Cross posted on The Official Google Checkout Blog

We’re thrilled to announce that as part of the Google Checkout for Non-Profits program, free transaction processing for Google Grants recipients will be extended through 2011.

So if you’re part of the Google Grants program and you have a Google Checkout account, you’ll be able to use Google Checkout to accept donations without paying transaction processing fees in the coming year. We hope many non-profits take advantage of this benefit through the next year as they raise funds to advance their causes.

For more information about other Google tools for non-profits, check out the Google for Non-Profits website.

Posted by Satyajeet Salgar, Checkout Team

If you’re a non-profit organization who has created one or more amazing videos in the past year, we have good news for you. For the second year in a row, YouTube is teaming up with See3 Communications to present the DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards, a celebration of the best non-profit video on the site.

Whether you created a high-definition documentary about street slums in India or shot a quirky cellphone video of rescue dogs at your animal shelter, we encourage you to submit your video at www.youtube.com/nonprofitvideoawards. We’ll award prizes like $2500 grants from the Case Foundation, Flip Cams, free admission to the Nonprofit Technology Conference, and a spotlight on the YouTube homepage to small, medium and large organizations, plus a special award for the “Best Thrifty Video”.

To give you a sense of what works, here are the finalists’ videos from last year’s competition:



The deadline to enter is March 2, 2010 and you must be a member of the YouTube Nonprofit Program at the time of judging, to enter. Good luck!

Posted by Ramya Raghavan, YouTube Team

Cross Posted on the Official Google Blog

For me, celebrating the holidays is both about spending time with family, and taking the time to help others. Along with bundling up by the fire and sipping some hot cocoa, the holidays mean taking the time to do something good.

If you want to send directions to a volunteer opportunity, or just want to brighten a friend’s day, we’ve designed online holiday greeting cards featuring Google Maps. In addition to choosing from ten holiday covers and adding a personal message, you can include specific directions, a Street View image, or a favorite place on the inside of the card.

For example, I can send this card with the map designed as a holiday present, to remind friends about the gift of giving, and share directions to volunteer at their local food bank to help feed thousands of people over the holidays.

Thanks to Christoff Niemann for inspiration.

With all of the holiday decorations around San Francisco, I enjoy walking or biking around and taking in the sights. I can send this card to my friends to get them thinking about environmentally-friendly alternate modes of transportation, and include biking directions to an upcoming dinner (after all, snow is a rare sight in San Francisco).

Finally, doing good can also mean just brightening someone’s day, so I will send this cheerful holiday greeting to my big brother in Colorado to let him know that I’m looking forward to seeing him over the holidays.

You too can share the holiday spirit with these online cards, so start sending them at googlemapsholidays.appspot.com. Happy holidays!

Posted by Kirsten Olsen Cahill, Google.org Team

The holidays are a hectic time for all of us, especially nonprofit organizations that rely on the seasonal spirit of giving to sustain operations throughout the year. As you move into this busy time, we thought you might like a few tips on how using Google Apps and other tools can help you make a change and save some time this holiday season.

To reach more donors: Use these Google Docs templates to attract and engage supporters with newsletters, event invitations, and more.

To improve operations: Try out this project planning template to save time and better organize your staff and volunteers.

To raise awareness: Check out Google Fusion Tables to show impact or add a custom map to your website.

For more ideas of how Google’s tools can help expand your impact and to view cases studies from fellow nonprofits, visit the Google for Nonprofits website. Share your stories by telling us how Google products have helped your organization.

Posted by Anna Bishop, Google For Nonprofits Team

Cross-posted on the Webmaster Central Blog

Googlers often participate in live site clinics at conferences, giving advice about real-world sites and allowing webmasters to learn by example. Now Google's Search Quality team is excited to host an online site clinic on the Webmaster Central Blog. In future posts, the Search Quality team will be looking at some user-submitted examples and offering broad advice that you can apply to your site.

This site clinic will focus on non-profit organizations, but chances are that the advice will benefit small business and government sites as well. If you work for a non-profit and would like your site considered, read on for submission instructions.

