, we received entries that strove to solve a wide variety of needs, from “How can I cure cancer?” to “Can I teach a robot to learn English?” to “Can I build a faster sailboat?” The breadth and depth of these projects was incredibly impressive, and this year we hope to see even more entries from the next generation of brilliant young scientists.

This year’s fair will be even more global than the last: We’re now accepting submissions in 13 languages (Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Spanish and Russia). We will also be recognizing 90 regional finalists (30 from the Americas, 30 from the Asia Pacific and 30 from Europe/Middle East/Africa). From these 90, to be announced in May, our judges will select the top 15 finalists, who will be flown to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. for our live Google Science Fair final event on July 23, 2012. At the finals, a panel of distinguished international judges (like Vint Cerf, Sylvia Earle and Nobel Laureates David Gross and Ada Yonath) will select top winners in each age category (13-14, 15-16, 17-18).

We’re also introducing a new category for this year’s competition—the Scientific American Science in Action award. We were so inspired by 2011 finalist Harine Ravichandran’s project, which attempted to solve energy surges in rural villages, that we decided to recognize an outstanding project that addresses a social, environmental or health need to make a difference in the lives of a group or community, as Harine’s project did for her grandparents’ village in India. The winner will also be flown to Mountain View for the finalist event in July.

The Google Science Fair opens today, January 12, worldwide, and we’ll accept submissions until Sunday, April 1 at 11:59pm GMT (or 6:59pm ET/3:59pm PT). In addition to satisfying your curious mind, your brilliant project can also help to win you some pretty cool prizes, like a $50,000 college scholarship from Google, a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands with a National Geographic Explorer or an internship at Google or any one of our partners. Our Scientific American Science in Action award winner will earn $50,000 and year-long mentorship to make their project goal a reality.

The winners of last year’s inaugural Google Science Fair became something like scientific rock stars. Shree Bose, Naomi Shah and Lauren Hodge met with President Obama, were invited to speak at big events like TEDx Women and were featured in Wired magazine. Shree, our grand prize winner, was named one of Glamour magazine’s 21 Amazing Young Women of the Year. White House visits and Glamour aside, every student in the Google Science Fair has the chance to do hands-on research that can truly change the world.

Visit google.com/sciencefair and ask your most burning questions at the top of your voice for the world to hear. Google itself was founded through experimentation and with the Google Science Fair, we hope to inspire scientific exploration among the next generation of scientists and engineers, celebrate scientific talent, create scientific role models and unite students around the world in the quest for learning.

Posted by Cristin Frodella, Google Education Team

Google Apps Highlights

2011-12-16T15:08:00.000-08:00

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

The elves got an early jump on the holidays this year by leaving us some surprises in Google Apps over the last few weeks. Sharing from Gmail got a whole lot easier, and Google Calendar can make better use of precious screen space. We also have 10 new Google Apps customer stories to share from the tens of thousands that have gone Google in recent weeks.

Gmail gets more social
Last week we sprinkled a touch of Google+ into Gmail, making it easier to connect and share with people from your inbox. You can add people to circles right from an email thread through Gmail’s people widget, share photo attachments with friends and family on Google+ without leaving Gmail, and view a filtered version of your inbox only showing messages from people in your circles. We also improved Gmail’s address book by incorporating contact information shared by your friends, family and colleagues in their Google+ profiles.

New features in the Gmail iOS app
Just yesterday we added several new improvements to the Gmail app for iOS 4+. Now you can set up a custom email signature for mobile messages, manage your vacation responder, and view nested labels from your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. We also added scribbles, a fun way to spice up messages by adding a quick hand-drawn sketch. You can create scribbles using a range of colors, brush sizes, lines, erasers and spray paints from your touchscreen device.

More free calls right from Gmail
Last year we introduced free domestic calling in Gmail within the U.S. and Canada, and we’re extending this free service for the whole year of 2012. We’re happy to help you keep in touch with those special people in your life, for free.

Hide morning and night hours in Calendar
If you don’t often have appointments early in the morning or late at night, a new trick in Google Calendar might be useful. Now you can hide morning and night hours, leaving more screen real estate for the times of day when most of your events take place. Give it a try in Calendar Labs.

Who’s gone Google?
Businesses and schools are switching to Google Apps in droves these days. From tiny startups to large enterprises and nonprofits to college campuses, we love hearing the inspiring stories that our customers share. Here’s a new batch of stories for your reading pleasure: TripIt, IPSEN, Ebby Halliday, Ticket River, VigLink, HeyZap, The Great Books Foundation, Utah K-12 schools, the U.S. Coast Guard Academy and UC Santa Cruz. Welcome one and all!

For more details and the latest news, check out the Google Apps Blog, and keep an eye out for this series here after the holidays. We launched more than 150 improvements to Google Apps in 2011, and we have a ton more in store for 2012!

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Team

Giving Back In 2011

2011-12-15T12:13:00.000-08:00

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

As the holiday season approaches we thought it was a good moment to update you on some grants we're making to support education, technology and the fight against modern day slavery.

STEM and girls’ education

Science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) open up great opportunities for young people so we've decided to fund 16 great programs in this area. These include Boston-based Citizen Schools and Generating Genius in the U.K., both of which work to help to expand the horizons of underprivileged youngsters. In total, our grants will provide enhanced STEM education for more than 3 million students.

In addition, we're supporting girls’ education in the developing world. By giving a girl an education, you not only improve her opportunities, but those of her whole family. The African Leadership Academy provides merit scholarships to promising young women across the continent, and the Afghan Institute of Learning offers literacy classes to women and girls in rural Afghanistan. Groups like these will use our funds to educate more than 10,000 girls in developing countries.

Empowerment through technology

We've all been wowed by the entrepreneurial spirit behind the 15 awards in this category, all of whom are using the web, open source programming and other technology platforms to connect communities and improve access to information. Vittana, for instance, helps lenders offer loans to students in the developing world who have have a 99 percent repayment rate—potentially doubling or tripling a recipient's earning power. Code for America enables the web industry to share its skills with the public sector by developing projects that improve transparency and encourage civic engagement on a mass scale. And Switchboard is working with local mobile providers to help African health care workers create networks and communicate for free.

Fighting slavery and human trafficking

Modern day slavery is a multi-billion dollar industry that ruins the lives of around 27 million people. So we're funding a number of groups that are working to tackle the problem. For instance, in India, International Justice Mission (IJM), along with The BBC World Service Trust, Action Aid and Aide et Action, are forming a new coalition. It will work on the ground with governments to stop slave labor by identifying the ring masters, documenting abuse, freeing individuals and providing them with therapy as well as job training. Our support will also help expand the reach of tools like the powerful Slavery Footprint calculator and Polaris Project’s National Trafficking Hotline.

To learn more about these organizations and how you can get involved, visit our Google Gives Back 2011 site and take a look at this video:

These grants, which total $40 million, are only part of our annual philanthropic efforts. Over the course of the year, Google provided more than $115 million in funding to various nonprofit organizations and academic institutions around the world; our in-kind support (programs like Google Grants and Google Apps for Education that offer free products and services to eligible organizations) came to more than $1 billion, and our annual company-wide GoogleServe event and related programs enabled individual Googlers to donate more than 40,000 hours of their own volunteer time.

As 2011 draws to a close, I’m inspired by this year’s grantees and look forward to seeing their world-changing work in 2012.

Posted by Shona Brown, SVP, Google.org

Grow Your Organization Through Google+ This Holiday Season

2011-12-07T12:38:00.000-08:00

We know you must be really busy right now trying to wrap up your year-end goals, especially fundraising targets, before everyone heads out for the holiday season. The Google for Nonprofits team would like to help. We’ve seen nonprofit organizations doing great work on Google+ to reach new people and build relationships with their audiences, and so wanted to provide you with a “holiday gift” of tips on turning your new Google+ followers into active contributors to your organizations this holiday season. This booklet is posted on our Google+ for Nonprofits community page where you can find lots of resources to get started.

In addition, you may have noticed that in the past couple days, a group of entertainers and individuals have started drawing attention to their favorite charities with the phrase #CauseILoveEm, and creatively showing their followers what they love about these nonprofit organizations.

+Russell Brand is asking fans to volunteer for two hours of charity work at +Habitat for Humanity of Greater Los Angeles, +Los Angeles Animal Alliance or one of four other local LA charities. In exchange, he and Sarah Silverman will give fans two hours of live comedy.

+Usher and student participants in his New Look Leadership Academy asked people to do an international act of kindness and post descriptions of their acts including photos and videos as comments on +Usher's New Look Foundation. The acts with the most "+1"s will be re-posted by Usher and highlighted on the New Look Foundation website.

+Linkin Park posted a new video asking people to spread the word about +Music For Relief and their new Power the World Give Light campaign, which encourages people to donate to provide solar-powered light bulbs for families in Haiti without electricity. People who share their website online and drive the most clicks will be eligible to win prizes.

+Dolly Parton and +Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, her early child literacy program that provides 700,000+ free books every month, are sharing Champion Spotlight stories about their community leaders and are posting the 20 most inspiring Imagination Moments submitted by families who have benefited from this gift of reading.

Co-founder +Hugh Jackman and +Laughing Man Coffee & Tea asked people to share photos of themselves with Laughing Man's fair trade products (the profits of which go to charity) and to sound off on living their motto, "All Be Happy," using #CauseILoveEm to be included in a thank you photo album.

+Josh Groban and +Find Your Light Foundation announced the Fulfill-a-Wish campaign, spotlighting the needs of nonprofit arts organizations from across North America in videos and posts and asking for your help fulfilling these holiday wishes.

We’d love for you to take advantage of this movement to generate more awareness for your nonprofit. Ask your Google+ followers to share your organization publicly and with their circles using #CauseILoveEm, and letting people know why they love you in the most creative ways possible. Consider starting a quick campaign to engage new people ready to “share their love.” For example, give people something that they can do to get involved this month like posting a video about your cause, sharing a story related to your organization, or volunteering to be eligible for a Hangout for your program recipients. Please also join the open circle we’ve started on our +Google for Nonprofits +Page so we can suggest your organization to people wondering which nonprofits they can connect with and showcase.

We hope these tips and this viral program help you a bit towards achieving your year-end goals this holiday season.

Posted by Mimi Kravetz, Google.org Team

More Support For Grantees

2011-12-07T08:02:00.000-08:00

Do you have a question about Google Grants that you can’t find an answer to, even in our newly updated Help Center? Would you just rather talk to someone directly?

We’re happy to say that you can do both.

If you have a question about Google Grants and you want a good answer fast, the Google Grants Help Forum is the place for you.

We’ve just re-launched the forum with the new look and feel that you might already be familiar with from using other Google products like Gmail, and we think you’re really going to like it. It follows the same principles as the other products: focus, elasticity and effortlessness, but most importantly, it’s designed to get your questions answered fast.

We have dedicated Top Contributors (you’ll know them by the blue icon next to their name), Google employees (you’ll know them by the Google icon next to their name) and many active nonprofit participants ready with answers to your Google Grants questions. Plus, there are already lots of answered questions for you to browse. Your question may already have been answered!

But what if you just want to ask a real live person about your AdWords account? Well, you can do that, too.

Back in April, we announced free phone support for US and Canadian-based AdWords advertisers, and we thought this would be a good time to remind you that, as Google Grantees, this resource is available to you, too.

Just call 1-866-2Google between 8am and 8pm EST Monday-Friday and have your AdWords customer ID ready. If you’re outside the US and Canada and want to talk to an AdWords specialist, check this list for your local support phone number.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

A Nonprofit Goes Google To Further Enjoyment Of Reading And Learning

2011-12-05T13:44:00.000-08:00

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Mark Gillingham, Vice President of The Great Books Foundation, a nonprofit educational organization whose mission is to promote reading, thinking, and the sharing of ideas for people of all ages. The Foundation's 60 employees have been using Google Apps for over two years.

For the past 60 years, the Foundation has helped millions of students and adults make the reading and discussion of literature a lifelong source of enjoyment, personal growth, and social engagement.

We offer courses for teachers in person and online. The Foundation also publishes books, anthologies, and materials for all ages to provide quality texts to discuss.

We have a history of using free and open-source applications on our desktop computers and servers that are more flexible and powerful than the paid applications we had been using. Once we learned that Google Apps was available at no cost for nonprofits under 3,000 users, I gathered our IT planning committee to plan how to migrate 60 users from our existing system.

We had been using an onsite email system for years because it was part of our file system. Although we upgraded the system every two years, it never seemed up-to-date. We had issues reading certain types of documents and viewing images and web sites. Using the system away from the office caused problems because we needed special applications, which varied by operating system. The calendar was not compatible with our mobile devices and the document repository was difficult to manage. As a result, most staff did not utilize the IT solutions we were offering.

We planned our deployment with a local developer Rachel Baker, whom we met through NTEN (Nonprofit Technology Network). She helped us understand what was required for a successful deployment and guided us through the process. We also used the Google Apps Marketplace to find a Google Apps reseller, Cloud Sherpas, whose specific migration knowledge and software helped us move all of our data.

At launch in 2009, our staff was thrilled to finally use a modern email program with highly reduced spam. Years later, some of us have still not gotten over this giddy feeling. More teams are using Google Docs to share internal and external documents. Google Calendar is the official way we schedule our meeting rooms.

Now in 2011, we're excited to try out Google+ in our organization to find new ways to collaborate. We are considering using Google+ to provide technical support for our employees. Also, we think our remote workers could use Google+ as an easy way to communicate with their peers and home base while travelling.

Part of my job is seeing the future so I can help direct the Foundation toward technology that will work for them. Google is always improving its products and launching new features. I love it when I can show someone the next new thing. It makes them smile, which makes me smile too.

If you are a U.S. 501c3 nonprofit interested in using Google Apps, please apply for our Google for Nonprofits program. If accepted into the program, you can receive up to 3,000 users for free, or a 40% Business discount on more than 3,000 users.

Non US-based organizations can sign up for a free Google Apps account with 10 users, or you are welcome to purchase Google Apps for Business.

To help you setup Google Apps quickly, Google provides many deployment resources, plus a simple in-product Setup Wizard.

Posted by Chris Cheng, Google Apps Team

Share Your Story

2011-11-28T12:34:00.000-08:00

With the launch of the Google for Nonprofits program, we created a place for organizations to share stories of the powerful work they are doing to change the world. Our Make a Change website collects lots of big and small changes made by people at nonprofits. We are inspired by these organizations and want to continue to share these stories so we invite you to share your organization’s story with us via this webform. Tell us about how Google products have helped you make a change with your organization. We would love to hear more about what you’re doing and we may even feature you on our Make a Change website.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Posted by Janelle Kuhlman, Google Grants Team

Join Presidents Bush, Clinton, plus Bono and Alicia Keys this Worlds AIDS Day on YouTube

2011-11-23T10:35:00.000-08:00

(Cross-posted on the Official YouTube Blog)

Did you know there are now 6.6 million people receiving treatment for HIV, compared to just 100,000 in 2002? Still, more than a thousand babies are born every day with HIV and there are 34 million people living with the disease.

This World AIDS Day, you can join the discussion about how to help bring about the beginning of the end of AIDS. We’re partnering with ONE and (RED) to bring you a panel of experts who will talk about the progress we’ve made, where we're falling short, and what it's going to take to end this disease for good. They’ll also answer some questions from the YouTube audience. Starting today, you can submit your questions to the panel, which includes Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton; Bono, co-founder of ONE and (RED); Alicia Keys, co-founder of Keep a Child Alive; and other leaders in the fight against AIDS, including representatives from the Tema Clinic in Ghana, the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation and the Saddleback Church.

On December 1, World AIDS Day, these leaders will answer some of the top-voted questions live on YouTube at a special event hosted by ONE, (RED) and an impressive list of partners and influencers.

According to ONE, if we recommit to the fight against AIDS, by 2015 we could end mother-to-child transmission of HIV, provide treatment to the 15 million people who need it, and drastically reduce new infections. With the support of donors, African governments, organizations, and the private sector the beginning of the end of HIV/AIDS is within our reach.

Submit your question today and become part of the beginning of the end of AIDS. The deadline to submit is November 28.

Posted by Ramya Raghavan, YouTube Team

Google Apps Highlights

2011-11-18T13:46:00.000-08:00

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog)

The last few weeks have brought a fresh new look in Gmail, more mobile access options and simpler meeting scheduling tools. Millions of organizations using Google Apps can now use Google+ on their business and university accounts, and we launched a couple Apps-related Google+ Pages ourselves.

Gmail’s new look
Back in July we previewed Gmail’s new look, and a couple weeks ago we started letting people switch to the new design with one click. The refreshed interface makes it easier to follow conversations and spot the sender with profile pictures for each message. The new look also supports dynamic screen densities, so Gmail displays properly whether you’re viewing on a large desktop monitor or a smaller mobile screen. We also added a selection of beautiful HD themes to the existing gallery. Finally, we made it easier to perform advanced email searches using a panel of powerful search options that reveals with a single click.

Gmail app for iOS devices
This month we introduced the Gmail app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, complete with mobile alerts for new mail, a responsive touch screen interface and Gmail mainstays like fast search, conversation view and address auto-complete.

Suggested meeting times in Google Calendar
We’ve heard how frustrating it can be to spend 15 minutes finding a good time for people to convene for a 30 minute meeting, so we made it easier to find a good meeting time in Google Calendar. The suggested times feature automatically reviews the availability of meeting invitees, and proposes event times that work for the whole group.

