As you may have read in previous posts, we now have over 4,000 non-profit organizations participating in the Google Grants program. From the beginning, our team’s main focus was to keep growing our recipient base so that more and more organizations could benefit from Google Grants.
But as we've grown in size, we’ve realized that an organization benefits most from a Google Grant when they really understand how to use it to meet their goals. Just being approved for a Google Grant isn’t enough. And the “set it and forget it” approach doesn’t work well for your account either. By making the effort to understand AdWords and be engaged in your account, your organization can really maximize your advertising grant.
This might sound like a lot of work, especially if your organization is resource constrained. But don’t worry: the Google Grants team is here to help! One of our major initiatives this year is to add education resources geared specifically to you, the recipient. We will be adding considerable new content to our program website, including trainings, guides, FAQs, and more. And knowing that there are different learning styles out there, we will be experimenting with different formats for our new education materials so that visual learners can read text, while audio and visual learners can listen to and watch online trainings. If you have suggestions for materials or information, please drop us a note.
Look out for new educational content coming soon to our site. We encourage you to review these materials and use what you learn to succeed. We want to ensure that the more than 4,000 organizations receiving a Google Grant are actively involved and making the most of their grants. With your effort, you can help us get one recipient closer to this goal!
IT infrastructure is hard work for any organization. Having worked at a non-profit prior to coming to Google, I know that the combination of long-standing legacy systems and limited resources certainly doesn't make things any easier. Now that I'm member of the Google Apps team, I spend my time working on simple but powerful communication and collaboration tools for organizations.
Since we first launched it in August 2006, Google Apps has become one of our most flexible offerings. It's helping to meet the needs of family domains, businesses of all sizes, Internet Service Providers and universities. And starting last summer, we extended the Education Edition of Google Apps to registered 501(c)3s.
You may already be familiar with Google's standard suite of free hosted services, including private-label email, calendaring, and online-document sharing. But the Education Edition offers a number of value-added admin features at no additional cost, including e-mail migration tools, phone support for critical issues, and extensibility APIs. (Ads are also optional, in case you're curious.)
There's no need to take my word for it, though: check out our success stories from organizations that have already made the switch, including the Nonprofit Technology Network, Mercy Corps, Idealist.org, and the East Bay Community Recovery Project.
At the end of the day, enabling good works through Google Apps — in any capacity — both inspires and humbles us. We're excited to offer this worthy sector a low-investment, feature-rich IT choice. Find out more or apply for an account.
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