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.Read More

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

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.Read More

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

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 ...Read More

(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

(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 ...Read More

(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

(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. ...Read More

(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

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 ...Read More

(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

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 ...Read More

(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

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.Read More

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

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.Read More

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