How to submit your site:

To register your site for the clinic, fill in the information requested on this form. From there, the team will determine trends and share corresponding best practices to improve site quality and user experience. The analysis will be available in a follow-up post, and will adhere to the public standards of webmaster guidance. Please note that by submitting your site, you permit the team to use your site as an example in follow-up clinic posts.

There are a few guidelines:

1. Your site must belong to an officially registered non-profit organization.

2. In order to ensure that you're the site owner, you must verify ownership of your site in Google Webmaster Tools. You can do that (for free) here.

3. To the best of your ability, make sure your site meets the webmaster quality guidelines. The team will be suing the same principles as the basis for their analysis.

All set? Submit your site for consideration here.

The site clinic goes live today and submissions will be accepted until 11/18/2010. Stay tuned for some useful webmaster tips when the sites are reviewed.

Posted by Alexi Douvas and Jen Lee, Search Quality Team

Whether it’s prospective volunteers, donors or individuals interested in your organization’s cause, better understanding your visitors and their actions on your site can help achieve your goals. Fortunately Google Analytics can take the guesswork out of the equation, bringing you key trends, rich data and actionable insights. The following reports under the ‘Visitors’ tab in Google Analytics are a great place to start.

Map Overlay: From countries to states and cities, this report shows from where in the world your visitors are accessing your site. The darker the shaded color on the map, the higher the concentration of visitors coming from that location. Hover your mouse over an area to quickly access the metrics associated with that geography. Best of all, you can use the tab at the top to change what metric is used for the map. Have an active goal for donations and want to see what states drive the highest donations per visitor? Interested in learning what cities drove the highest number of volunteer sign-ups after a recent event? Just swap out the metrics and get your insights in seconds.

New vs. Returning: This report shows you a breakdown of your visitors into two categories - returning users (those who have been to your website before) and new users (those who have not been to your site before). You can view those two visitor groups through a variety of lenses - total visits, bounce rate, conversions and more. Diving into this report can let you know if your recent publicity efforts are paying off (do we have more ‘new’ visitors this month versus last month?), or if you are getting larger average online donations from your returning users versus those who are looking at your site for the first time.

Visitor Trending: Check these reports for a great overview of what your visitors are doing over a period of time. Do my visitors tend to spend more time browsing my site during the week, or on the weekend? Has my bounce rate changed at all since I redesigned our website? Whether you’re measuring average pageviews, bounce rate or time on site, these reports all give a high level picture of how your site is doing in relation to key metrics.

The overview and insights provided by the reports above can help you make informed decisions about how to manage your Google Grants account and your website. For more information on features and reports available through Google Analytics, be sure to check out our Google Analytics Help Center.

Posted by Geoff Stirling, AdWords Team

Getting started with the YouTube Non-Profit Program only takes 3 simple steps:

1. Create an account with YouTube under your charity’s name: www.youtube.com/create_account

2. Register for the YouTube Non-Profit Program (US, UK, CA, AU only): www.youtube.com/nonprofits

3. Get your videos online!

Building a really effective channel that attracts subscribers takes a little longer. Here are some tips on getting the most out of your YouTube Non-Profit Channel:

Customize your channel wisely - The brand channel wide frame illustrates which images can be customized under your channel. The channel banner for example can link externally and is the first image to grab your visitor’s attention. Make sure your logo is clearly shown to present a trusted front for your non-profit.

Add Call-to-Action overlays - A major benefit of this program is that Call-to-Action overlays are made freely available across all of your uploads. These instructions will help you get these configured. Calls-to-action provide a powerful prompt that should be used to engage your video viewers into performing an action that will support your non-profit’s cause.

Upload content regularly - It can be hard to keep your content updated, but even low quality footage from the field can be a powerful driver of engagement and trust with your audience. In fact, it is best to focus on authentic and original content as this will best communicate your message amongst the large amount of competing content on YouTube.

