In the discussion forum this month, a few newly accepted Grantees were curious on how to proceed with the AdWords Account Creation process if they already had a paid AdWords account.Read More

In the discussion forum this month, a few newly accepted Grantees were curious on how to proceed with the AdWords Account Creation process if they already had a paid AdWords account.

Unfortunately, it's not possible to merge a Google Grants account with a paid AdWords account, nor is it possible to convert your paying account into a Google Grants account. Google Grants recipients must create a new AdWords account once accepted into the program.

If you had an AdWords account prior to obtaining a Google Grants account, here are some tips to keep in mind when creating your new account:

• Choose a different login email: Use a different email address to create the new account. If you'd like to use the same email address, you'll need to change it in your existing AdWords account before closing it out.
• Use AdWords Editor: You can use AdWords Editor to transfer all your campaigns from your old account to your new account. (You'll need to create your new account and at least one campaign first.) AdWords Editor is a free, downloadable application for managing your account. AdWords Editor enables you to copy or move items between campaigns, ad groups, and accounts.

To all those new Grantees, we hope you find value and success from your efforts and experience with the Google Grants program!

Posted by AnnMarie Hill, The Google Grants Team

July’s resource round-up includes an aggregation of How-Tos for grant applications, a call for volunteers at NTEN.org, a calendar of events and information about National Philanthropy Day on November 15, tips for rebranding your organization and a social media success story from a local dance group in Virginia.Read More

July’s resource round-up includes an aggregation of How-Tos for grant applications, a call for volunteers at NTEN.org, a calendar of events and information about National Philanthropy Day on November 15, tips for rebranding your organization and a social media success story from a local dance group in Virginia.

Grant Application How-Tos
eHow has a collection of articles on the subject of applying for a variety of grants. They even have one called How to Apply for a Google Grant. Included in this collection; How to Apply for Home-Based Business Grants, How to Apply for a Nonprofit Grant and How to Apply for a Burning Man Art Grant.

Update your listing on NTEN
Non-profit Technology Network is updating their member directory and need your help testing it out. If you have about 30 minutes to help out this week (7/26-7/30), send a quick email to karl@nten.org. Otherwise, just make sure that your NTEN member information is up to date.

National Philanthropy Day
The Association of Fundraising Professionals Chapters are beginning preparations for National Philanthropy Day (November 15th) acknowledgements. Check their calendar for celebratory events and gather materials for your chapter’s own celebration on their site.

Tips for rebranding your organization
If your organization is considering rebranding, this USA Today article with tips and guidance on how to assess whether your org is right for rebranding and how to navigate the obstacles, could be helpful as you get started on the process.

Success with social media
One local dance group in Virginia shares their perspective on using social media like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to raise awareness about their group on a limited budget.

If you come across resources that would be useful to the greater non-profit community, feel free to post it to the appropriate topic in our discussion group so that everyone can benefit. If you'd like to review previous round-ups, you can search for "resource round-up" from the search box at the top of the page.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

As the fall school year approaches, AdWords in the Curriculum wrapped up its spring semester at Michigan State University. A class of 13 students working under Professor Clay Vorhees was paired with Michigan-based non profits including West Michigan Land Conservancy, Piast Institute, Michigan Weimaraner Rescue, and the National Leiomysarcoma Foundation.

AdWords in the Curriculum students highlighted the strategic aspects of AdWords campaigns which can make campaign builds and optimization an engaging and appealing project to work on.

After an initial meeting, the MSU student teams took a systematic approach to stages for optimizing.

Professor Vorhees explained, “During the optimization efforts, the students adopted a strategic approach to improve the campaigns by conducting AB tests that demonstrated the benefits of dynamic keyword insertion, developing rational appeals, and calls to action in their ad text. Leveraging these research findings, the student teams re-developed their campaigns after 5 weeks of testing and noticed substantial improvements in account performance.”