Google+ for organizations using Google Apps
Businesses, schools and organizations with Google Apps can now use Google+. Employees and students can create profiles, +1 things they like on the web, share interesting content with their circles and have live multi-person video chats with classmates, colleagues and friends. Organizations can also create their Google+ Pages—an organization’s identity on Google+ for customers, students or fans. We’re using Google+ Pages ourselves, so take a look at the Gmail and Google Enterprise pages, and circle us if you’d like to stay in the loop.

24x7 telephone support and improved mobile device management
This week, we introduced a couple other new benefits for Google Apps customers. Organizations of all sizes around the world can now call our support hotline at any time for all core service issue. Also new this week, we improved our mobile device management capabilities with an interface for administrators to view and deny mobile devices connecting to Google Apps, granular mobile policy controls, and the ability to visualize mobile usage trends across the organization.

Who’s gone Google?
Organizations large and small continue to amass around Google Apps. We’re thrilled to welcome a whole host of new customers including the Trinity Mirror Group (Britain’s largest newspaper publisher), startups such as JobFlo and UserTesting, organizations including the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and colleges like the University of Michigan and UT Austin. Welcome to all!

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Team

More Google+ Resources For Your Nonprofit

2011-11-11T11:42:00.000-08:00

Now that you’ve created a Google+ Page for your organization, tested how to tailor your messaging to different audiences that you care about with Circles & Hangouts and have told everyone that you’re on Google+, we wanted to wrap up our week-long series on Google+ for nonprofits with a few additional resources:

If you’re looking for help creating your Google+ page or about Google+ in general, check out the Google+ Help Center.
If you want to pose a question about Google+ Pages, head over to Google+ Page Discuss.
If you have general, nonprofit-related questions, explore the Google for Nonprofits Help Center.
If you have support-related questions, you can ask them in the Google for Nonprofits Discussion Group.

And we’re on Google+ too! So if you haven’t already added the Google for Nonprofits Google+ page to your circles, head over and check us out. We hope this series was helpful to get your nonprofit started with Google+ and look forward to learning more about how your organization is using Google+ to further your goals. Make sure to share your Google+ best practices on our page so other nonprofits can learn from you.

Posted by Leslie Hernandez Dinneen, Google.org Team

Get The Word Out That Your Organization Is Now On Google+

2011-11-10T11:19:00.000-08:00

Now that you’ve put a ton of work into your organization’s Plus Page, let people know about it! There are lots of ways to tell the world that your nonprofit is on Google+.

1. Tell everyone you’re on Google+: Tell donors, volunteers & clients in your newsletters, on your website & anywhere else that users go to learn about your organization. We’ve created some starter language for you to add to your next email, newsletter or social media update. You can customize this language for your organization:

Newsletter & Email copy: We’re now on Google+! [link to your Google+ page] We’ll be posting regularly about what we’re up to and will be trying a few Hangouts. So come check us out on Google+. And if you love us, add us to your Circles so you can get all of our Google+ updates directly in your Google+ stream. Leave a comment on our Google+ Page and let us know what you think.
Social media update: We’re now on Google+! [link to your Google+ page] Come hang out with us and hear the latest on what we’re up to. You can follow us here: [add a link to your nonprofit’s Google+ Plus Page]

2. Connect your Google+ Page to your website

Let users know they can find you on Google+ by connecting your Google+ page to your nonprofit’s website. Learn more about linking your +Page to your website.

3. Add the +1 button to your website

Help your message circulate by installing the +1 button on your website. You can easily grab a snippet of code and work with your webmaster to add it to your website. You know your page and your users best, so we recommend putting the button wherever you think it will be the most effective. Learn more about the +1 button.

By telling everyone that your nonprofit is on Google+, you can let volunteers, friends, donors, board members & more know that they can have a customized conversation with your nonprofit on Google+.

Posted by Leslie Hernandez Dinneen, Google.org Team

Engaging Your Constituents On Google+

2011-11-09T11:26:00.000-08:00

Do you ever wish you could tailor your social media communications to all of the different audiences your nonprofit communicates with? For example, you probably speak to volunteers differently than how you speak to the board. As part of our week-long series to get nonprofits up and running successfully on Google+, here are a few ways for you to start sharing your Google+ page with key audiences for your organization.

1. Continue posting to keep people up-to-date

You can post content publicly so people can find it using search, or use Circles to tailor your message to more specific users. Regularly posting interesting content, engaging with your users by asking questions, and sharing photos and videos are all ways to keep people coming back for more. Learn more technical tips on how to share content with others.

2. Launch Hangouts

Nothing beats having a live, dynamic gathering around a topic that your organization works on or cares about. Hangouts let you set up one-click video conversations with volunteers, donors, and recipients -- whoever you want to have a conversation with. Just let your followers know when you’ll be hanging out and what topic you want to discuss. You can get face-to-face interaction in real time -- all over high-quality, easy-to-use video chat.
Starting a hangout from your +Page is easy, just make sure you’re looking at your +Pages stream, and click “Start a Hangout” on the right hand side of your stream. Check yourself out in the “powder room” to make sure your mic works and you look great. Then, add the circles you would to join the hangout, and click “ Hangout.” Learn more about Hangouts with +Pages.

3. Manage your circles

Different people have different interests, and Google+ allows you to easily share relevant content with the right people. For example, you could create a circle for volunteers and share information with them about upcoming events. Learn more about managing Circles on Google+.

4. Monitor the conversation

It’s important to stay updated about what is happening on your page and what the general tone is. Whether negative or positive, make sure to stay engaged with your Google+ page by responding to comments. Some comments, even if negative, may still serve as a gateway for richer dialogue about important issues. Consider how you can leverage a difficult comment to have a conversation.
Try searching for your organization’s name in Google+ to learn what people are saying publicly about your Google+ page. Also make sure to monitor other +mentions of your page by looking in your notifications stream.

Check back tomorrow for more information about how you can tell the world that your organization is now on Google+.

Posted by Leslie Hernandez Dinneen, Google.org Team

Create A Google+ Page For Your Nonprofit To Connect With People Who Care About Your Cause

2011-11-08T14:07:00.000-08:00

As part of our week-long series to help nonprofit organizations get up and running on Google+, we wanted to share some more details about how you can successfully create your Google+ page.

Your Google+ Page is the home of your organization on Google+; make it yours with photos, success stories, information about volunteering and donating, project locations and more. You can follow the steps below to get your organization up and running on Google+.

1. Create your profile

You’ll need to have a Google Account and a personal Google+ profile to create a Google+ Page. Once logged into your Google+ profile, on the right hand side of your stream, you will see “Create a Page” to begin creating your page.
When you create your page, you’ll be asked to select a category, make sure you select “Company, Institution or Organization” to indicate that you’re a nonprofit.
To get started, walk through the dialog boxes to set up the basics of your profile including a profile picture and a tagline for your organization.
Want more help? Learn more about creating your Google+ Page and editing your profile.

2. Start posting

Want to start the conversation? Make your page engaging so that users want to come back and check what new content you’ve added. You can choose which circles you share info with, so people are only seeing the updates that are the most relevant and interesting to them.
Learn more about sharing on Google+.

3. Grow your Circles

Whenever someone adds you to their Circles, you can add them right back, so spreading the word and encouraging people to add you is a key component of talking to the people who want to hear from you. To view people and pages who aren’t already in your circles but have added you, review your followers on your Google+ page.
Learn more about adding people to your circles.

4. Follow and Interact with helpful Google+ Pages

Follow the latest on Google+ and in the Google for Nonprofits community by adding our official Google+ team page and the Google for Nonprofits Google+ page to your circles.
Interact with our Google+ page by dropping by for a hangout, reading and commenting on our tips, and letting us know how you’re liking Pages by sharing a post with us.

Check back tomorrow for more tips and tricks to engage with people who care about your nonprofit on Google+.

Posted by Leslie Hernandez Dinneen, Google.org Team

Google+ Pages Now Available For All Nonprofits

2011-11-07T14:19:00.000-08:00

We’re committed to building online tools that help your nonprofit grow and thrive. One of our goals is to make it easier for you to connect with the millions of people who come to Google each day looking for organizations and causes to connect with. An important part of that connection is the lasting relationship you develop with your various constituents.

We want to make sharing online more like it is in the real world. That’s why the Google+ team introduced Google+ Pages - a new way to have customized conversations and interactions with your constituents - volunteers, donors, fans & more. Google+ is a great place for you to connect with consumers who are passionate about your cause.

With the launch of Google+ Pages, any cause, nonprofit or organization can now have a presence on Google+. We’ve compiled a few Google+ tips to help your create your Google+ profile, start posting, grow your circles, start a hangout, monitor the conversation and tell the world that your nonprofit is on Google+. A few organizations, Pencils of Promise, Save the Children and Museo del Prado, have started their own Google+ Pages. We hope their early work gives you some ideas & inspiration for your nonprofit’s Google+ page.

The Google for Nonprofits team is on Google+ too! Check out our Google for Nonprofits Google+ page and add us to your circles. We'll post community questions, host hangouts so you can meet the team & hear from experts, share tips & engage users in an ongoing conversation about nonprofits and technology.

There are also many resources to help you stay up-to-date on the latest news from Google+. We’ll post new information about Google+ for nonprofits on the Google for Nonprofits blog. Check back this week for more information about how nonprofit organizations can utilize Google+. You can also follow the Official Google blog to keep up with the latest Google+ product news and updates. If you need additional help with your Google+ page, check out the Google+ Help Center or post a question in the Google+ Page Discuss.

We look forward to connecting with you on Google+.

Posted by Leslie Hernandez Dinneen, Google.org Team

The Google For Nonprofits Program Launches New Application And Account Management Features

2011-11-02T13:45:00.000-07:00

We’re happy to announce that we recently launched a series of new features to improve the process of applying for and managing your Google for Nonprofits membership account. Members are now able to do the following:

1. Organizations can now switch the Google Account linked to their Google for Nonprofits application from a personal to an organization-wide Gmail account. Learn More

2. Branches of umbrella organizations that share Employee Identification Numbers (EIN) with their parent organizations can apply for individual membership accounts. Learn More

3. New account managers are able to request ownership of their organization's pre-existing membership account. Learn More

Please make sure to visit the Help Center links listed above to learn about these new features.

We also want to thank the members who have provided input in the Google for Nonprofits forum. We hope you enjoy the new features.

Posted by Carolyn Wendell, The Google For Nonprofits Team

Google Online Marketing Challenge NGO Impact Award Winners 2011

2011-10-28T13:27:00.000-07:00

We’re pleased to announce the winners of the NGO Impact Award, a new award that recognizes Google Online Marketing Challenge student teams that made an outstanding difference to their nonprofit partners via superb online marketing campaigns. The deciding factors for these winners were the effectiveness of the campaign and a 200-word report on how the advertising impacted the nonprofit. The reports were judged by an independent panel of nonprofit leaders.

Prizes for the winners include:

1st place - $15,000 donation to the nonprofit partner
2nd place - $10,000 donation to the nonprofit partner
3rd place - $5,000 donation to the nonprofit partner

Congratulations to the following winners!

1st Place
Michael Albrecht and Christian Pfeifhofer taught by Dr. Horst Treiblmaier from Vienna University of Economics and Business worked with TrashDesignManufaktur. TrashDesignManufaktur is a non-profit organization in Vienna which offers unemployed persons the opportunity to learn new skills by up-cycling electronic waste and discarded machines into high-quality design objects, such as jewelry and furniture.

2nd Place
Sebastiano Comin, Simone Dolci, Elena Merazzi, Elena Moriondom and Giuseppe Scampa taught by Dr. Nicoletta Vittadini from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore collaborated with Istituto Oikos. Istituto Oikos works in Europe and in developing countries to advocate for and promote environmental conservation.

3rd Place
The team of Erin Blatzer, Lauren Davis, Carolina Thomas, and Jeffrei Clifton taught by Professor Steven Koch from University of Houston partnered with the Houston Symphony. The Symphony is one of America's oldest performing arts organizations and performs approximately 170 concerts each year for more than 350,000 Houstonians.

If you’re interested in being involved in next year’s Google Online Marketing Challenge NGO Impact award, stay tuned to our website.

Posted by Jessica Schwartz, Google AdWords Team

Google Person Finder Launched In Turkish

2011-10-24T12:22:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted on the Google.org Blog)

After the earthquake in Van, Turkey, Google Person Finder has launched in Turkish for people looking for their loved ones in the region. Through Google Person Finder, people can enter a new record in the list for a person they're looking for. Anyone who has information for the missing people on the list can update the data. All data entered will become publicly available, viewable and usable by anyone. And you can help search and rescue teams by updating the status of missing people. To use Google Person Finder, visit this site: http://turkey-2011.googlepersonfinder.appspot.com/.

Google Person Finder was developed after the Haiti earthquake in January 2010 to help people who were trying to reach their friends and families, and to reunite them. We hope Person Finder helps people get the latest information on missing persons using one common source. After the Japanese tsunami, 600,000 persons records were entered into Google Person Finder. For more information about how it works, click here.

The Google Crisis Response Team

Google Apps Highlights

2011-10-24T09:49:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

In the spirit of helping people work better together, over the last few weeks we made big improvements to Google presentations, introduced a version of Google Docs optimized for Android tablets, and enabled more dynamic content in Google Sites. We also celebrated the fact that Silicon Valley has gone Google!

Google presentations reloaded
On Tuesday we launched a completely rebuilt version of our web-based presentations application, so you can build more beautiful presentations together with colleagues and classmates. Google presentations now lets you make great-looking slides with animated builds, advanced slide transitions and better support for drawings, tables and themes. Plus, we made it easier to create presentations with others, without the hassles of attachments. Your whole team can work together in the same version of a presentation at the same time, and you can see who’s doing what, chat with others, and see a full revision history at any moment in time.

Google Docs on Android tablets
We’ve made it faster and easier to work with Google Docs on Android tablets with a new version of the Android application that takes full advantage of larger screen real estate. The three-panel view lets you browse filters and collections, see your document list and view file thumbnails and details simultaneously. You can get the Google Docs Android app for free from the Android Market.

Charts in Google Sites
Charts are often created in spreadsheets, but sometimes you want charts to appear in other places, like your team or project sites. In Google Sites, now you can select “Chart” from the “Insert” menu, and navigate to the Google Spreadsheet where your chart or data is located. You can also choose to have your site’s chart update in real-time when someone updates the underlying spreadsheet.

New look for Google Docs and Sites
We started rolling out a new look in Google Docs a couple months ago, and now this new design is available throughout all our collaboration tools. In addition to a cleaner, simpler design, we’ve made it more clear when your files are being auto-saved and added new icons to help you see at-a-glance who your docs are shared with. You can also customize the overall “density” of screen information, a great feature if you want to fit more onto a smaller display.

Who’s gone Google?
Successful small businesses tend to stay laser-focused on improving their core businesses, without getting distracted by peripheral activities that don’t make them more competitive. For example, most small businesses don’t want to spend time or money developing in-house expertise to run email and other IT systems. Case in point: 97 percent of Business Insider’s “Silicon Valley Startups to Watch” use Google Apps.

More than 5,000 businesses and thousands of other organizations start using Google Apps every single day, and more of our customers have shared their stories recently so you can hear why. A warm welcome goes out to Philz Coffee, Mid-Atlantic Door Group, Bradford & Barthel, LLP and the City of Mesquite, Nevada.

I hope these product updates and customer stories help you and your organization get even more from Google Apps. For more details and the latest news, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Document Hosting With Google Products

2011-10-19T12:50:00.000-07:00

Part Two Of A Two Part Series

Last week we told you about Children’s Radio Foundation and how they use Google Docs to act like a file server for their organization. This week, we’ll talk about another nonprofit, Grassroot Soccer who uses a different Google product - Google Sites - to host files for their organization.

Also headquartered in Cape Town, South Africa, Grassroot Soccer is a nonprofit organization that uses the power of soccer to educate, inspire, and mobilize communities to stop the spread of HIV. Located in approximately 15 countries, Grassroot Soccer uses Google Sites to allow its dispersed employees to access important organizational wide documents. But how exactly do they do this?

The staff has created a number of sites to organize and share information. The organization is made up of various departments including Communications, Programs, Monitoring and Evaluation, and Curriculum & Development. Here’s a snapshot of the nonprofit’s site dashboard.

Let’s dig deeper into a few of the individual sites and see what Site features they utilize. Under the Programs category, there is a site dedicated to one of GRS’s most popular program types called a Voluntary Counseling and Testing (VCT) Tournament. Essentially these are large youth soccer tournaments where there is a testing center on site for youth and spectators to be tested for HIV. You can imagine how much planning goes into one of these events, and the VCT Google Site is a repository for all the key documents needed to put on this event.

The programs team uses the File Cabinet feature of Google Sites to host all the document templates needed when running a VCT. Using a File Cabinet allows GRS to:

Create folders to categorize their documents for easier organization. The File Cabinet holds everything from vendor contact lists, to letters to schools informing them of the tournament, to the surveys used for monitoring and evaluation at the event, being able to categorize these templates into folders makes them easier to find.
Allows them to add, delete, or move files within the cabinet. The File Cabinet allows the easy ability of editing what’s included in the File Cabinet, by doing so directly in the site. Your changes are reflected on the site and anybody can subscribe to receive emails when a change is made to the cabinet.