Share your content - Enabling auto-share by linking your YouTube channel to your Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader accounts makes it easy to keep your subscribers up to date no matter which channel they follow. Auto-share combined with regular uploads and comments will prompt your subscribers that you are still actively engaging your area of focus. Also, make sure you embed your videos on your website.

Video is an incredibly powerful tool as it can convey emotive and visual messages more effectively than any other media. YouTube not only provides you with this channel of delivery, but also an important feedback and engagement channel with your audience. For more information on YouTube please visit the YouTube Blog.

Posted by Scott Savage, Google Australia

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

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

Over the past few years, the Google Grants team has been working hard to help you, the grantee, make better use of your AdWords account to achieve your organization's goals. We've beefed up our educational resources, added new content to our Help Center, and much more to empower you. Towards the same end, we held our first grantee workshop last summer on our Mountain View, California campus, where 100+ grantees attended a two-day workshop focused on better use of their Google Grants account and awareness of other non-profit offerings from Google. Last year's event was such a success, that we will be holding a second two-day workshop in Mountain View this summer.

That's right - we are pleased to announce our second Google Grants Workshop, to be held in Mountain View in early September!

During the two-day workshop, grantees will attend AdWords sessions taught by in-house specialists, hear best practices from fellow grantees, and learn about Google for Non-Profits' products that can make an impact on their organization. As with last year's event, we will record workshop sessions and post the videos online from which all can benefit.

While we'd love to open this event to all our 6,000+ grantees, we do have a limited number of invitations and will not be able to accommodate everyone. Therefore, we'll be holding a lottery drawing to ensure that we issue invitations fairly. Also, since this workshop will feature similar content to last year's event, we ask that those who attended the previous workshop do not enter the lottery for the 2010 event.

If you're a current Google Grants recipient, are interested in attending the Google Grants Workshop this summer, and did not attend last year's workshop, please sign-up to enter our invite lottery by July 9th.

To take full advantage of this event, we ask for attendance from your organization's AdWords account manager and up to one additional representative per organization. Also, to help us better understand how we can help your non-profit, we'll ask you for some basic information and a brief statement about why your organization would benefit from attending this event. We'll be following up with all interested grantees after the July 9th deadline with the results of the lottery.

Have a great summer and we'll see you in September!

Posted by Kristie Mun, AnnMarie Hill, and Michelle Rosen, Google Grants Workshop Organizers

It’s a single special sauce that makes a Big Mac a Big Mac, and even Dr. Pepper has only twenty-three flavors. So it’s not without some pride that I say that Google uses over 200 signals in order to decide how to rank websites in our search results. That’s almost twenty times as many secret ingredients as there are in KFC’s original recipe!

A lot of people want to know what they can do to be the top-ranked result on Google for a particular search. I can’t tell you exactly how to do that—if I did, everyone would be top-ranked and our search results would be a huge mess—but it’s no secret that the top-ranked non-profit sites tend to have useful and original content. That said, even the best content in the world will only take you so far if search engines have trouble accessing or understanding it. Resources like Google Webmaster Tools can help you make sure that your content is search engine friendly and easily found online.

Making Your Content Search Engine Friendly

Google crawls the web using a software program called Googlebot that visits websites and adds them to our search index (other search engines have similar programs). Googlebot is very smart and capable, but it’s no human. Googlebot can have trouble interpreting pictures or video, and can generally only see text. If the organization name on your homepage is just a big image, then you’ll want to make sure that the name is featured in the title of the page, or elsewhere in text so that Googlebot can find it. This holds true for images of event flyers, schedules, contact information, and any content that you want users to be able to find easily. Having this information available in text also makes your website more accessible to users who aren’t able to interact with your site visually.

Another thing you can do to help search engines understand your site is to use good anchor text. These are the words that are clickable for a web link—the words ‘anchor text’ in the last sentence are an example of anchor text. Anchor text gives search engines additional context about the content to which you’re linking. Search engine friendly (and user friendly) anchor text describes where the link will take you and doesn’t just say ‘click here.’

Unhelpful anchor text: For information about Google Grants, click here.
Awesome anchor text: To apply for a grant, visit the Google Grants website.