Allowing 5 weeks for data gathering and testing can ultimately improve campaign results. Making snap decisions about areas to change after just a week of performance can be risky, since there may be only a handful of impressions and clicks. On the other hand, it is critical to make adjustments to a campaign based on data once trends develop.

When the campaigns were set up and in a position to be optimized, the training began.

“Once optimization was underway, the students turned to teachers and worked with their non-profits virtually, on-site, and via the phone to train the non-profits in the process of monitoring, editing, and optimizing their campaigns. This extended training time with the non-profits proved to be a great success.”

After the semester with AdWords in the Curriculum concluded, all four non-profits are continuing to run campaigns with more than 12,000 visitors driven to the sites on a monthly basis.

Read More

As the fall school year approaches, AdWords in the Curriculum wrapped up its spring semester at Michigan State University. A class of 13 students working under Professor Clay Vorhees was paired with Michigan-based non profits including West Michigan Land Conservancy, Piast Institute, Michigan Weimaraner Rescue, and the National Leiomysarcoma Foundation.

AdWords in the Curriculum students highlighted the strategic aspects of AdWords campaigns which can make campaign builds and optimization an engaging and appealing project to work on.

After an initial meeting, the MSU student teams took a systematic approach to stages for optimizing.

Professor Vorhees explained, “During the optimization efforts, the students adopted a strategic approach to improve the campaigns by conducting AB tests that demonstrated the benefits of dynamic keyword insertion, developing rational appeals, and calls to action in their ad text. Leveraging these research findings, the student teams re-developed their campaigns after 5 weeks of testing and noticed substantial improvements in account performance.”

Allowing 5 weeks for data gathering and testing can ultimately improve campaign results. Making snap decisions about areas to change after just a week of performance can be risky, since there may be only a handful of impressions and clicks. On the other hand, it is critical to make adjustments to a campaign based on data once trends develop.

When the campaigns were set up and in a position to be optimized, the training began.

“Once optimization was underway, the students turned to teachers and worked with their non-profits virtually, on-site, and via the phone to train the non-profits in the process of monitoring, editing, and optimizing their campaigns. This extended training time with the non-profits proved to be a great success.”

After the semester with AdWords in the Curriculum concluded, all four non-profits are continuing to run campaigns with more than 12,000 visitors driven to the sites on a monthly basis.

Posted by Anita Varma, Google Ann Arbor Team

If you’re looking for help or inspiration to improve your Google Grants AdWords account performance, your grantee peers are regularly offering up their best advice on our testimonial page.

Recently ...Read More

If you’re looking for help or inspiration to improve your Google Grants AdWords account performance, your grantee peers are regularly offering up their best advice on our testimonial page.

Recently Kids First Fund, an organization focused on helping needy children, shared some background on how their Google Grants AdWords account has helped them secure funds and raise awareness about their mission and how they’ve been able to manage the award within their organization.

"Kids First Fund advertisements appeared on more than 3 million Google search pages during 2009. These messages generated a stunning 35,000+ clicks to visit KidsFirstFund.org. The AdWords program generated exposure for the Kids First Fund among users in the USA, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. Once at the Kids First Fund website, donations may be made via Google’s Checkout service. The Kids First Fund can identify several donations received through online exposure at Google.com. This includes a $1,000 donation from a US-based foundation and individual donations from around the world including France, Malaysia, and Mozambique."

Advice for other grantees: Be certain to assign someone in the organization the task of managing the account. It's a great opportunity for a person with existing online marketing skills to expand their experience or for a newbie to learn about AdWords.

If you’d like to hear more about what other grantees are doing with their Grants AdWords accounts, check out the testimonials page for a growing number of stories. You can also submit your own story on our Share Your Story page and help other grantees by sharing what you’ve learned.


Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

Today, we’d like to highlight some ways in which non-profits can use ad extensions to create more compelling campaigns and attract users to complete a desired activity. Please note that all extensions we discuss below are set at the campaign level.