For more details on how GRS users the File Cabinet see the screenshot below:

Google Sites, like Google Docs, can also store more than just documents, so if you want an eclectic range of file types together, it’s possible. Under the Communications category, Grassroot Soccer has a site called the “Brand Book.” This site holds documents, photos and videos related to their marketing, communications, and branding strategy. Let’s say for example, a GRS staff member in Zimbabwe is curious as to what letterhead to use to write an official document to the ministry of health, or they want to order business cards for themselves, they can check the “Brand Book” to access the most up-to-date templates for letterhead or business cards. Grassroot Soccer uses Attachments to simply attach the relevant documents to the bottom of the sites page. Because hosting your documents on sites allows you to easily mix documents with other media, on the Brand Book site you’ll also find top GRS photos and videos.

In terms of site management, the staff members of each departments manage their departments’ sites, and everyone within Grassroot Soccer can see every site.

Now that you’ve seen how Grassroot Soccer uses Google Sites to host their files and documents, try it out and let us know if it’s working for your organization by posting on the Google Discussion Forum.

Posted by Carolyn Wendell, Consumer Operations Team

Nonprofit Industry Benchmark Report For Mental Health And Crisis Intervention

2011-10-12T10:33:00.000-07:00

Last year we asked participants in the Google Grants program to submit surveys about their experience with Google Grants, AdWords and other products. Of the responses we received, we were able to glean a bit of insight into the industries that make up the nonprofits in our program and would like to share those insights with you for the purposes of creating your own benchmarks and metrics in this monthly benchmarking series.

This month we’re featuring the Mental Health and Crisis Intervention category of the nonprofit industry. Look to future months for other NTEE nonprofit categories.

Grantees in the Mental Health and Crisis Intervention industry were most likely to track “new volunteers” as their most important metric, state "reaching new constituents" as their main mission objective served via their Grant and state "raising awareness" as the main marketing objective served via their Google Grant.

With regard to the performance of their Grants AdWords account, they received an average of 35% of their total site visits from their Grants AdWords account and an average of 2,100 conversions over the last year (11/2009 - 11/2010).

An average of 9.5% of Mental Health and Crisis Intervention organizations who responded to the survey report that they currently use an agency, SEO or SEM to manage their Grants AdWords account.

We hope that, as an organization focused on mental health and crisis intervention, you will be able to use these industry benchmarks to gauge your own performance with online marketing and begin to understand the trends of your particular vertical within the nonprofit industry.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

Document Hosting With Google Products

2011-10-11T10:37:00.000-07:00

Part One Of A Two Part Series

Recently, I’ve been hearing a fair amount of buzz amongst nonprofits about wanting Google products to act as a “file server” for their organization. Google Docs and Sites can allow for storage and access by all different computers, providing a lot of similar functionality as nonprofits rely on from "file servers”. Children’s Radio Foundation and Grassroot Soccer have used Google Docs and Sites in two very different ways to provide document hosting and sharing across their organization.

We sat down with these two organizations to learn more about how Google has provided a free and easy alternative to server hosted solutions. This week we’ll focus on the Children’s Radio Foundation (CRF). We interviewed Tom Henry, CRF Board Member to learn more about how the organization uses Google Docs to host their files.

The Children’s Radio Foundation (CRF) is a nonprofit based in Cape Town, South Africa that focuses on using the rich subtext of radio media to give young people a voice, and empower them to contribute to individual and social change.

Tom Henry, a volunteer for CRF has greatly helped the organization by designing a method for them to host and share files using Google Docs. One of Tom’s favorite Google Docs features is collections, which allows him to label related files and group them into folders that can then be shared with others across the organization.

What benefits does Tom see of using Docs and collections?

Advanced Sharing Options: With collection’s advanced sharing options, Tom can choose who can view, comment and edit the various collections.
Multiple Collections: Tom can create multiple collections, each representing a key part of the organization (eg. Legal information, Board information, etc.), and program-related collections named by the country where the program exists.
Multiple file types: Collections can include files of all types including PDF’s, spreadsheets, and text documents.
Direct upload or Convert to Google Docs: When uploading docs to collections, Tom most frequently uploads text documents and spreadsheets and then converts them into Google Docs, allowing employees the ability to edit and collaborate on these docs online, upon upload. However, at times, Tom would prefer to upload them in the original PDF format, without conversion to the Google Doc equivalent, making sure he is holding the integrity of the document.

The most useful feature to Tom was the Advanced Sharing Options offered by collections. Tom would share the collections and give people across the organization access, assigning them privileges that made sense for their job role. For example, he would give his admin view access to several of the collections, whereas he would give the other directors edit access to the collection. Everyone could edit or view collections shared with them by going into their Google Docs account and looking in the left hand column under “Collections Shared with me.”

Now that you’ve seen how CRF uses Google Docs, try it out and let us know if it’s working for your organization by posting on the Google Discussion Forum.

Posted by Carolyn Wendell, Consumer Operations Team

The New Look Of Google For Nonprofits Help

2011-10-07T14:56:00.000-07:00

Every nonprofit wishes signing up for Google for Nonprofits was as easy as just clicking a button, but we know this isn’t always the case and occasionally nonprofits need help.

That’s why we just launched the Google for Nonprofits Help Center, a one stop shop where you can find support for the Google for Nonprofits Program and all associated products without having to dig through multiple help centers to find the support you need.

You’ll notice that close to 50 new articles have been added to what used to be the Google for Nonprofits FAQ page, and that we have cross-published articles from the Google Apps, Google Earth, and SketchUp help centers. Additionally, you may have noticed that the Google Grants Help Center has moved to the Google for Nonprofits help center.

A few extra special things to point out about the new help center:

There’s information to help you enroll in offerings
Confused about enrolling in Google Apps?
Visit the Enroll in Products > Google Apps section of the help center and check out the Sign up Guide.

Confused about setting up your AdWords account?
See the Enroll in Products > Google Grants section to check out the Grants Account Creation Guide.

There are contact forms to support top issues
We now have contact forms in place to support top issues for the general Google for Nonprofits application process and to support each product. See the Contacting Us page for more details.

We have new troubleshooters
Is something not working the way it’s supposed to?
Check out the Fix a Problem section that includes troubleshooting content for both the enrollment process and post-enrollment product support.

Let us know what you think about our new help center! Take a spin, explore the new resources and start up a discussion in the Google for Nonprofits Discussion Forum.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

Google Earth Outreach And Canadian Nonprofits Connect Over Mapping Tools

2011-10-06T13:44:00.000-07:00

Last week Google Earth Outreach launched our program in Canada, offering support to non-profits and aboriginal communities that wish to leverage Google’s mapping tools to improve understanding of critical issues facing Canada today. Our team spent the week in Vancouver inspiring and empowering these groups to spread their message through geographic visualizations.

Google Earth Outreach team member Tanya Birch works with a participant on Fusion Tables.
We kicked off the week with a 3-day workshop co-hosted with our partner Tides Canada. With their help, we were able to gather developers, communications and technology professionals from over 50 organizations to be trained on Google Earth, Google Maps and Google Fusion Tables. We met folks from a diverse set of organizations, such as Ecotrust Canada, Social Alterations, Living Oceans Society, and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami.

These groups came into the workshop with varying levels of familiarity with Google’s geo tools. While some participants leveraged the time to master the basics, others focused on advanced coding using the Maps APIs. Non-profits developed and worked on their project ideas with Earth Outreach staff on hand for guidance and technical help. Our team was amazed by some of the projects that came out of these sessions, including a Google Fusion Table map of Inuit communities and a Google Earth tour of the path of a migrating whooping crane.

Whooping crane migration path visualized in Google Earth by Matt Hanneman of Global Forest Watch Canada.
Our activities in Vancouver culminated in an event on Wednesday for the wider Vancouver non-profit community. We were honored to have David Suzuki, an influential Canadian scientist, author, broadcaster and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation, on hand to share his thoughts on how philanthropy, public engagement and technology can advance the reach, scope and impact of Canadian civil society. Our team’s founder, Rebecca Moore, also took the stage to demonstrate how the rich variety of environmental and social issues in Canada can benefit from geographic visualizations as powerful tools for environmental advocacy and social justice. Afterwards, our team got to interact with the community face-to-face at demo stations featuring Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Fusion Tables, Open Data Kit as well as already developed Canadian mapping projects.

Inspiring examples of Canadian organizations already using mapping tools to communicate their work.
We are very excited about the next steps for these non-profits who have started their mapping initiatives and we can’t wait to see what comes next! For Canadian organizations looking to learn more, please take a look at our new Canadian website in English or French.

Posted by Raleigh Seamster, Program Manager, Google Earth Outreach

We Asked, You Answered

2011-09-29T14:33:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, we asked you to share how you currently use Google products and how you find educational resources for those products. We were excited that hundreds of you took the time to provide a lot of great input. We wanted to highlight a few of the main themes, and alert you to some new educational resources that we’ve created based on your feedback.

What we heard:
Nonprofits go online primarily for communication and driving awareness
We asked you for which tasks you’ve sought out online resources or support. Many of you go online to communicate with others in your organization. You also go online to find resources for fundraising, online marketing, driving awareness for your cause, volunteer management and project management. Needless to say, there are a wide variety of tasks that you go online to complete!

Nonprofits want more info about nonprofit-specific Google tools
We asked you which Google tools you’d be interested in learning more about and it was clear to us that you’re most interested in the nonprofit-specific product offerings. AdWords (Google Grants), YouTube for Nonprofits and Google Apps for Nonprofit are at the top of the list of tools that you want to learn more about.

Nonprofits prefer online tutorials, step-by-step checklists and online videos as educational formats:
We also asked you about your preferred formats for additional educational resources. You want online resources that are broken down into meaningful steps, such as online tutorials or checklists. You also said that you want more multimedia educational resources, such as online video.

We wanted to take quick action on your feedback, so we’re launching a new set of educational checklists designed to help nonprofits get started with the Google tools that are available through the Google for Nonprofits Program. You can find this information here: http://www.google.com/nonprofits/tips.html.

Additionally, we’ve launched a series of new Google Docs templates to help you with volunteer management. We have two Google Forms, a Volunteer Database Template & a Volunteer Event Registration Form Template to help you automate collecting volunteer information online. With these templates you can build an online database of general volunteer interest and get volunteers registered for specific events. We’ve also created a Volunteer Management Google Sites Template to help you communicate with volunteers, share key documents and publish a calendar of upcoming events. You can customize them to fit your organization’s volunteer management needs.

We’ll continue to develop additional resources to help save you time and increase your effectiveness with Google tools. If you have additional thoughts or feedback on the educational content we’ve shared today, please take a moment to share your perspective in the Google for Nonprofits forum here.

Posted by Leslie Hernandez Dinneen, Google.org Team

Ann Arbor Launches Google Product Office Hours for the Nonprofit Community

2011-09-27T10:56:00.000-07:00

Next week, Google’s Ann Arbor, Michigan office is piloting Community Office Hours for local nonprofits. As a proud member of the Metro Detroit community, Google Ann Arbor is eager to help southeast Michigan nonprofits achieve their goals by providing extra support on Google tools.

Ann Arbor’s Community Office Hours will provide nonprofits with an opportunity to sign up for 20 minute appointments to receive one-on-one help with Google product questions. Google volunteers will be on-hand to answer questions related to Google AdWords, Google Analytics, Google Places, Google Apps, and Google+.

The inaugural session will take place on Thursday, September 29 from 11:00a.m.-1:00p.m. with recurring sessions every Thursday through the end of October. Office hours are located at the McKinley Towne Center (201 S. Division Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48104) in downtown Ann Arbor.

Interested in making an appointment?
Registration is required. To sign up, first select the Google product you have a question about, then register for a 20 minute appointment.

If you have any questions, please send them to a2communityofficehours@google.com.

We look forward to seeing you at Community Office Hours!

Posted by Colby Chilcote, Google AdWords Team

Google Earth Outreach Launches In Canada

2011-09-26T13:56:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted on the Lat Long Blog)

We are excited to announce the launch of the Google Earth Outreach program in Canada. To celebrate the Google Earth Outreach team is directly engaging the Canadian non-profit and aboriginal communities through a week of exciting workshops and activities in Vancouver, BC. The program has been successful in helping non-profits around the world bring their stories to life through the use of Google’s mapping tools. To date, the Google Earth Outreach team has facilitated the use of mapping tools to stop mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, documented Darfur with USHMM, highlighted climate change with Al Gore, and most recently took Street View to the Amazon, just to name a few.

Both as a Canadian and Google Earth Outreach team member, I’m thrilled to bring these exciting opportunities home. Canada currently faces a wide variety of environmental and social issues that can benefit from powerful geographic visualizations.

With the launch of the program in Canada, the team aims to support the use of online mapping tools by public benefit groups seeking to address Canada’s most pressing concerns, such as the protection of the Boreal forest and Arctic regions, as well as other humanitarian and cultural issues. We are enabling organizations to quickly and easily get the resources they need to use Google Earth and Google Maps to tell visually compelling stories about their causes to millions of users. Watch the video below for a preview highlighting the work the David Suzuki Foundation is doing to protect Canadian oceans.

David Suzuki Foundation’s I Am Fish video is a great example of a Canadian organization using Google Earth to communicate their cause to a large global audience.

Eligible members of the Canadian non-profit community are now able to apply for grants of Google's tools and services including Google Earth Pro and SketchUp Pro. The launch of our Canadian website gives our Canadian users access to a plethora of resources to help them better develop their mapping projects through tutorials, a showcase of great non-profit maps, and an online community of other non-profit Google Earth and Google Maps users.

To jumpstart these mapping initiatives in Canada, the Google Earth Outreach team has partnered with Tides Canada to engage with Canadian non-profits face-to-face with two very popular and fully-booked events. Starting today, the Google Earth Outreach team will be teaching a technical, interactive three-day workshop and facilitating mapping projects among the participating non-profits and aboriginal groups. We’ll cap off our activities on Wednesday night with an exciting event for the larger Canadian non-profit community, with a keynote talk by our very special guest Dr. David Suzuki. This event will give attending non-profits a sneak peek at how other groups have used Google Earth and Google Maps to make a powerful impact on their communities.

To hear more about what we’re up to in Canada this week, check out our homepage for a different Canadian mapping example every day and follow us on Twitter. We hope these early Canadian partners will inspire you to use Google Earth and Google Maps to help tell your own story!

Maryam Ghofraniha, Google Earth Outreach

From the desert to the web: bringing the Dead Sea Scrolls online

2011-09-26T08:15:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog and the Google.org Blog)

It’s taken 24 centuries, the work of archaeologists, scholars and historians, and the advent of the Internet to make the Dead Sea Scrolls accessible to anyone in the world. Today, as the new year approaches on the Hebrew calendar, we’re celebrating the launch of the Dead Sea Scrolls online; a project of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem powered by Google technology.

Written between the third and first centuries BCE, the Dead Sea Scrolls include the oldest known biblical manuscripts in existence. In 68 BCE, they were hidden in 11 caves in the Judean desert on the shores of the Dead Sea to protect them from the approaching Roman armies. They weren’t discovered again until 1947, when a Bedouin shepherd threw a rock in a cave and realized something was inside. Since 1965, the scrolls have been on exhibit at the Shrine of the Book at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Among other topics, the scrolls offer critical insights into life and religion in ancient Jerusalem, including the birth of Christianity.

Now, anyone around the world can view, read and interact with five digitized Dead Sea Scrolls. The high resolution photographs, taken by Ardon Bar-Hama, are up to 1,200 megapixels, almost 200 times more than the average consumer camera, so viewers can see even the most minute details in the parchment. For example, zoom in on the Temple Scroll to get a feel for the animal skin it's written on—only one-tenth of a millimeter thick.

You can browse the Great Isaiah Scroll, the most well known scroll and the one that can be found in most home bibles, by chapter and verse. You can also click directly on the Hebrew text and get an English translation. While you’re there, leave a comment for others to see.

The scroll text is also discoverable via web search. If you search for phrases from the scrolls, a link to that text within the scroll viewers on the Dead Sea Scrolls collections site may surface in your search results. For example, search for [Dead Sea Scrolls "In the day of thy planting thou didst make it to grow"], and you may see a link to Chapter 17:Verse 11 within the Great Isaiah Scroll.

This partnership with The Israel Museum, Jerusalem is part of our larger effort to bring important cultural and historical collections online. We are thrilled to have been able to help this project through hosting on Google Storage and App Engine, helping design the web experience and making it searchable and accessible to the world. We’ve been involved in similar projects in the past, including building the Yad Vashem Holocaust photo collection and collections at the Prado Museum in Madrid. We encourage organizations interested in partnering with us in our archiving efforts to enter their information in this form. We hope you enjoy visiting the Dead Sea Scrolls collection online, or any of these other projects, and interacting with history at your fingertips.

Posted by Eyal Miller, New Business Development and Eyal Fink, Software Engineer, Israel Research and Development Center

Google Apps Highlights

2011-09-23T17:06:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label “Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

It’s back-to-school season, and we’ve made Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar and Sites easier to use and more powerful for students and non-students alike—including some important accessibility improvements to help blind users be productive in our apps.

