For Nonprofits Blog
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Google Apps Highlights
Friday, December 16, 2011
(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
Thursday, December 15, 2011
(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
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
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
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
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 fee
l 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
Monday, December 5, 2011
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
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