Ad Sitelinks

If you’re running the top-ranked ads for a given keyword, you now have the ability to add different links to specific pages or content on your site. Rather than sending all users to the same landing page, ad sitelinks will display up to four additional links for users to choose from, as in the example below.Read More

If you’ve been searching on Google.com you’ve probably seen a number of ads including some additional lines of information, such as a phone number, a business address, or even some product images. We’ve added a series of ad extensions in recent months to help users find more useful information on Google.

Today, we’d like to highlight some ways in which non-profits can use ad extensions to create more compelling campaigns and attract users to complete a desired activity. Please note that all extensions we discuss below are set at the campaign level.

Ad Sitelinks

If you’re running the top-ranked ads for a given keyword, you now have the ability to add different links to specific pages or content on your site. Rather than sending all users to the same landing page, ad sitelinks will display up to four additional links for users to choose from, as in the example below.

For non-profits, this means that you now have the opportunity to point folks not only to your homepage but also to other key areas of your site, such as a volunteer opportunities page, a fundraising page, or a page with information on your current projects.

Location Extensions

You’ve probably heard of or seen location extensions on Google in the past year: these are ads which have business addresses dynamically linked to them. For those who have claimed their Google Places listing and synced it with their ads, we recently added the ability to add multiple address listings (US only).

How can non-profits leverage this extension? This is a great tool for organizations looking to attract local foot traffic or promote an event to users in a specific region. For example, a food bank based in San Jose, California may be running ads on general keywords like “San Jose food banks” and have ad text that calls on folks to “donate items today!” Using this extension, the food bank can add its address so that users in San Jose can easily see how far away they’re located, and drop off some goods!

Click-to-Call Phone Extensions

We’re seeing a rapidly increasing number of users search on their mobile phones, and with the click-to-call extension, we’ve given advertisers the ability to connect with potential customers or donors over the phone. If your users have high-end devices with full browsers, you can display your local phone number to nearby users through a location extension that the user can click to dial. For all other phones, you can display your national or vanity phone number for people to get in touch with your non-profit over the phone.

How does this help your organization? This is the ideal way to put potential donors, volunteers, and other stakeholders in touch with your non-profit over the phone. For example, an organization responding to a natural disaster may be accepting donations over the phone; adding the phone extension when someone enters “donate to XYZ” on the phone gives the person an opportunity to click on your number, call, and donate immediately.

To learn more about these extensions and other new ad formats (display formats not available to grantees), visit the Ad Innovations page.

Posted by Sonja Lee, Account Manager, Online Sales

Recently, Google released its Economic Impact report for 2009, detailing the impact that AdWords, AdSense and Google Grants had on businesses in the U.S. The report includes state-level information ...Read More

Recently, Google released its Economic Impact report for 2009, detailing the impact that AdWords, AdSense and Google Grants had on businesses in the U.S. The report includes state-level information on revenue generated for businesses and donations for non-profits by these products as well as great stories from these enterprises about how they’ve used these tools to reach their goals.

Though most of the stories in the report focus on for-profit entities, they offer helpful perspectives, tactics and ideas for non-profit Grantees as well.

• Better World Books, a new and used bookseller in Indiana, increased new donors to their global literacy program by consistently expanding their global presence by enlisting the use of AdWords.
  
  
• MobileDemand, a rugged tablet PC manufacturer in Iowa, increased leads and contracts by targeting niche markets with the granular targeting capabilities of AdWords.
  
  
• Shopperschoice.com, an online sporting goods store in Louisiana, grew their company and increased their share of voice by competing effectively through the detailed reporting available in AdWords.
  
  
• Crescent Harbor, who sells light fixtures online in Maine, grew their family-owned company while staying small and local by using AdWords to reach out to national markets.
  
  
• 123Print, an online one-stop print shop in Maryland, has seen growth in new areas by focusing budgets on emerging markets they identified with their globally targeted AdWords traffic.
  