Multiple sign-in and other new preferences in Gmail for mobile
On Wednesday, we added some helpful new features for people who use Gmail on a mobile browser. You can now sign in to more than one Gmail account at a time, and toggle between them easily from the account switcher menu at the bottom of the mobile inbox. This can be a good time saver if you have multiple accounts or share a mobile device with family members. Gmail for mobile also now enables you to set up mobile-specific email signatures and create vacation responders right from your phone to let people know when you won't be available by email.

Calling credit auto-recharge
Now you can automatically add international calling credits for phone calls in Gmail when your balance gets low. Just visit the "Billing" area of the Google Voice settings page and click "Add credit" to put your account on cruise control.

Allow people to comment but not edit in documents
Sometimes, you might find yourself in situations when you’d like to share a document for feedback, but don’t want to make the document's content fully editable. The comment-only level of access launched last week is a nice option for these scenarios. You can let others discuss and add their thoughts to your document—without allowing them to change your work. You can allow document comments from specific individuals or groups, from anyone belonging your organization or from the general public.

Format painter, Fusion Tables, drag & drop images and vertical cell merge
Comment-only access isn't all that we've added to Google Docs over the last few weeks. Other notable improvements include a text format painter in documents, which is a fast way to copy and paste font, size, color and other text styling. Spreadsheets now support vertically merged cells (in addition to horizontal merges). In drawings, you can drag images from your desktop to the drawing canvas, then continue editing your graphic. We also added Fusion Tables as a new document type in the documents list. Fusion Tables are a powerful way to gather, visualize and collaborate on large data sets that might be unwieldy in a typical spreadsheet.

Fusion Table data visualized on an interactive map

Accessibility improvements in Google Calendar, Docs and Sites
We think technology can do a better job getting out of people’s way and helping you be more productive with less complexity and fewer frustrations. In this spirit, we’ve recently made a series of improvements to make our applications more accessible to blind users. We have more work to do, but Google Calendar, Docs and Sites now offer better support for screen readers and improved keyboard shortcuts. We hope these changes make our applications more useful to all users.

Who’s gone Google?
Organizations are moving to Google Apps for a diverse set of reasons—including cost savings, streamlined teamwork and better mobile access. We’ve even started hearing from schools and businesses who have made the switch to reduce their impact on the environment. No two organizations choose Google Apps for the exact same reasons, but in total, the momentum of Google Apps keeps growing.

We recently shared the news that 61 of the top 100 universities ranked by U.S. News and World Report have gone Google. On the business side, there are now more than 4 million companies using Google Apps, and businesses are joining at a rate of over 5,000 per day. In all, there are more than 40 million users that regularly use Google Apps in their organizations.

I hope these product updates and customer stories help you and your organization get even more from Google Apps. For more details and the latest news, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Live Webinar: Accessibility Updates for Docs, Sites and Calendar

2011-09-15T12:44:00.001-07:00

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Enterprise Blog)

Earlier this year, members of the blind community shared a powerful message with us about the importance of accessibility. On the Official Google Blog, we announced some accessibility enhancements to our products, including new keyboard shortcuts and improved screen reader support in Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Calendar. For blind students and employees who rely on assistive technologies to access the web, we hope these improvements will make it easier to use our products.

To answer your questions and discuss how today’s product updates affect blind users in businesses, governments and schools using Google Apps, we’d like to invite our enterprise customers to join us for a webinar on September 21.

Accessibility Updates for Docs, Sites and Calendar
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
12:00pm-1:00pm PT
Sign up here

To learn more about accessibility features in Google Apps, please visit our help center. For information more generally about using Google products with screen readers, how to send us feedback and how to track our progress, visit google.com/accessibility.

Posted by Naomi Black, Technical Program Manager, Accessibility

Google Apps Highlights

2011-09-06T16:07:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Over the last few weeks, we added a few frequently-requested improvements to Google Apps, including offline access in Gmail, Calendar and Docs, page numbering in documents, and page-level permissions in Google Sites. If you’ve been waiting for these features, please give them a try!

Work offline in Gmail, Calendar and Docs
You can connect to the Internet in more and more places now, but you probably occasionally find yourself in situations when you can’t use web apps because of spotty connectivity. Now you can stay productive even without a connection in Gmail, Calendar and Docs on Chrome, thanks to new offline capabilities for each of these applications.

Free calls home for overseas U.S. Military personnel
On Tuesday, Gmail also added the ability for all U.S. Military personnel with valid .mil email addresses to call the United States for free. We appreciate the hardships our troops face, and we hope to make staying in touch with friends and family a little easier for them while they’re deployed.

Page numbers in Google Docs
A while back we added page headers and footers in Google Docs, and now you can add automatic page numbers at the top or bottom of your pages. We’ve heard from plenty of students and teachers who asked for this feature, so we’re glad to be making Google Docs just a little bit better for them.

Page-level permissions in Google Sites
Sometimes project sites are most useful when the whole team can access everything in the site, but there are other situations—like when you’re sharing a site with a client—when you might not want everyone to have full access. That’s where page-level permissions come in handy. It’s a simple way to specify who can see each page in your Google Sites.

Administrative audit history
Another useful feature that we added for organizations this week is administrative change reporting. This new area of the control panel lets admins see a record of administrative changes that have been made to their Google Apps setup, including changes to user accounts, application settings, mobile settings and administrative delegation.

Who’s gone Google?
More than 4 million businesses are using Google Apps now, and the wave of organizations switching over continues to accelerate. Yesterday at Dreamforce, Eric Schmidt shared a couple new details about the growing momentum in this area, including the fact that more than 5,000 businesses sign up each day, and that there are more than 40 million total active users in organizations using Google Apps.

To get a flavor of how organizations are putting Google Apps to work, Viocorp, North Carolina A&T State University and Lamar Advertising shared their stories over the last few weeks.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Google Earth Outreach trains environmental journalists in the Amazon

2011-09-02T10:18:00.002-07:00

In July, my Google Earth Outreach teammate Sean Askay and I traveled from the Ecuadorian Andes all the way to the Amazon basin with a group of journalists who report on environmental issues impacting the Amazon region.

We were there at the invitation of Internews’ Earth Journalism Network to train journalists on how to incorporate compelling geographic visualizations into their stories using Google’s mapping tools. Over 20 journalists and communications specialists were represented among the newly-formed Pan-Amazonia journalist network from Amazon region countries, including Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Brazil.

As with many a fabled Amazonian adventure, we were met with exciting challenges and adventures along the way. The first began on our bus ride through Ecuador to the Amazon - we ended up relying more on Sean’s tracking our GPS location in Google Earth to navigate to our Napo River pick-up point than on our bus driver’s directions. There were a few times that the bus driver was ready to turn around and go back, but thanks to Sean and Google Earth, we all got there in the end.

GPS track of our 9 hour bus ride from Quito, Ecuador to the Napo River

Once in the jungle, we stepped over the tarantulas and poison dart frogs to make it to our outdoor classroom at Yachana Lodge and face our next challenge: the slow internet connection. Luckily, with a Google Earth Portable Server we were able to serve satellite imagery, terrain, and vector data locally from our laptop to give the journalists easy access to Google Earth. It was one of our first trial runs with this tool, which will be very useful for future trainings and to other organizations - for example, in crisis response situations where people want to operate a full Google Earth environment despite low internet bandwidth.

Training in our “classroom” in the Amazon on the Napo River, Ecuador.

During the training we focused on developing the journalists’ skills in using Google Earth and Google Maps as research tools and for news content creation. They learned how to create quick and easy geographic visualizations to embed in a webpage with Google Maps or Google Fusion Tables, to sync photos taken in the field with GPS tracks, and to record tours in Google Earth for movie-making. With environmental threats to the Amazon coming from so many different sources, using these online mapping tools allows these journalists to cover the whole region and illustrate their stories in a visual way that’s easier for the public and policy-makers to understand.

Answering Google Earth questions during a hands-on activity with journalists.

Internew’s Earth Journalism Network and Amazonian journalists plan to use these new tools and techniques to bring the story of the Amazon to the public. James Fahn, the executive director of Earth Journalism Network, attended the training and saw many possibilities for collaboration and use of Google mapping and visualization tools for journalists covering environmental issues around the world. If this pilot project is successful, Internews hopes to bring the training to journalism networks in other countries.

Posted by Raleigh Seamster, Google Earth Outreach Team

Energy Works Michigan Brings Renewable Energy To Schools With Online Tools

2011-09-01T17:18:00.000-07:00

We are always interested to see how nonprofit organizations have used Google products and tools in interesting ways to support their missions. The story from Energy Works Michigan is one that highlights the way a small organization can combine Google products and optimize their resources to have a great impact on its community.

Energy Works Michigan has been awarded a grant by the Michigan Public Service Commission to administer the Michigan Renewable Schools Program. Through this program, Energy Works Michigan implements energy efficiency and renewable energy measures at Michigan K-12 schools, colleges, and universities -- with an overall mission to building foundational capacities for a sustainable, equitable, and prosperous future in Michigan. To date, Energy Works Michigan has partnered with 67 public, private and charter K-12 schools and districts throughout the state of Michigan.

Their 4-person team, made the decision to use Google Apps to communicate, collaborate and most importantly, keep organized. However, in order to tackle so many schools, they knew that they needed to use more than just Google Apps. Their organization now relies on several Google products such as Google Earth, Google SketchUp and Google Analytics. So how does Energy Works Michigan use all of these products?

Google Earth: Each year, Energy Works Michigan identifies a new set of schools to work with to install solar photovoltaic or wind turbine systems at schools. As they have so few staff members, the organization is not able to travel immediately to every school that wants to partner with them. They use Google Earth to conduct preliminary site assessments of schools -- and determine which renewable energy system makes sense to install. Google Earth allows them to determine the orientation and elevation of the building of a school, and also to evaluate angles of the sun and wind.
Google SketchUp: Google Sketchup is a 3D content creation tool intended for intelligent drawing and design of architectural and mechanical prototyping. Energy Works Michigan uses Google SketchUp to share a visual representation of the renewable energy system with their partner schools, such as the solar panels they rendered for Cass Technical High School in Detroit, MI:

Google Analytics: Using Google Analytics, Energy Works Michigan has been able to to track their site traffic, and improve their promotion efforts, messaging and content strategies based on historical navigation patterns. Viewing traffic volume on specific pages has been particularly useful because it helps determine the programs and information visitors are interesting in most. Energy Works Michigan can then promote and enhance these sections.

According to Executive Director, Emile Lauzzana, Google products have allowed the organization to use the staff’s time more efficiently and have enabled them to quickly assess site conditions for renewable energy installations. They’ve also allowed the organization to share schematic 3D graphics of renewable energy systems to their clients and produce a clear and legible display of their partner schools on maps, making their work more understandable to their clients and to other visitors of their website.

It’s exciting that Energy Works Michigan has been able to leverage Google tools to further advance their outstanding mission.

Posted by Clemantine Wamariya, Google for Nonprofits Summer Intern

Introducing Learn With Google

2011-08-23T14:35:00.000-07:00

(Cross posted on the Inside AdWords Blog)

School is back in session and here at Google, we’ve been looking for ways to help you learn how to grow your business online. Many of you have been looking for one central place to go to get smart about online tools and strategies, and we hear you. That’s why we’re pleased to introduce Learn with Google, a new educational site designed to be a one-stop shop for businesses to learn about Google products and services like AdWords, Google Apps, Places, Analytics, and more. Whether you’re looking to grow your business or just be more productive, we hope that this collection of short videos, handouts, and resources will arm you with best practices and tips that you can use right away.

(click for full-size image)

On the site, you’ll learn about:

Starting Your Business Online: Learn why having an online presence is critical for growing your business and how to create an online marketing plan. Discover how local marketing tactics can help you reach customers near you.

Marketing Your Business Online: Master the basics of online marketing and AdWords to get more for your money. Learn how to choose the right keywords, write compelling ads, and optimize your advertising spend.

Running Your Business Online: Learn how the Google Apps suite of online communications and productivity tools, like Gmail and Google Docs, can make your team more collaborative and your business more efficient.

To get started, check out the videos, worksheets, and checklists at Learn with Google. From there, we’ll recommend other tips and how-to’s that will help you grow your business online. We’ll be adding more content and improving the site over time, so be sure to check back often.

Posted by Barbara Yang, Product Marketing Manager, Small Business Team

Announcing The Winners Of The Google Online Marketing Challenge 2011

2011-08-22T15:15:00.000-07:00

This year marks the fourth annual Google Online Marketing Challenge, a global university competition that affords students hands-on experience in online marketing. Each team of students partners with a small to medium size business or NGO and receives $200 to run a three week Google AdWords campaign. Ultimately, they submit their account and a campaign strategy report to an international judging panel of professors.

Over the past four years, Challenge participation has soared. This year, 4,429 teams from 68 countries participated, representing an increase of 46 percent from last year and making the Challenge one of the world’s largest university competitions. Earlier this year, the Challenge was recognized for its educational impact by the American Marketing Association, which recognized the program with their Innovative Excellence in Marketing Education award.

We’re proud to announce that the team from The University of Houston garnered the global award. Team members Erin Blatzer, Lauren Davis, Carolina Thomas, and Jeffrei Clifton, taught by Professor Steven Koch, shared the following thoughts on their campaign strategy for the Houston Symphony.

For us, creating the right team -- including the right client -- was essential. The Houston Symphony gave us inside access to their marketing team and ongoing strategy, which formed the basis for our campaign's complementary strategy. The Symphony uses single ticket sales as an entry point for creating long term subscribers and donors...With 875% ROI, we knew we had delivered a strong campaign, and were delighted to share the insights generated with the Symphony team so that they could continue building revenue and community relationships online. To win the global competition on top of that is an extraordinary honor and we couldn't be more thrilled.

In recognition of their success, the team and their professor are off to Mountain View, Calif. for a special tour of the Googleplex. To help in their ongoing studies, each team member will also receive an Apple MacBook Pro.

We also extend congratulations to the four regional winners. For the Americas, the winner comes from James Madison University in the U.S., while a team from the Warsaw School of Economics won for Europe. The Asia/Pacific winner comes from Edith Cowan University in Australia and for the Middle East/Africa, the winning team comes from Bethlehem University in the West Bank. Here are more details about our winners.

This year’s Challenge participants also competed for the NGO Impact Award, which recognizes online marketing campaigns that made an outstanding difference for an NGO. A panel of independent nonprofit leaders selected the winners based on short essays detailing the impact achieved by the nonprofit due to the AdWords campaign. The winning NGO partners will be awarded donations: $15,000 for first place, $10,000 for second place, and $5,000 for third place.

We are thrilled to announce that a team from Vienna University of Economics and Business won first place for their promotion of Trash Design, while a team from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore took second place for their work with Instituto Oikos. The overall global winners from the University of Houston received third place for their impact on the Houston Symphony.

For anyone interested in competing in the 2012 Challenge, formal registrations will open later this year and in the meantime, you can preregister.

Posted by Jessica Schwartz, Google AdWords Team

Google For Nonprofits Wants To Hear From You

2011-08-19T09:36:00.000-07:00

The Google for Nonprofits team is constantly looking for new ways to provide the best tools & resources for our users. To that end, we’ve created a short survey to learn more about how you like to learn about Google tools for nonprofits. We’ll use your feedback to pilot some new educational initiatives designed to help nonprofit organizations be successful with Google tools.

Please take 10-15 minutes to share your feedback with us in this survey. If other colleagues at your organization use Google tools/products we'd also love to hear from them. Please refer them to this survey as well. As always, we appreciate your time & feedback.

To remind you about some of the great resources available to nonprofits today, be sure to check out Google for Nonprofits video product tutorials & case studies on the our website. Additionally if you’d like to interact with other nonprofit users, head over to the Google for Nonprofits forum. And if you need additional help, there’s the Google for Nonprofits marketplace where you can find featured providers who can help you increase your impact online.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Posted by Leslie Hernandez, Google For Nonprofits Team

Google Apps Highlights

2011-08-15T09:42:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

This week we have news from the Gmail and Google Docs teams, which both made interface changes to streamline how you use those applications. We also introduced some new keyboard shortcuts and made improvements to spreadsheet charts and functions.

New preview pane in Gmail Labs
The Gmail team has heard requests from many of you for an inbox preview pane, and last Thursday we introduced this option as a Gmail Lab. Now you can quickly scroll through a list of messages and see their contents, marking mail as “read” as you go. Once you enable this feature from the Labs area in Settings, you can choose between a vertical or horizontal split in your Gmail window.

Sharper, smoother Gmail mobile interface
Last week we also brought a higher-resolution Gmail interface for people who access their inbox through a mobile browser on a high-resolution display, like the iPhone 4. We also simplified the process to check for new mail—just pull down on the Message List. Transitions between different pages in the interface are also smoothly animated now.

New look and keyboard shortcuts for the documents list
Google Docs also got some big interface improvements to the documents list last week as part of a Google-wide project to streamline and simplify many of our applications. You can switch to the new design by clicking “Try the new look” under the gear icon in the upper right. We’ve also added dozens of new keyboard shortcuts to navigate through the documents list, create new files, share items and more. Just type ? to see the keyboard shortcut cheat sheet.

Automatic spreadsheet function snippets
There are spreadsheet functions you probably know by heart, and others like GoogleTranslate where you might need a tip now and again, so on Tuesday we introduced spreadsheet function snippets. When you start typing a function into a cell, we’ll instantly show you a list of matching functions. Hovering over a function displays its proper syntax and the function’s purpose. We hope this feature saves you trips to the Google Docs Help Center.

