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.Mediacause.org 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.Mediacause.org and post a challenge for their industry experts.Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team
David Tryse showing the threats to the tigers’ habitat.Mongabay , read the original WWF press release and watch full video footage of the cubs, and find out how you can help save Sumatra.
Posted by Tanya Keen, Google Earth Team
(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog ) Better AIM interoperability in Gmail and beyond 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 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 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 delegated administration , which lets full administrators assign partial administration privileges to other individuals. Who’s gone Google? 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. Google Apps Blog . Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager
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. 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.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.let us know .http://www.rhok.org/ for more information and to sign up for your local event.
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:
Google Docs
forms feature within Google Spreadsheets to quickly collect data and even embed the form on your website.
Google Sites
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?
Start today by creating a (free) Google Apps account for your domain.
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
(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog )
Customize Gmail with a favorite photo
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
Follow