  
• Grandma’s Secrets, a custom bakery in New York, managed their budget effectively by using geographic targeting in AdWords to advertise their treats only to users in New York City.

If you’d like more detail on any of these strategies, just click into the case studies to read more. If you'd like to discuss the report with other grantees and non-profits you can start up a thread in the Grants Non-profit and grantee resources discussion group.

Speaking of storytelling, some non-profits featured in the report; Direct Relief, Big Cat Rescue, Arbor Day Foundation, Natural Resources Defense Council and TreadLightly!, already have their stories featured on the Grants testimonials page. If you’re a grantee who would like to share a story of how Google Grants has impacted your organization, we’d love to share it with other organizations so that the potential of Grants and AdWords can reach new non-profits around the world.

In case you haven't already heard, we will be holding a Google Grants workshop at our Mountain View, California campus in early September. This two-day event is designed for existing Google Grantee organizations interested in strategies to maximize their AdWords account and ...Read More

In case you haven't already heard, we will be holding a Google Grants workshop at our Mountain View, California campus in early September. This two-day event is designed for existing Google Grantee organizations interested in strategies to maximize their AdWords account and free Google products to help reach more donors, improve operations, and raise awareness. You can read more about the workshop in our full blog post on the topic.

If you are interested in attending, please sign-up here for the invitation lottery. The deadline to complete the interest form is Friday, July 9th, so be sure to sign-up soon if you would like to attend the workshop.

Looking forward to September!

Posted by Kristie Mun, The Google Grants Team

In this month’s edition of “Discussion Forum: Hot Topics”, I’d like to address an issue that’s come up in a few discussion threads over the past month - whether it’s possible to run ads for multiple websites or domains owned by your organization, and, if so, how to do this.Read More

In this month’s edition of “Discussion Forum: Hot Topics”, I’d like to address an issue that’s come up in a few discussion threads over the past month - whether it’s possible to run ads for multiple websites or domains owned by your organization, and, if so, how to do this.

The short answer is that, yes, it’s possible, but it requires some work on your part.

According to the Google Grants program details page, your ads must link only to the URL included in your application, as this is the URL approved for your Google Grant. If your organization's focus, website content, and/or URLs change significantly for any other reason, you need to notify us about the change.

The same goes for adding multiple domains to your Grants account. If you want to have a domain other than the primary one listed in your application used in your AdWords ad text, you need to notify our team and request approval by filling out the form located at this link.

Once you’ve submitted this new information, we’ll notify you of any change in status or additional questions we have.

I hope this helps those of you with multiple domains. Keep your discussions going on our forums!

Posted by AnnMarie Hill, Google Grants Team

Today, July 1st, YouTube is teaming up with PBS NewsHour for an exclusive interview with Bob Dudley, President and CEO of BP’s Gulf Coast Restoration Organization. In a live session moderated by the PBS NewsHour’s Ray Suarez, Mr. Dudley will respond directly to ...Read More

Today, July 1st, YouTube is teaming up with PBS NewsHour for an exclusive interview with Bob Dudley, President and CEO of BP’s Gulf Coast Restoration Organization. In a live session moderated by the PBS NewsHour’s Ray Suarez, Mr. Dudley will respond directly to the public’s questions about the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

If your organization is interested in being part of the discussion, we welcome questions from you and your members. You can ask BP questions about accountability, the clean-up plan, recovery efforts in the Gulf region, environmental impact, the status of the relief well drilling, the role of the U.S. government, the future of offshore drilling and of BP as a company, or any other topic on your mind.

Participate in the discussion by submitting questions and voting for the best ones using Google Moderator on youtube.com/citizentube. The top questions will be posed in the live interview today, Thursday, July 1, at 3:30 pm ET/12:30 pm PT on CitizenTube. Portions of the interview will also be aired Thursday evening on PBS NewsHour and available on YouTube.

We look forward to your submitted questions for this exclusive interview.

Posted by Kristie Mun, Google Grants Team