New chart types, and chart improvements for documents and drawings
We also made spreadsheet charts more powerful and easier to work with. After you create a chart, it’s now simpler to copy an image of your chart and embed it into a document or drawing. There are more chart types to choose from now, too—from candlestick and combo charts to GeoMaps and TreeMaps.

Who’s gone Google?
At the end of July, we opened our doors in Japan to more than 1,500 business technology leaders from the region for a lively discussion about the future of business technology. At the event, we heard from Softbank Group, Casio, Nortiz and Toda Corporation, who have all decided to switch to Google Apps from their legacy solutions. More than 60,000 other businesses around the world also switched to Google Apps since our last update here too, including Cox Schepp, Journal Communications, Crown Partners and ITV.

In the government sector, we were pleased to see that the U.S. General Services Administration completed their transition of 17,000 employees and contractors to Google Apps, an impressive feat considering it’s been just six months since they decided to “go Google.”

I hope these product updates and customer stories help you and your organization get even more from Google Apps. For more details and the latest news, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Non-Profit Industry Benchmark Report For Animal Related Orgs

2011-07-27T03:24:00.000-07:00

Last year we asked participants in the Google Grants program to submit surveys about their experience with Google Grants, AdWords and other products. Of the responses we received, we were able to glean a bit of insight into the industries that make up the non-profits in our program and would like to share those insights with you for the purposes of creating your own benchmarks and metrics in this monthly benchmarking series.

This month we’re featuring the Animal-related category of the non-profit industry. Look to future months for other NTEE non-profit categories.

Grantees in the Animal-related industry were most likely to track “adoptions” (animal adoptions) as their most important metric, state "reaching new constituents" as their main mission objective served via their Grant and state "raising awareness" as the main marketing objective served via their Google Grant.

With regard to the performance of their Grants AdWords account, they received an average of 35% of their total site visits from their Grants AdWords account and an average of 11,000 conversions over the last year (11/2009 - 11/2010).

An average of 4% of Animal-related organizations who responded to the survey report that they currently use an agency, SEO or SEM to manage their Grants AdWords account.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

Google Apps Highlights

2011-07-25T09:35:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

We’ve added more than a dozen new features to Google Apps so far in July. Read on to learn about a few of our favorites: a new look for Gmail and Google Calendar, ways we’ve made Gmail safer and easier to use, a couple new mobile capabilities and more.

Preview new looks for Gmail and Google Calendar
A couple weeks ago we began rolling out a visual refresh to Gmail and Google Calendar, which is consistent with design changes happening across many other Google products. The idea is to make the interfaces even more focused, elastic and effortless. If you’d like to see the new look, you can try it out in Gmail and Google Calendar now.

Pick your favorite inbox style
In addition to Gmail’s new look, we added new options to let you choose an inbox layout that best suits your email habits. You can decide between Priority Inbox, important messages first, starred messages first or unread messages first—or stick with a classic inbox style.

Make multiple calls in Gmail
A while back we added the ability to place phone calls to land lines and mobile phones from your Gmail browser window for free or at greatly reduced calling rates. On Wednesday we made this feature better by allowing multiple simultaneous calls. You can place a second call by putting your first call on hold, or put your first call on hold to pick up another incoming phone call.

View ZIP and RAR contents from Gmail attachments
Before last week, when you received a ZIP or RAR attachment you had to download the file and extract its contents to view what someone sent you. Now you can simply view the contents of ZIP and RAR in your browser without the hassle of downloading and extracting. This is a faster, safer and more affordable way of viewing attachments than opening potentially harmful files with software on your computer.

Phishing detection
Gmail has also started keeping you safer by displaying more information about the origin of certain messages. Email coming from senders who aren’t in your contact list will display the sender’s full email address. We’ll also show you when messages come from an email-sending service (like a news site’s article sharing system) and display a warning when it looks like the sender may have spoofed a Gmail address.

Read receipts for business and government customers
Many organizations that use Gmail have asked for a way to tell if important sent email has been opened, and since Tuesday, Google Apps for Business and Government administrators can activate read receipts from the control panel. Administrators can control which users can request or return read receipts, and whether receipts are issued automatically or manually by recipients.

New spreadsheet keyboard shortcut menu and PPTX support
In Google Docs, this week we added a handy keyboard shortcut cheat sheet to help you work more quickly in spreadsheets. Just hit Ctrl+/ (or Cmd+/ on a Mac) to bring up the keyboard shortcut guide. We also launched support for PPTX conversions, so now you can bring all those PowerPoint files from your desktop into Google Docs, and edit them with your classmates and colleagues from the browser.

More options for videos in Google Docs
Recently we made it easier to work with videos that you upload Google Docs. Now you can embed Google Docs videos into Google Sites pages, embed them on other webpages and even add text captions to your videos.

Share files from the Google Docs Android app
In April we introduced the Google Docs app for Android devices, making it easier to find and open Google Docs files on your phone or tablet. A couple weeks ago we added the ability to share files right from the Google Docs app, so now you’re covered when you need to give others access to a document, spreadsheet, presentation or any other type of a file when you’re on the move.

Five new mobile site templates
The Google Sites mobile experience also got an upgrade. We added five new mobile site templates to make it easy to build and launch a site that looks great on the small screen. This video explains how:

Who’s gone Google?
It’s been another banner few weeks for new customers. A hearty welcome goes out to Aperam, Nexteer, Premier Salons, Quality Distribution and tens of thousands of other businesses that moved to Google Apps since our last update. We also welcome our new education and government customers, including the University of Connecticut and the City of Pittsburgh!

I hope these product updates and customer stories help you and your organization get even more from Google Apps. For more details and the latest news, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Non-ASCII Characters Now Supported In Display And Destination URLs

2011-07-20T02:50:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from the Inside AdWords Blog)

If you write your ads in any language other than English, you may have wished that you could make your display URL consistent with the rest of your ad by showing your internationalized domain name. Today, we’re announcing that we now support non-ASCII characters, including non-Latin characters and Latin characters with accents and diacritics, in display and destination URLs.

When you create an ad in AdWords, you can now enter Unicode characters in the display and destination URL fields. To ensure that users will be able to reach your site, we’ll verify that the URL works properly in both Unicode and Punycode.

We also want to make sure that users are not shown URLs in any language other than their own, so we’ll render the display URL in Unicode characters only if its language matches the user’s Google interface language. In all other cases, it’ll be shown in Punycode.

Remember that all of our AdWords policies regarding display and destination URLs still apply. In particular, the domain of the display and destination URLs must match, so if you use non-ASCII characters in the display URL, make sure to do the same in the destination URL.

Additionally, if you include multi-byte characters, please note that the character limits may vary. For more information, please visit our Help Center.

Posted by Lisa Shieh, AdWords Team

Sharks, Rays And SketchUp At The New England Aquarium

2011-07-18T03:04:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from the SketchUp Blog)

April Phelps is a LEED-accredited designer who works at the New England Aquarium creating new exhibits and enhancing existing ones. Boston’s New England Aquarium is one of the many non-profit organizations to which we’ve granted SketchUp Pro licenses as part of the SketchUp for Nonprofits program.

SketchUp Pro has been a big help to us in the New England Aquarium Design Department. The Aquarium was founded in 1969 and attracts over 1.3 million visitors a year to our waterfront location. Recently the Aquarium’s capital improvement plan called for a complete renovation of our changing exhibits space, and we decided to part with the Aquarium’s traditional design aesthetic and embark on a new path.

Families touching the rays in our new shark and ray touch tank exhibit

The newly completed exhibit we designed in SketchUp Pro is called The Trust Family Foundation Shark and Ray Touch Tank. It features sharks and rays in a mangrove-themed tank surrounded by shallow edges and viewing windows, allowing visitors to experience a close encounter with these animals.

The exhibit presents these incredible species in a way that highlights their importance in a healthy ocean ecosystem. It also emphasizes the value of conserving essential coastal habitats, such as mangroves and lagoons. During evening hours the new space is also used as an event venue for private functions.

View from the entrance of the shark and ray touch tank. On top is our design phase
rendering; below is an opening day photograph.

The Aquarium provides unique challenges for designers. We have a variety of internal clients with different needs, and we need a modeling program that works quickly and accurately to convey our ideas. SketchUp’s quick modeling capabilities provided me the extra time needed to explore multiple design options on this project.

SketchUp also enabled our design team to give everyone at the Aquarium a sense of the new exhibit’s aesthetics quickly and easily. In addition to quickly creating renderings, we imported actual material samples into our models. This allowed staff and visitors to get a sense of scale and of how significant the interaction with animals would be.

View from inside the exhibit towards the Lagoon and Cassiopeia tanks. Above is
our design phase rendering; below is an opening day photograph.

Our traditional design aesthetic for the Main Building is to make the visitor feel like they are submerged underwater, looking through portals to all the fish. The new exhibit needed to be airy and bright, allowing visitors to feel that they are no longer submerged but at the beach level interacting with the animals. To achieve this we revealed the once covered up skylights and installed a significant amount of energy efficient lighting. With natural and artificial lighting we simulated the feeling of wading around a beach touching sharks and rays.

View of The Trust Family Foundation Shark and Ray Touch Tank Gift Shop. The top image is our design phase rendering; below it is an opening day photograph.

This “no surprises” methodology allowed us to receive design input from different departments quickly. Given our very tight schedule and lack of resources, it proved to be most helpful. We’re excited to continue to use SketchUp Pro on future projects and renovations at the New England Aquarium.

Posted by Chris Cronin, SketchUp Sales Team

Google Supports The Citizen Media Global Innovation Competition

2011-07-14T08:23:00.000-07:00

Media is an integral part of how people understand, access, and share information about the world around them. Communication channels including newspapers, television, blogs, and online videos have tremendous potential to empower and influence individuals across the globe. Yet, millions of people still face barriers that limit them from tapping into these resources. They are marginalized by political and economic situations and other limitations that deprive them of the full citizenship made possible by access to news, information, and connections to people outside of their immediate environments. That’s why we’re working with Ashoka to find and support the best, most innovative ideas out there that will help people around the world unlock the power of media and participate more fully in society.

Today marks the beginning of a new initiative run by Ashoka’s Changemakers, with support from Google, to source innovations that will boost media access and participation globally: Citizen Media: A Global Innovation Competition. What do we mean by this? Well, we’re waiting for you to tell us, but here are some initial ideas for what strong entries might hope to achieve:

Give voice to underserved, vulnerable populations, introducing them to media creation and distribution, and showcasing their messages
Equip journalists and publishers with tools or channels to report important news that otherwise gets missed
Advance free speech and privacy protections
Address the financial sustainability of quality news
Help people better navigate information and ascertain content reliability and authenticity

Nominate your idea or suggest another innovation starting today! Submissions are due on September 14th, and finalists will be selected by a panel of expert judges including Michael Maness, VP of Journalism and Media Innovation at the Knight Foundation, Esther Wojcicki, Vice Chair for Creative Commons, and Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas. Then, Ashoka will invite the public to vote on four winners who will receive cash prizes of US $5,000. Top qualifying entrants will also be considered for an Ashoka Fellowship — complete with a living stipend, international recognition, and access to a network of systems-changing social entrepreneurs. To encourage a breadth of global applications, the competition is being launched in nine languages: Arabic, Mandarin, English, French, Indonesian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai.

We’re excited to see the ideas submitted to this competition and to help social entrepreneurs advance their innovations.

This competition is run by Ashoka with sponsorship from Google. Submit your idea on: http://www.changemakers.com/citizenmedia

Posted by Mimi Kravetz, Google.org Team

Spotlight On The Google For Nonprofits Marketplace

2011-07-12T02:17:00.000-07:00

You may have seen our launch post back in March, with information about the Google for Nonprofits program and all of its moving parts. One of those moving parts, and a resource we hope you can take advantage of, is the Google for Nonprofits Marketplace.

The Google for Nonprofits Marketplace is where you can connect with Google Certified Partners - Google tool experts that offer their services for free or discounted rates to NGOs.

There are Google Certified Partners for products ranging from AdWords and Android to Earth, Sketchup, and Website Optimizer - just to name a few. So, whatever your organization’s needs, it’s likely that there is a Certified Partner available to help.

To find the right partner for your organization’s needs, simply visit the Marketplace page, choose the product you’re interested in and your local region from the drop-down menus and then review your choices from the results.

If your company is a Google Certified Partner and offers services to NGOs at a free or discounted rate, you can apply to have your company listed in the Google for Nonprofits Marketplace.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

Getting Data From The Ground To The Cloud

2011-07-01T05:06:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from the Google.org Blog)

Last week, the Google Earth Outreach and Google.org teams, in collaboration with the Global Canopy Programme, hosted partners from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for the first gathering of the Community Forest Monitoring Working Group. The goals of the working group are to provide a platform for groups engaged in community forest monitoring activities - across continents - to share knowledge and experience. Equally important is for these groups to provide recommendations for the development of tools, methodologies, and common protocols. For example, the Surui tribe in the Brazilian Amazon is using modern technology to implement their community’s Surui Carbon Project.

This effort isn’t isolated, as many NGOs and stakeholders support community-based approaches to forest monitoring for their efficiency, cultural relevance, and reliability. Community Forest Monitoring will play a role in the United Nations’ Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) effort which aims to incentivize developing countries to adopt a low-emission path to development. In thinking about best methods for data collection, this working group is looking to tackle a host of data collection issues including usability, security, accountability, cultural relevance, and scalability.

These are all concerns that the team at Open Data Kit (ODK), an open source suite of data collection tools, have fleshed out and iterated upon. ODK was born in 2008 as a Google sabbatical project of University of Washington computer science professor Gaetano Borriello. Borriello wanted to take advantage of Google’s data collection tools: maps, visualization, databases and has said that his team saw a gap in mobile data collection. Thus, Borriello’s team developed ODK Build, ODK Collect, and ODK Aggregate, mobile tools that have attracted thousands of users and dozens of active developers.

As ODK iterates and evolves, the Public Sector Engineering team is learning about the challenges and opportunities in mobile data collection and exploring how we can contribute to this space. ODK already gives users the option to visualize data in Google Earth and Google Fusion Tables, and we are exploring how to make use of some of Google’s other tools (what if photos collected on the ground could be easily posted to Picasa, or videos to YouTube?) It’s our goal to make sure that all meaningful data is effectively organized and made discoverable, accessible and usable.

Ultimately, community forest monitoring represents just one slice of the potential that effective data collection tools create. ODK was initially motivated by the needs of community health workers and has proven flexible enough to be used to track everything from human rights violations in the Central African Republic to water quality in Ghana. As the nature of scientific research diversifies and the volume of data collected increases, reliable, flexible, and lightweight tools will become more and more crucial.

What’s next? As the engineering teams continue to work on improving mobile data collection tools, the working group will convene policymakers at the next workshop to discuss standards and best practices. “The greatest barrier isn’t a technological one, but the challenge of leveraging this data so that communities can help ensure better governance for their forests,” says Niki Mardas, Head of Strategy and Communications for the Global Canopy Programme and theredddesk.org. As with many other public data collection efforts, it will become the job of advocates and analysts to shape meaningful narratives and press for the change the world needs. We’re glad to be a part of this effort and we’re committed to working with our partners to transform data collection from a passive process to an active and empowering practice.

Posted by Tanya Keen, Google Earth Outreach Team and Jenny Ye, Public Sector Engineering Team

Nonprofit Industry Benchmark Report For Health Care

2011-06-28T02:23:00.000-07:00

Last year we asked participants in the Google Grants program to submit surveys about their experience with Google Grants, AdWords and other products. Of the responses we received, we were able to glean a bit of insight into the industries that make up the non-profits in our program and would like to share those insights with you for the purposes of creating your own benchmarks and metrics in this monthly benchmarking series.

This month we’re featuring the Health Care category of the non-profit industry. Look to future months for other NTEE non-profit categories.

Grantees in the Health Care industry were most likely to track “donations” as their most important metric, state "reaching new constituents" as their main mission objective served via their Grant and state "raising awareness" as the main marketing objective served via their Google Grant.

With regard to the performance of their Grants AdWords account, they received an average of 20% of their total site visits from their Grants AdWords account and an average of 6,500 conversions over the last year (11/2009 - 11/2010).

An average of 10% of Health Care organizations who responded to the survey report that they currently use an agency, SEO or SEM to manage their Grants AdWords account.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

Global Warming Effects and Solutions in the Climate Hot Map

2011-06-22T13:28:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, the Union of Concerned Scientists launched their Climate Hot Map in an effort to communicate how scientists are proving that global warming is already affecting people and places around the world. Using the free Google Maps API, visitors to the site can now visit 60 hotspots that are changing due to climate change. The Climate Hot Map is part of a larger Weight of the Evidence campaign launched by UCS.

Climate change affects everyone, and it’s already impacting many people in varying degrees around the globe. However, there is hope for mitigating these climate impacts. Through the Climate Hot Map, you can take action by directly contacting companies and governments and support regional solutions to global warming.

For example, ocean acidification is a big problem for coral reefs, which concerns me because in a couple weeks I’ll be diving in the Caribbean. Acidification makes the process of shell-creation much harder for shellfish and calcification harder for corals. I hope these reefs will still be there for future generations. But ocean acidification is such a global problem -- how can I take action? In the pop-up balloon of the Climate Hot Map, I can fill out a form to send an email to Ban Ki-Moon to show my support for the UNFCCC’s “Green Climate Fund.”

These solutions help give people hope that mitigating the impacts of climate change is possible.

In addition to providing this valuable educational resource and advocacy tool, the Climate Hot Map has announced a Scavenger Hunt. Answer eight questions about where specific impacts of climate change and global warming are already taking place and you could win prizes like an Earthwatch expedition.

This project was funded by Google.org and Google Earth Outreach’s GeoChallenge Grants. This year, we’re supporting a new crop of projects through Developer Grants and can’t wait to see the latest ways nonprofits are using Google Earth and Maps to tell their stories.

Posted by Tanya Keen, Google Earth Outreach Team

Google And The Ad Council Team Up To Help Nonprofits Create Effective Public Service Advertising

2011-06-16T05:40:00.000-07:00

Editor’s note: Our guest blogger today is Kate Emanuel, Senior Vice President of Nonprofit & Government Affairs at the Ad Council, the leading producer of public service advertising campaigns.

The Ad Council has produced thousands of PSA campaigns that address the most pressing social issues of the day. You may be familiar with some of our more iconic figures and slogans--McGruff the Crime Dog, "A Mind is a Terrible Thing To Waste", or "Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Drunk." And you may or may not be familiar with our more current campaigns with some of the nation’s leading nonprofits: hunger (with Feeding America), mentoring (with Big Brothers Big Sisters), unplanned pregnancy (with the National Campaign to End Teenage and Unplanned Pregnancy), or adult literacy (with the Dollar Store Foundation).

Whether it’s fighting polio in the 1950’s or obesity prevention in 2011, the Ad Council’s mission and model has remained the same: we marshal the volunteer resources of the country’s ad agencies and media companies to raise awareness, change attitudes and spark social change.

But whether you’re the Ad Council, a large NGO or a small nonprofit with limited resources, we all face the same communications challenge: How to raise awareness for your cause against the backdrop of a cluttered media landscape and distracted consumers?

We don’t have all the answers but we always like to share our best practices and learn from others. That’s why we, along with Google, created a quarterly workshop series for the nonprofit community where we tackle all sort of emerging communications tools including mobile marketing, online contests, blogging, YouTube, and online video. Our latest briefing covered the suite of nonprofit tools offered by Google. Many of these programs are free and can really help nonprofits reach more donors, improve operations and raise awareness for their cause.

Held in Washington, DC and New York, the events featured presentations by Google for Nonprofits team members who covered tools including:

Google Grants: Free AdWords advertising given to select charitable organizations to solicit donations, recruit volunteers and raise awareness
Mapping Technologies: How you can bring your story to life using Google Earth and Maps)
Google Analytics: How to analyze your web traffic in an entirely new way. Or track email campaigns, banner ads, web-enabled phones, mobile websites and mobile apps.)

You can view the Google Analytics, Grants, and Geo briefings on the Google for Nonprofits YouTube channel or check out the Google for Nonprofits website at www.google.com/nonprofits.

And if you’d like to be added to our email list for future events, please contact Danna Kulzer, Director/Nonprofit & Government Affairs. We’re always in search of new topics, attendees and shared learning!

Posted by Kate Emanuel, The Ad Council

An Introduction To Map-Making, Part 2

2011-06-09T01:55:00.000-07:00

New to map-making with Google tools? Last week we focused on how you could get started by creating a map of your organization’s offices with Google Maps My Places. After walking through My Places, I mentioned Google Fusion Tables, another powerful Google mapping tool. One of the many applications of this tool is that you can import a spreadsheet and turn it into a map for easy publishing on the web. Fusion Tables is especially useful to people who have more than just a handful of locations to plot on a map, or who want a more interactive map that allows users to filter locations or other complex tasks.

A great example of a nonprofit that benefits from using Fusion Tables is MarinSpace, an organization dedicated to helping Marin County nonprofits improve the quality of their workspaces. MarinSpace regularly looks at nonprofits’ locations to understand where these organizations work in relation to each other. From mapping their locations, they can make co-locating suggestions and identify gaps in community services. They’ve even found that sometimes there are clusters of organizations that don’t realize they are a block away from each other and could be sharing knowledge and resources. Executive Director Shelley Hamilton had been using My Maps to map all this data. After learning about Fusion Tables at a Google Earth Outreach workshop in February, Shelley started using it to map nonprofits and is enthusiastic about how easy it is to use: “Once you have your info in Fusion Tables, a couple of clicks and boom, there it is!”

Nonprofits in Marin Map by MarinSpace

Who doesn’t like a little instant gratification? Let’s get started on our own map, shall we?

Before you start:

You’ll need to have a Google Account to use Fusion Tables, so create a free account if you don’t have one.
Prepare a dataset with location information to import into Fusion Tables. You can use comma-separated files (.csv), Microsoft Excel files (.xls, .xlsx), an OpenDocument Spreadsheet (.ods), Keyhole Markup Language (.kml) or data already in a Google Spreadsheet.

1. Go to http://www.google.com/fusiontables/ and log into your Google Account.
2. Click the New Table button to get a drop-down menu and choose Import Table.
3. Specify the file you’d like to upload. For this example, I’m using a sample Google Spreadsheet of my nonprofit’s locations with a column for each type of additional information that I want to associate with the locations.

Once you’ve selected the file click Next. The next two steps allow you to select which columns you’d like to import and add attributes. Proceed through the steps and click Finish.
4. You will now see your data displayed as a table.

Fusion Tables tries to recognize columns with locations during import and automatically categorize them as location data. You can skip ahead to step 5 to try this out, but if for some reason Fusion Tables didn’t recognize the correct location column, you’ll need to set it manually. To set the locaiton column manually, click Edit, then Modify columns. Select the appropriate column and set type to Location. Save your changes.

5. You are now one step away from your map! Click the Visualize menu and select Map. Fusion Tables should now geocode the location information in the column you’ve specified and create your map.

6. Now the fun really begins. You can use the options above your map to customize your info windows and make them more appealing (add links, select which fields appear, etc.). You can make your info window content more rich by including images, videos, data charts and more. Next you might want to configure your placemark style by changing their color or icon, or using one of the other style options.
Note: If you have polygon or line data in a GIS shapefile or KML file, you can also add and style in Fusion Tables. Just import your KML file the same way you imported a spreadsheet, or use shapescape to import a GIS shapefile.
7. Once you are satisfied with your map, click Get embeddable link for the code to embed it in your organization’s website.

If you’d like step-by-step instructions, you can find them in the Google Earth Outreach "Fusion Mapper" tutorial. Once you’ve mastered the basics, there are a many more things you can do with Fusion Tables. Check out the Google Fusion Tables Example Gallery and the tutorials in the Fusion Tables Help Center for inspiration and guidance. To add options for users to search your map or use a drop down menu to filter results on your map, check out the FusionTablesLayer Builder.

I hope this Fusion Tables map primer will help get your mapping creative juices flowing! For more tutorials and resources, see the Google Earth Outreach website.

Posted by Raleigh Seamster, Google Earth Outreach Team

Using Analytics To Understand Your Website's ROI

2011-06-08T06:22:00.000-07:00

A lot has been written about how important it is for nonprofits to have a presence on the Internet. While social media outlets offer new opportunities to communicate online, websites remain a primary way that organizations engage people on the web. A well-designed website that is frequently updated with interesting content can attract many unique visitors every day, so nonprofits dedicate significant resources to the development and maintenance of their websites. More visitors to your website means more people know about your organization and that’s a good thing, but should you expect more from your website? Yes!

Websites are a powerful marketing tool for nonprofits, so it is important to measure and understand their impact on your organization’s bottom line. Measuring is the easy part thanks to Google Analytics, a free tool that provides detailed information about your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Within Google Analytics you can define and track customized “Goals” based on visitor actions that are valuable to your organization. Example goals for a nonprofit would be online donations, event registrations, and mailing list sign-ups.

Once you’ve set up goals and Google Analytics has begun gathering data to measure them, it’s time to think about how the data should be analyzed. A good starting point would be using the data to determine which of your website goals provides the most value to your nonprofit. Knowing that information can help you decide how resources (e.g., programming hours, AdWords credits to drive traffic) should be allocated in the future. Let’s look at how you could calculate the value of the following goals: online donations, event registrations, and mailing list sign-ups.

Valuing donations made via your website is easy if you use Conversion Tracking in your AdWords account. Installing a Conversion Tracking code snippet on the “Thank You” page will enable you to track the number of donations (i.e., conversions) and their dollar value. If you prefer not to use Conversion Tracking, you can use Google Analytics goals data and data from your online payment processor to determine the average online donation amount. Divide the dollars donated via your website during a month (week, quarter, etc.) by the number of people who triggered your donation “goal” in Google Analytics and the result is your average online donation amount. What about finding the average value of a visit to you donations page, since not every visitor makes a donation? To find the average value of a visit to your donations page, divide the dollars donated via your website during a month (week, quarter, etc.) by the number of people who visited your donations page during that time period.

Average Online Donation =

Total Online Donations/Total # of Online Donors

Avg. Value of Visit to Donation Page =

Total Online Donations/Total # of Donation Page Visits

Determining the value of online registrations for events depends partly on the event’s purpose. If the event is a fundraiser that designed to raise money primarily through ticket sales, then the methods we used to value online donations will work well. However, what about events that use ticket sales and an auction to generate revenue? We already know how to calculate the value of the ticket sales, but how do we determine the portion of auction revenue driven by your website? Cross-reference your list of auction participants and their winning bid amounts with the list of people who signed-up online. All of the auction revenue from people who registered for the event online can be attributed to your website. So, the average value of a visit to your event registration page is the total revenue generated by that page divided by the number of people who visited it.

Avg. Value of Visits to Events Page =

Ticket Revenue + Auction Revenue/Total # of Events Page Visits

Finally, we are faced with the challenge of figuring out what a mailing list sign-up via your website is worth. The solution is similar to how we determined the portion of event auction revenue driven by your website. You’ll need to cross-reference your donor list with the list of people who signed-up for your mailing list via the website. When a donor appears on both lists, then some or all of that person’s donation should be credited to your website. The portion of the donation that is credited to the website could depend on how much time has passed since the mailing list sign-up and/or how much contact your development staff has had with the donor in the interim. The average value of a mailing list sign-up on your website is the total revenue generated (i.e., donations made) by people who signed-up during a month (week, quarter, etc.) divided by the number of sign-ups. Similarly, the value of a visit to your mailing list sign-up page is the total revenue generated by that page divided by the number of people who visited it.

Average Value of Visits to Sign Up Page =

Total (or % of) Donations from people signed up via your website/Total # of Sign Up Page Visits

If you’d like more information on how to use Google Analytics please visit this website or follow their blog here.

Posted by Sam Franklin, AdWords Team

An Introduction To Map-Making, Part 1

2011-06-03T02:59:00.000-07:00

New to map-making with Google tools? Start out with a simple and useful application of Google mapping technology. Give your website visitors a quick visual overview of where your organization works with Google Maps My Places. Creating a map via My Places takes only minutes to make, but can leave a lasting impression on someone who is interested in your organization’s geographic scope.

Map of American Councils for International Education’s offices around the world.

Map of Conservation Biology Institute’s projects.

Here’s how you can get started:
1. Go to maps.google.com and sign in to your Google Account (look for the link in the upper right-hand corner).
2. Click on the My Places link next to Get Directions under the search box. A list of all the maps you've created (or will create!) with My Places should appear in the left-hand panel.
3. Create a new map, and add a title and description, such as “Where We Work”. Set your map’s privacy settings. Don’t forget to click the Save button!
4. Now we’re ready to start adding offices! Let’s say one of your offices is in Washington, D.C. You can add it manually using the placemark icon to drop and drag a placemark on the map, or you can search for the address and add the location with the Save to Map link.
5. You can change the icon color or shape; or add text, pictures and video to your placemark by simply clicking the placemark in question when your map is in edit mode.

6. Now that you’ve got the hang of it, add your other offices!
7. Once you’ve finished your map, you can share it with others by clicking Link for the direct link and the HTML code that lets you easily embed it in your website.

If you’d like step-by-step instructions for the above, you can find them in the Google Earth Outreach "Creating Maps Using My Maps" tutorial.

If creating your first map with My Places whets your appetite for more, there’s plenty of other ways you can get creative with My Places for outreach and campaigns. You can create a map showing drop-off locations for donations like this one from Mother’s Milk Bank at Austin or a map that shows where those donations went and resulting impact on the recipients like this map showing bicycle donations to Africa from Kona Basic Needs/Kona Bike Town. Using the polygon tool (right next to the placemark tool), you can draw the districts in which your organization provides services or highlight where donor funds are going. 300 Acres did just that with a map that showed how each donor’s contribution went to save 300 acres of the Amazon Rainforest. This campaign raised over $100K in just 60 days and succeeded in buying and saving the forest from destruction.

300 Acres’s map

If you have more than just a handful of offices or project sites, or you want a more interactive map that allows users to filter placemarks or perform more complex tasks, you might want to think about using Google Maps API or Google Fusion Tables to create your map. Stay tuned next week for Part 2 of this blog post, which will describe how you can use Google Fusion Tables for mapmaking.

Posted by Raleigh Seamster, Google Earth Outreach Team

Non-profit industry benchmark report for Disease, Disorders & Medical Disciplines

2011-06-02T14:05:00.000-07:00

Last year we asked participants in the Google Grants program to submit surveys about their experience with Google Grants, AdWords and other products. With the responses we received, we were able to glean a bit of insight into the industries that make up the non-profits in our program and would like to share those insights with you for the purposes of creating your own benchmarks and metrics in this monthly benchmarking series.

This month we’re featuring the Disease, Disorders & Medical Disciplines category of the non-profit industry. Look to future months for other NTEE non-profit categories.

Grantees in the Disease, Disorders & Medical Disciplines industry were most likely to track “website traffic” as their most important metric, state "reaching new constituents" as their main mission objective served via their Grant and state "raising awareness" as the main marketing objective served via their Google Grant.

With regard to the performance of their Grants AdWords account, they received an average of 25% of their total site visits from their Grants AdWords account and an average of 53,000 conversions over the last year (11/2009 - 11/2010).

Of those surveyed, 9.2% of Disease, Disorders & Medical Disciplines organizations who responded to the survey report that they currently use an agency, SEO or SEM to manage their Grants AdWords account.

Online Marketing Help For NGOs

2011-05-24T16:16:00.001-07:00

Our recent benchmark reports show that a growing number of grantees are looking to agencies and other third parties for help developing, managing and optimizing AdWords accounts and online marketing campaigns.

However, this number is still pretty small and we’ve heard from many more of you that you could use help with marketing projects from time to time but don’t really have the resources to handle it.

For those of you with online marketing projects but without resources to handle them, we’d like to highlight one resource that you could find helpful -- Mediacause.org

Media Cause is a new online resource that connects NGOs and online marketing volunteers to collaborate on Google Grants, SEO, and social media marketing projects.

NGOs can sign up for free, post online marketing “challenges” (anything from improving a Facebook profile page to optimizing an AdWords keyword list) and have an expert from the online marketing world step in and lend a hand.

But wait, there’s more! Media Cause volunteers get something out of it, too. By contributing to your organization and others, they gain valuable industry experience that Media Cause helps them parlay into career advancement for individuals and exposure for agencies. Through social media and website promotion, internship and training opportunities, and job placement assistance they do their best to return the favor to the online marketers who participate.

If you’re looking for expert help with your organization’s online marketing, check out Mediacause.org and post a challenge for their industry experts.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

WWF’s Google Earth Tour Highlights Deforestation Plans in Tiger Habitat

2011-05-23T14:12:00.000-07:00

These Sumatran tiger cubs have been caught on WWF’s motion-triggered video cameras playing with a large dry leaf and frolicking in the Sumatran rainforests. WWF released the footage last week, along with a Google Earth tour by David Tryse showing the threats to the tigers’ habitat.WWF estimates that only 400 Sumatran tigers remain today. 12 of these tigers and two mothers with cubs were recorded in WWF’s camera traps over a period of 2 months. Along with elephants, rhinos and orangutans, these tigers live in lowland rainforests of Sumatra called Bukit Tigapuluh that is presently being logged by Asia Pacific Resources International Limited (APRIL) and Asia Pulp and Paper (APP). Learn more from Mongabay, read the original WWF press release and watch full video footage of the cubs, and find out how you can help save Sumatra.

To learn how to create a Google Earth narrated tour to tell your own story, watch this Google Earth Outreach video tutorial.

Posted by Tanya Keen, Google Earth Team

Google Apps Highlights

2011-05-20T14:39:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)
Over the last few weeks, we made improvements to instant messaging, increased capacity for saved contacts, added powerful data analysis with pivot tables in spreadsheets and introduced more flexible management tools for Google Apps customers.
Better AIM interoperability in Gmail and beyond
Google Talk is built on open protocols for instant messaging, making it possible for other IM networks to connect seamlessly with Google Talk. Yesterday we rolled out improvements to make chatting with your AIM buddies even easier in Gmail, iGoogle, Orkut and Google Talk on Android devices. Now you can invite your AIM buddies to chat from any of these places just by entering their AOL screennames, even if you don’t have or use an AIM account.

Room for 15,000 more contacts in Gmail
We’ve heard from a surprising number of super-connected people who wanted to save more contacts in Gmail than its 10,000-contact limit allowed, so a couple weeks ago we made Gmail better by supporting up to 25,000 contacts. You can also save even more information with each contact, so if you were previously bumping up against the limits, you should have a whole lot more extra space for your contacts now.

Pivot tables in Google spreadsheets
Google spreadsheets now has another tool to help serious dataheads make sense from large data sets: pivot tables. With pivot tables, you can easily summarize rows and columns of information, helping you quickly spot patterns in the information that you might not have noticed otherwise. If you’re new to pivot tables, we made a short video to show what you can do.

Customizable administration options for Google Apps customers
IT staff members in large organizations don’t all need the same level of control in their Google Apps environment. For example, a university IT help desk should be able to reset lost passwords for students, but probably doesn’t need to modify school-wide email settings. On Monday, we made Google Apps much more flexible by introducing delegated administration, which lets full administrators assign partial administration privileges to other individuals.

Who’s gone Google?
In the last three weeks, we’ve seen more than 60,000 organizations choose our cloud products for their communication and collaboration needs, and this week a couple international customers stood out from the crowd. Oxygen Design Agency based in Toronto, Canada chose Google Apps and avoided a big investment in traditional email servers when their previous email solution started to break down. With Google Apps, their downtime woes have disappeared, designers can stay in contact when they’re meeting clients and the system is much simpler and more affordable to manage.
EAT. has more than 100 restaurant locations and 1,700 employees in the U.K. They serve fresh, healthy food—as well as kilobytes to customers through technology programs like an iPhone ordering app, free in-store Wi-Fi, a Twitter feed and a tap-to-pay system. EAT. selected Google Apps to replace their old system to get away from complex, costly upgrades, achieve hassle-free scalability as their business expands and securely support a wider array of mobile devices.

I hope these product updates and customer stories help you and your organization get even more from Google Apps. For more details and the latest news, check out the Google Apps Blog.
Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Submit A Disaster Management Or Climate Change Problem Needing A Software Solution

2011-05-17T14:44:00.000-07:00

For the last two years Google has partnered with Microsoft, Yahoo!, HP, NASA and the World Bank on Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), bringing together subject matter experts and volunteer software developers and designers to create open source software solutions that address challenges facing humanity. The weekend of June 4-5, 2011 we’ll hold the next round of 18 Random Hacks of Kindness global events at five US and 13 international sites, giving the community opportunities to collaborate in person, sprint on projects, and engage in new work together.

We’re looking to non-profit organizations and experts in the fields of Disaster Risk Management and Climate change to submit problem definitions online, letting hackers and volunteers know exactly what problems need to be solved, and the context the technology must work in. You can also attend events to meet with developers in person and get them excited about specific projects.

Applications developed by the RHoK community in the past include: I’m OK, a mobile messaging application for disaster response that was used on the ground in Haiti and Chile; Person Finder, a tool created by Google to help people find friends and loved ones after a natural disaster, refined at successive RHoK events and effectively deployed in Haiti, Chile and Japan; and CHASM, a visual tool to map landslide risk currently being piloted by the World Bank in landslide affected areas in the Caribbean.

If you’re in Silicon Valley and would like to do a brief introductory presentation on your problem at the Google Mountain View campus let us know.

Visit http://www.rhok.org/ for more information and to sign up for your local event.

Posted by Mimi Kravetz, Google.org Team

Getting Started With Google Apps

2011-05-10T13:28:00.000-07:00

Every day, many nonprofits choose Google Apps to host email, collaborate in real-time on documents, and coordinate schedules - to name just a few features. Better yet, Google Apps for Nonprofits is free for qualifying organizations with fewer than 3,000 employees, and offered at a 40% Business discount for nonprofits with more than 3,000 employees.

Google Apps for Nonprofits is a great way to improve your productivity, while also significantly cutting costs. Hardware and software can be expensive, especially when you consider additional email servers, spam protection, word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications. These multiplying costs can cannibalize your ability to deliver your dollars toward fulfilling the core mission of your organization. You can actually estimate a calculation of the savings your organization could deliver by switching to Google Apps here. (And note that you can subtract out the "Google Apps for Business licenses" costs if your nonprofit has less than 3,000 employees).

But it doesn’t stop with significant cost savings. Here are a few examples of how the powerful products and features can improve operations and productivity within your organization:

Gmail

Fast, reliable email that’s built and branded for your organization with ample storage, mail search tools and integrated chat that offers some other great innovative features like:

Translate foreign languages on the fly with the Gmail "Message translation" Lab
Avoid traveling to in-person meetings by using the free video chat feature

Google Docs

Using Docs, you can easily create and share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations without managing messy and confusing attachments. Collaborate with ease by editing files simultaneously and try the forms feature within Google Spreadsheets to quickly collect data and even embed the form on your website.

See Google Docs in action:

Google Sites

Don't know HTML, but don’t want to wait for your webmaster to make an update to your website? Empower your employees to create content quickly and easily using Google Sites. With Sites you can created internal or external websites to manage projects, host content or create a central portal for your organization.

See Google Sites in action:

These are just a few of the tools included in Google Apps for Nonprofits. To learn more, visit this site. We support and encourage the great work you do, and we'd love to hear how you're using Google Apps to drive your nonprofit's mission.

Ready to apply?
1. Start today by creating a (free) Google Apps account for your domain.
2. Apply to the Google for Nonprofits program to get a Google Apps for Education upgrade, as well as access to our other premium nonprofit offerings.*

* The Google for Nonprofits program is currently available to U.S. 501(c)(3) organizations. We plan to roll out the program internationally later this year. Thanks for your patience!

Posted by Chris Cheng, Google Apps Team

Google Apps Highlights

2011-05-04T12:23:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve helped you personalize Gmail in new ways, made our applications speedier to use, brought text recognition and editing powers to Android phones, and given you a glimpse into the inner workings of a Google data center.

Customize Gmail with a favorite photo
For a long while, Gmail has had themes so your inbox can reflect a bit of your personality. Now, you can set Gmail’s background to a photo from your computer or Picasa Web Albums. So if Gmail’s standard theme choices don’t quite float your boat, now we’re sure you can create a theme you’ll love.

Faster multitasking in Gmail with the Background Send Lab
Features like nearly-instant search and integrated instant messaging help you save time in your inbox, but we’re always looking for new ways to speed up your experience in Gmail. On Monday we released a new feature in Labs called Background Send that can shave off a few seconds each time you hit “Send.” With this feature enabled, you can start working with other messages while your outgoing message is processed in the background without slowing you down. Give it a try from the Labs tab of Gmail Settings.

Streamlined file uploads in Google Docs
On Monday, we sped up the Google Docs experience with improvements to file uploads. Now you can upload a whole folder at once, and if you use Chrome, Safari or Firefox, you can even drag and drop files from your desktop into the documents list or specific collections. You'll also see an upload progress window right in the documents list.

New Google Docs app for Android

Thanks to a brand new Google Docs app for Android, it’s easier to browse, search, edit and share your documents right from your mobile phone. You can even create new documents by snapping a picture of text with your phone’s camera, and thanks to Google Docs’ optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities, words in the image are converted to text that you can continue editing from your phone or computer.

100 new fonts in Google Sites

With more design choices in Google Sites, you can create better looking sites that match the look and feel you want to achieve. This Wednesday, we added 100 new fonts to the text formatting options in Google Sites, so it’s easier to make more personalized pages for your organization, project, classroom or business.

Get a sneak peek into a Google data center
Businesses, schools and individuals considering Google Apps often want to learn more about the technology and procedures in our data centers designed to help keep your data safe, secure and available whenever you want it. Since we can’t invite everyone to tour one of our data centers, we thought we’d pull the curtain back with an in-depth video:

Who’s gone Google?

A hearty welcome goes out to over 50,000 businesses, schools and organizations that have switched to Google Apps in the last two weeks. Several have shared their stories on the Google Enterprise Blog, so you can learn about how Cinram has improved communication and collaboration across 20 manufacturing facilities in North America and Europe, how Gibson Sotheby's International Realty is empowering hundreds of mobile workers like never before, and how the states of Rhode Island and Missouri are making Google Apps available to more than a million students and 100,000 staff members.

I hope these product updates and customer stories help you and your organization get even more from Google Apps. For more details and the latest news, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Announcing The Google Earth Outreach Developer Grants Program

2011-05-03T16:08:00.000-07:00

(Cross-posted from the Official Google.org Blog)

Over the years, the Google Earth Outreach team has seen hundreds of maps that nonprofits are using to change the world for the better. We’ve also talked to just as many nonprofits who have a great idea for a map they want to create, but don’t have people on their team with enough technical skills to create it.

Today, we’re excited to announce the Google Earth Outreach Developer Grants program, supporting selected projects from eligible nonprofit organizations that are using Google’s mapping technologies in novel, innovative ways to make the world a better place.

Through this program, non-profit organizations from all over the world will have an opportunity to receive up to $20,000 that will help turn their mapping ideas to support their causes into a reality. Numerous nonprofits have already used Google Earth to raise awareness about an issue or cause that demonstrate innovation and creativity. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum and partners created the Crisis in Darfur Google Earth layer, which utilized Google Earth’s high-resolution satellite imagery to document the burning of villages, destruction of communities and livelihoods as a result of the genocide in Sudan. The presentation of refugee stories and testimonials in a map visualization brought 26 times the usual number of visitors to the USHMM’s “How Can I Help?” section of the website.

Charity:Water uses the Google Maps API to show donors precisely where the money they contributed was allocated. After donating, donors receive geographic coordinates to view the location of a well to which they’ve contributed, and they can also view pictures of people accessing clean drinking water as a result of their contribution.

Photo Caption: Charity:Water connects donors to well sites all over the globe.

Applications to the Google Earth Outreach Developer Grants program will be accepted until May 26, 2011. More details of the program, project requirements and eligibility can be found on the Google Earth Outreach Developer Grants page. Apply today!

Posted by Tanya Keen, Google Earth Outreach Team

Celebrating Arbor Day with Save The Redwoods League and Google Earth

2011-04-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

(Cross posted from the Official Google Blog)

From time to time we invite guests to post about topics of interest and we’re pleased to have Emily Limm join us for U.S. Arbor Day. Emily is the science director for the non-profit Save the Redwoods League and is studying the impact of climate change on the redwood forests of northern California. To raise awareness about the League’s research, she worked with Google Earth Outreach to model old-growth redwoods on Google Earth. In this post, Emily shares her ideas on how technology and citizen science can help scientific research. -Ed.

Today is U.S. Arbor Day, a holiday established 120 years ago to celebrate our often under-appreciated forests, which provide us with necessities like clean air and drinking water as well as small pleasures like shade for a summer’s day picnic or a beautiful place to hike with crunchy leaves underfoot. Arbor Day holds special meaning for me because I spend most of my time in the coastal redwood forests of California, working to protect the world’s tallest tree species.

Over the past few months, Save the Redwoods League and the Google Earth Outreach team have collaborated to create 3D models of the old-growth redwood forest in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park in northern California, so you can now take a virtual hike among the ancient trees and cruise over towering treetops. Explore the park by activating the 3D trees layer in Earth (under 3D Buildings) and searching for [jedediah smith redwoods state park, ca]. Tilt your view angle toward the horizon to make the trees appear. You can download the KML file for the narrated tour about redwoods to view in Google Earth, or watch the video version below:

In order to protect redwoods in Jedediah Smith and elsewhere, my colleagues and I are working to collect data on geographic regions where the trees are currently thriving to determine how future forests will fare in our changing climate. A critical piece of our work is collecting and comparing field observations of redwoods across different climates, but we need more data to draw strong conclusions—and that’s where you come in.

Today, Save the Redwoods League is launching our citizen science project Redwood Watch, powered by iNaturalist.org, a platform for recording, organizing and mapping nature observations. By sharing a simple digital photograph of a redwood tree and the time and location where the picture was taken, you can help the League track and monitor the species. If you know of a redwood tree—perhaps in your own backyard or in a nearby park—you can use the free Redwood Watch iPhone application or your own camera to take a photo, add a comment and submit it online. iNaturalist stores your observation and, if geographical coordinates weren’t captured automatically, uses the Google Maps APIs to assign them to your photo. With your geolocated observation, we can zoom out and analyze your observation in the context of global environmental and climatic patterns.

An observation of a coast redwood submitted to the Redwood Watch on iNaturalist.org.

The more field observations Save the Redwoods League collects, the better we’ll understand what climate makes a healthy redwood today, and predict where the redwood forests of tomorrow will thrive. We hope to see you on the Redwood Watch.

Happy Arbor Day from Save the Redwoods League and Google Earth!

Note: There are plenty of parallel projects going on around the world, so if you don’t live near redwoods, consider participating in one of the other iNaturalist.org citizen science projects.

Posted by Emily Limm, Ph.D., Director of Science and Planning, Save The Redwoods League

Getting Started With Google Places

2011-04-26T10:11:00.000-07:00

More and more people are searching for businesses and organizations (like yours!) on Google Maps, so it’s important to take a few minutes to customize how your nonprofit is listed... using Google Places!

Your organization’s Google Places page is its listing where you can correct basic information, such as the physical address, website, or email of your organization. You can also enhance your Google Places page by adding images and videos of the work you do, which can allow viewers to link to your photo albums and your YouTube Nonprofit Channel. You can even encourage viewers to “Join Now!” or “Donate Now!” and link to your website to drive membership, donations, or to guide people on how they can help your cause.

For example, GreenInfo Network, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, has added images of the maps they have created for their nonprofit partners to their Google Places page:

Here’s how you can get started:

Go to google.com/places, and click “Get Started” and then “List your business”. Another way is to search for your nonprofit on Google Maps, click on the result, and then click on “Business Owner?”
You may need to verify that you are, in fact, the owner, and this can be checked with either a phone call or a snail-mail postcard to the organization's address. Once verified, you can start enhancing the Places page for your organization.
Add or edit (if necessary) the physical location of your organization. You can also move the marker to the correct location on the map. (Remember: these aren't individual projects or field locations where you work; this is the location of your organization’s headquarters or regional branches.)
Add photos, images, and videos of the work that you do. If applicable, add a description, encouraging people to “Join Now!” or “Donate Now!” with a link to your website.
Confirm the other details for your listing, make any changes as necessary, and click “Submit”.

That’s all there is to it! Google Places is available in numerous countries, and is free, so get started now at google.com/places! Google Places is even available on your Android or iPhone device, so people can find your nonprofit on-the-go.

After you’ve updated the Places page for your organization, do you feel ready to get creative with more mapmaking? You can build custom maps of your work with our Google Maps and Google Earth tutorials, such as Creating Maps using My Maps - specifically designed for nonprofits!

Posted by Karin Tuxen-Bettman, Google Earth Outreach Team

Non-Profit Industry Benchmark Report For Education

2011-04-26T09:59:00.000-07:00

Last year we asked participants in the Google Grants program to submit surveys about their experience with Google Grants, AdWords and other products. Of the responses we received, we were able to glean a bit of insight into the industries that make up the non-profits in our program and would like to share those insights with you for the purposes of creating your own benchmarks and metrics in this monthly benchmarking series.

This month we’re featuring the Education category of the non-profit industry. Look to future months for other NTEE non-profit categories.

Grantees in the Education industry were most likely to track “website traffic” as their most important metric, state "serving their constituents" as their main mission objective served via their Grant and state "raising awareness" as the main marketing objective served via their Google Grant.

With regard to the performance of their Grants AdWords account, they received an average of 27% of their total site visits from their Grants AdWords account and an average of 23,000 conversions over the last year (11/2009 - 11/2010).

An average of 6% of Educational organizations who responded to the survey report that they currently use an agency, SEO or SEM to manage their Grants AdWords account.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

Getting Started With Google Grants

2011-04-21T09:07:00.000-07:00

I’ve Been Awarded a Google Grant! Yay! Now What?

First, congrats! If your organization has been accepted to Google Grants, you’ve joined a growing group of nonprofits that are harnessing the power of online advertising to reach people across the globe. With Google AdWords in-kind advertising, your nonprofit can do many things: promote your website, raise awareness for your cause, recruit volunteers, attract new donors, market fundraising events and more.

That all sounds great, but you are new to online advertising. How do you actually use AdWords to achieve these goals? Sit tight and have no fear. The Google Grants Team has some handy tips just for you!

1. Structure, Structure, Structure

Structuring your AdWords account effectively can have a big impact on the success of your AdWords campaigns. Your account is broken down into three levels: account, campaigns, and ad groups. Each campaign should focus on one main service or offering you want to promote. Handy Tip: Look at your website and organize your account structure to match your website structure. Let us show you what we mean:

With this organized structure, you can easily see which campaigns are performing well and which need help! For example, you may notice that your Volunteer Campaign has a good clickthrough rate (CTR) and a high number of sign-ups, but you do not see the same results in your Donations Campaign. This alerts you that you may need to adjust your keywords, ad text or the landing page that you are directing users to for this campaign.

2. Keywords are Key!

Keywords are the heart of your search-based advertising campaigns. When selecting keywords, think like a user. If you were a user looking to volunteer at an animal shelter, you might search on ‘animal shelter volunteer’, ‘volunteer with dogs’, or ‘help animal shelter’. Brainstorm all of your keyword ideas, and then organize those keywords in themed lists.

Each of those themed lists will be their own Ad Group. That way, the ad text can specifically match the keywords in that group. Now when a user searches on ‘volunteer with animals’, your ad will say ‘volunteer with animals‘, which is highly relevant to the words the user searched on and will entice them to click on your ad.

Handy Tip: Getting stuck? Need more keyword ideas? Use the Keyword Tool!

3. Make Your Ads Sing!

Your goal is to attract users to your website. In order to do that, your ads should be simple, enticing, and relevant to what users are searching for. Follow our handy ad text optimization tips to make your ads sing!
Keywords in Ad Text: Include keywords in your ad text, especially in your title. Whenever a user types that keyword and sees your ad, the keyword will appear in bold font within your ad. This helps draw the user’s attention to your ad.
Call-to-Action: Include a call-to-action such as ‘sign up now’ or ‘donate online’. This encourages users to click on your ad and ensures they understand exactly what you expect them to do when they reach your landing page.
Clear Message: Use clear and specific ad text that highlights the benefits of your product or service or why your organization is unique .
Choose the Best Destination URL: Take the user to the specific landing page that has the information or service described in your ad. For example, if your ad is asking for a donation, take the user to the landing page where they can find out how to donate. If users do not find what is promised as soon as they arrive, they are more likely to leave your website.

Posted by Nikki Lopez, Google Grants Team

Google Apps Highlights

2011-04-19T10:30:00.000-07:00

Cross posted on The Official Google Blog.

In the last few weeks we’ve improved Google Apps with easier email snafu avoidance, better document and spreadsheet printing, stronger business security features for Android and more. The pace of entire organizations switching to Google Apps also continued to build, and many have shared their stories about moving to the cloud.

Recipient suggestion features graduate from Gmail Labs
We’ve all made the embarrassing mistake of forgetting to add an important email recipient, or even worse, sending an email to the wrong person with a similar name as someone else. To help you avoid such a digital faux pas, we experimented with Gmail Labs features that could notify you while drafting a message if it appeared you had addressed your message incorrectly. We heard lots of positive feedback about these Labs, so we rolled out recipient suggestion features for all Gmail users. Keep an eye out for the tips that show up beneath the address box!

Pagination and better printing for documents
Google Docs speeds up collaboration right in the browser between classmates and colleagues, but people often want to see how documents will look on paper before actually printing. Last Tuesday we advanced Google Docs another notch by adding pagination—the ability to see where page breaks fall. We also made document printing a whole lot better on Chrome. Printing is now a simpler operation right from the browser’s “File” menu, and what you see in your browser is exactly what you’ll get on paper.

Improvements to spreadsheet printing, too
As of last Monday, you can now print spreadsheets from your mobile phone with Cloud Print, building on the mobile document and email printing capabilities we announced earlier this year. You can print from most mobile browsers that support HTML5 to any cloud-connected printer. We also made improvements to spreadsheet printing from desktop browsers, with new options for printing spreadsheet titles, sheet names and page numbers.

Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office interface improvements
If your school or business wants some of Google Docs’ collaboration magic in familiar Microsoft Office software without upgrading Office or deploying SharePoint®, then we think you’ll like Google Cloud Connect. People can work together on the same files at the same time in Word, PowerPoint® and Excel® without the agony of attachments. We recently added 38 new language interfaces and a top feature request: the ability to minimize the Google Cloud Connect toolbar.

Better Android security and productivity for businesses
We recently treated our business and education customers to three new Android features: storage encryption for Android 3.0+ devices, a streamlined contacts experience that makes it faster to find and connect with people in your organization and the ability for users to locate and secure lost or stolen Android 2.2+ devices without burdening IT administrators.

Who's gone Google?
Since our last update here, over 60,000 businesses have moved to Google Apps. We’ve profiled quite a few on the Google Enterprise Blog recently, including Boxx Group, South Carolina REALTORS, Just Salad, 3Tailer, and our favorite switch story of all, Contoso.

Thousands of schools, nonprofits and other organizations made the move as well. Welcome to Boise State University, Edina Public Schools, ESSEC Business School, Monash University, Oakwood Junior School, the Georgia Department of Corrections and The Phoenix of New Orleans.

I hope these product updates and customer stories help you and your organization get even more from Google Apps. For more details and the latest news, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

Getting Started With YouTube

2011-04-14T10:25:00.000-07:00

Over the next few weeks we will be sharing tips on how to get started with each of the Google For Nonprofit products. This week we are kicking things off with YouTube! YouTube’s Nonprofit Program offers free premium perks to organizations in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia like branded channels, the ability to add call-to-action overlays to videos to drive traffic to external sites, and the ability to add a Google Checkout button to your channel. These tools can add another layer of interactivity to the content you’re creating. Check out the tips below on how your organization can make a powerful non-profit video.

1. Content is still king

First and foremost, you want to make sure that your video is appropriate for the organizational goals you want to hit. Before you start filming, sit down and figure out what you want to accomplish and whom you want to reach. A video targeting high-dollar donors may look very different from one that’s intended to train your volunteers.

Then, think about ways that you can put a creative spin on your video. Good, original content — whether it’s heartfelt and serious or light and humorous — goes a long way on YouTube. Here are a few approaches you may think about taking:

Tell serial stories. Engage viewers with a series of videos that tell a story around a specific theme, and keep them coming back for more. Once you've created a few episodes, put them into a playlist. This allows you to develop several video narratives targeted at particular demographics. A good example is Rainforest Action Network’s “Greenwash of the Week” series or “Oxfam’s Green Granny” series.
Respond to current events. Address relevant news stories by posting videos that explain your position. You can then embed them in emails to your supporters — a video message can be more effective than a text-laden email. Also, users are probably more likely to be searching for topics currently in the news and may be more likely to find your video organically through the YouTube search bar. You’ll want to be sure to tag your video with timely and relevant words.
Make your audience part of the video. Using YouTube annotations, you can create a “choose your own adventure”-style video, which puts the viewer in the driver’s seat and allows them to decide their video “fate.” Two great nonprofit examples of this style are “A Different Ending,” a campaign combating knife crime in the U.K., and “That’s Not Cool,” a campaign from the Ad Council about staying safe online.

2. You don’t need a Hollywood budget to succeed

Gone are the days when you need a large camera crew to make sure people watch your video; some of the most successful videos on YouTube have been created with an extremely minimal budget. Your organization can get started with video even if you only have a few hundred dollars.

Another alternative, if you’re low on staff and monetary resources, is to participate in YouTube’s Good Work program, which matches professional ad executives with nonprofits who need help creating video. The best videos created will be included in a special showcase at June’s Cannes Advertising Festival.

3. It’s OK to follow the leader

Here’s a piece of advice your boss will probably never give you: start watching a few popular YouTube videos every day, even if they have seemingly nothing to do with your organization. You may not see the connection between your issues and Fred, a sneezing panda or Dancing Matt, but these videos are resonating with a huge number of people on YouTube. See if you can replicate elements of these viral videos in your own organization’s content. Seriously, couldn’t Keyboard Cat be the next poster cat for animal welfare?

“The Pink Glove Dance,” arguably the most viral nonprofit video ever with over 8 million views, followed this method beautifully. The Portland St. Vincent Medical Center snatched a page right out of the J.K. Wedding playbook.

It’s a recipe you can follow, too. Just mix together a cute cast of snappy dancers (bonus points if they’re not classically trained), an irresistibly catchy but inspirational song that you have permission to use, add a sprinkling of cause messaging, and you’re good to go.

Happy filming and good luck!

Posted by Ramya Raghavan, YouTube Team

Recommendations When You Want Them: The +1 Button

2011-04-12T13:43:00.000-07:00

At the end of last month, we introduced an easy way for Google users to get recommendations from the people they trust right when they’re searching, the +1 button.

With a single click, the +1 button lets signed-in Google users recommend the content they like on the web to their friends and contacts right when it’s most useful -- on Google search.

The +1 button also appears alongside ads on Google.com. This means that in the coming weeks, Google users will be able to +1 button your organization’s Google Grants ads, spreading their support of your cause to people who know and trust them.

Let’s say that your nonprofit organization collects and distributes used books to underprivileged youth in the community. Someone who volunteered with your organization in the past can click the +1 button on your ad to recommend it publicly to their contacts.

That following week, a friend of the volunteer comes across a pile of books they no longer need while spring cleaning their apartment. They sign into their Google account, search Google.com and also see your ad – along with the personalized annotation that their friend +1’d it. Because they see that their friend +1’d the ad, it may help them decide where to donate their books.

But the +1 button isn’t just for search pages. We’re working on a +1 button that you can put on your pages too, making it easy for people to recommend your content on Google search without leaving your site. If you want to be notified when the +1 button is available for your website, you can sign up for email updates at our +1 webmaster site.

By helping searchers see more personal, relevant ads, we believe the +1 button could send you more qualified traffic. As for timing, the +1 button will automatically be added to your ads over the coming weeks for English searches on Google.com.

For more information on the +1 button check out this website.

Posted by AnnMarie Hill, Google Grants Team

Battling "Below First Page Bid" Status

2011-04-07T12:20:00.000-07:00

You’ve probably, at some point, seen “Below first page bid” in the status column of your keywords. Given the CPC bid limit of $1 for Google Grants accounts, sometimes it’s frustrating for you to receive traffic, let alone clicks, on some of your valuable, but often more general keywords.

Since Ad Rank takes into account your Quality Score and your bid when determining where your ad will show on Google Search, the status of “Below first page bid” means that your ads aren’t ranking as highly as they could on Google Search, which translates into less traffic to your site for a given keyword. One way to conquer “Below first page bid” status is through increasing Quality Score, which you can do in a variety of ways that we’ll explain today.

Because Quality Score is affected by the historical performance of your account, changes you make may take some time to influence your Quality Score, but don’t be discouraged!

Here are a few potential diagnoses for your keywords and some ways that you can start to remedy the situation.

Diagnosis 1: Chosen keyword is too general.
Remedy: Focus only on what works.

Add Negative Keywords to eliminate irrelevant impressions and improve your clickthrough rate. You can generate ideas for negative keywords by using the Search Term Report.
Use the Keyword Tool to find more specific keywords. These are typically more relevant to the user’s query and have a higher clickthrough rate than a more general keyword.
Experiment with different keyword match types by limiting matching on your keywords to a smaller set of user queries. On average, phrase match and exact match keywords can outperform broad match ones by limiting when your ads show to more relevant variations of your keywords.

Diagnosis 2: Keyword Quality Score is low.
Remedy: Refresh, refine, and experiment with existing ads & keywords.

Here are a few strategies for improving Quality Score:

Prevent poorly performing ads with low clickthrough rate from showing by pausing them.
Experiment with new ads that contain your keyword in them so that searchers know that you’re relevant to what they are looking for. Try using keyword insertion ads to accomplish this more efficiently.
Reorganize your campaigns into tightly themed ad groups. Creating different ad groups focused on a specific theme helps to ensure that your ad text is as relevant as possible to your keywords, which is important for Quality Score. For example, ad text which refers to donations shouldn’t be associated with keywords about volunteering. Do this within the AdWords interface or using AdWords Editor.
Change the display URL of the ad to something more specific, using a more descriptive URL for each of your ad groups.
Add negative keywords and utilize keyword match types to make sure that your ads show on only the most relevant searches.

Diagnosis 3: Competition is high.
Remedy: Focus on reaching your exact audience with a message relevant to them.

Location target away! You can create a basic campaign, then customize it for each location that you target so that users in your target audience can see how relevant your ads are to them.
Create ads that have your keywords in them - use keyword insertion ads to dynamically generate relevant ads.
Boost clicks and clickthrough rate with the Ad Extensions which are the best fit for the goals of each campaign! For example, Ad Sitelinks extensions can give you more real estate on Search and give users the option of a variety of different landing pages; Location Extensions will show your organization’s geographic location in the ad text to help you focus on local searches.

There’s so much to say...so this is just a quick snapshot. Even if one of these diagnoses--or all of them--apply to you, it’s never too late to make changes for the better!

Posted by Sarah Yuen, AdWords Team

Celebrating Positive Change

2011-04-05T10:27:00.000-07:00

If you’re like me and tune into daily news from around the world, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the harrowing updates of natural disaster and political turmoil. When we launched the new Google for Nonprofits program, we knew we wanted to provide a space for organizations to share hopeful stories of the incredible work they’re doing to make the world a better place. That’s why we created the Make-a-Change site to amplify the voices of these organizations doing such inspirational work. From building a school in Tanzania to going paperless to protecting our coastline, organizations around the world are doing incredible work - and we want to highlight these stories and spread good news.

If you work for a nonprofit, share your story with us! Each week, we’ll highlight one story of change at www.facebook.com/GoogleForNonprofits and via Twitter (@googlenonprofit). Check back often for a peek - it might brighten your day or give you ideas for how to make your own change!

Posted by Kirsten Cahill Olsen, Google for Nonprofits Team

Happy 8th Birthday, Google Grants!

2011-04-01T11:37:00.000-07:00

As we celebrate our 8th birthday, we feel truly inspired by all the incredible work you do and the way you use Google Grants to achieve your missions, reach your constituents, raise awareness about your cause and succeed in the world of online marketing.

So, we’d like to celebrate our birthday by sharing eight great pieces of Grantee wisdom from this year’s pool of extraordinary testimonials.

Thank you for making Google Grants a part of your organization.

Friendship Circle We have used Google Grants to promote Friendship Circle's many different programs and activities. In addition we are using Google Grants to point people to our blog. Tzvi Schectman - Family Coordinator, Friendship Circle

spcaLA Constantly monitor and use your Google AdWords. Use the tools provided by Google - especially keyword generators. Run reports. Change things that aren't working. Run ads for everything you have to offer! Miriam Davenport - Sr. Director of Development, spcaLA

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Use keyword insertion! I finally just tried it and I'm seeing immediate results (higher click-through rates). Kim Ranney - Online Marketing Manager, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)

International Finance Corporation Active management of the Google Grants campaigns is crucial. In addition, all traffic is not necessarily quality traffic. It's important to manage the campaigns in such a way that you're continuously targeting/reaching high-quality leads, rather than just barnstorming. Seth Fleisher - Product Manager, SME Toolkit, International Finance Corporation

The Writer's Center Setting a schedule to update/manage your AdWords can prove helpful, as well as designating a specific staff member for the task. Kyle Semmel - Publications & Communications Manager / Interim Director, The Writer's Center

Indian Land Tenure Foundation Make sure to link your AdWords account with Google Analytics so you can easily track the effectiveness of your ads based on the goals for your website. Pay attention to the popular, high performing keywords. Make sure your ads are designed to maximize these keywords and make sure that the content on your website matches what a user would expect to find using these search terms. If a user is lured in by an ad for one thing and finds something entirely different on your website, this will increase bounce rates and potentially damage your credibility. Erin Dennis - Communications Specialist, Indian Land Tenure Foundation

Artist Organized Art, Inc. Take advantage of local, regional and global targeting. Use the AdWords client side tools. Optimize your campaigns. Develop your agendas in terms of campaigns and use the "opportunities" Google is regularly finding for you... it's literally the benefit of a team of really, really smart people advancing your organization's cause. Joshua Selman - President, Artist Organized Art, Inc.

Big Cat Rescue The best way to make the most of your Google Grant is to check in every day to see what is happening via Google Alerts and customizing your AdWords to meet those changing needs. Carole Baskin - CEO, Big Cat Rescue

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

Non-profit industry benchmark report for Arts, Culture & Humanities

2011-03-29T10:14:00.000-07:00

Last year we asked participants in the Google Grants program to submit surveys about their experience with Google Grants, AdWords and other products. Of the responses we received, we were able to glean a bit of insight into the industries that make up the non-profits in our program and would like to share those insights with you for the purposes of creating your own benchmarks and metrics in this monthly benchmarking series.

This month we’re featuring the Arts, Culture & Humanities category of the non-profit industry. Look to future months for other NTEE non-profit categories.

Arts, Culture & Humanities
Grantees in this segment of the non-profit industry were most likely to track website traffic as their most important metric, state "reaching new constituents" as their main mission objective served via their Grant and state "raising awareness" as the main marketing objective served via their Google Grant.

With regard to the performance of their Grants AdWords account, they received an average of 19% of their total site visits from their Grants AdWords account and an average of 12,000 conversions over the last year (11/2009 - 11/2010).

An average of 7% of Arts, Culture & Humanities organizations who responded to the survey report that they currently use an agency, SEO or SEM to manage their Grants AdWords account.

Check back next month when we’ll feature benchmark information for the Education segment.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

YouTube Good Work Helps Non-Profits Find The Video Help They Need

2011-03-24T11:50:00.000-07:00

We know that finding the funding and resources to create compelling video can be difficult. That’s why YouTube is introducing “Good Work,” a program in partnership with the Cannes Advertising Festival.

Through Good Work, YouTube is matching nonprofits with the best ad professionals in the world, and asking these creative professionals to make videos for nonprofits.

The best videos, as selected by an esteemed judging panel of ad executives and NGO sector leaders, will be featured at a showcase at the Cannes Advertising Festival in June and on the YouTube homepage, providing exposure for both the video creators and the nonprofits.

Nonprofits are encouraged to participate, but you must have nonprofit status issued by your government and have a YouTube channel. To get started, just fill out the brief questionnaire below at http://www.youtube.com/goodwork.

The platform is also open to creative executives to find and select a nonprofit they want to work with, based on the information you provide. If they choose your organization, you’ll get an email from them, and you can work together to achieve your video goals.

Posted by Ramya Raghavan, YouTube Team