In the first example, it’s not immediately clear to the user if the link goes to the Google Grants website, or if it goes to a different site with content about Google Grants. The second example tells the user and Googlebot that the link is to the Google Grants website, and it lets Googlebot know that some people are referring to the page at http://www.google.com/grants as the ‘Google Grants website.’

These are just two quick tips to make your website easy for search engines to index. For more ways you can make your content search engine friendly, check out the Google Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide.

Using Google Webmaster Tools

To help you make your site search engine friendly, Google offers Google Webmaster Tools, a set of tools you can use to see how the Google search engine interacts with your site. You can see which search queries are causing your site to appear in Google’s search results, and also make sure that Googlebot is able to index your site successfully.

To get started, you’ll need to visit Webmaster Tools, sign into your account, and add your website. The sign-up process will walk you through the process of adding your first website, and if you hit a snag there’s a Help Center and a community of webmasters in the Webmaster Help Forum that are always willing to answer questions and help out.

Once you’ve added your site to Webmaster Tools, you can see all sorts of interesting information about your site, including customized suggestions about changes that will make your site more search engine friendly and a tool that lets you see your website the way Googlebot sees it.

Making your site search engine friendly is just one part of a successful online strategy for your organization, but it can pay off with increased visibility. Search engine optimization may not have the zing of a clever AdWords campaign or the spice of a nicely-designed site, but done well it can be a secret ingredient that helps people find and support your cause online.

Posted by Rob Thomas, Search Guru

May's resource round-up includes some first-hand experience from Google Grantees on what to expect from your Google Grant from set-up to tracking, a word from an SEO on their approach to our program, advice on how to make social marketing work for your org and two successful use cases of organizations promoting their cause effectively through YouTube for Non-Profits.

The lifecycle of a Google Grant
This grantee explains why Google Grants was helpful for her organization and what she experienced when setting up and using AdWords. Her advice: If you’re trying to cross “the invisibility threshold” for your little-known organization, you need an effective and aggressive marketing plan just like for-profit businesses, which might include Google Grants and other online outlets.

This SEO sums up their method for negotiating the application and account building process and how to incorporate different features to make your strategy successful.

If you’ve ever tried to weigh the benefits and intricacies of AdWords Conversion Tracking and Google Analytics to see which was a better fit for your organization, this UK web solutions company has taken the time to list the pros and cons.


Make social media work for your org
Having a YouTube channel for your non-profit is a good start, but if you’ve wondered what really makes a good video, take a look at these examples of successful social media campaigns.

If you’re familiar with Shauna Casey, non-profit advocate and founder of Voluntweetup, you will likely find these tips for social marketing valuable as your org embarks on its own social marketing endeavors.


YouTube is working for non-profits
(RED), an organization working to eliminate AIDS in Africa, recently aired a documentary on HBO to raise awareness about the true impact of their mission. Immediately following the broadcast, they posted the video on their YouTube channel. If your organization has similar materials, newscasts in which you’ve participated or other broadcasts, add them to your org’s YouTube for Non-profits channel to increase awareness about your cause.

The Global Fund, an organization focused on fighting AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, is hosting a petition on their YouTube for Non-profits channel to negotiate funds to buy treatments to stop mother-to-child transmission of HIV. If your org gathers signatures show support for your cause or make change, you could try hosting a petition on your channel to showcase the importance of your cause to potential funders and decision makers.

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 the discussion group so that everyone can benefit. If you'd like to review previous round-ups, just click here and read through previous months' round-ups or search for "resource round-up" from the search box at the top of the page.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

Regardless of whether you’re sending traffic to your website via AdWords, if you’re getting any traffic on your site it’s important to keep track of it, and with Google Analytics that’s free!

We’ve discussed Google Analytics before and have shared a number of great resources with you, but let’s take a closer look at some reports that help you learn more about the types of visitors your website receives.

The ‘Visitors’ reporting section of Analytics shows you where visitors to your site are located geographically, and helps you understand user behavior in terms of trending (how deep into your site they go and for how long), and loyalty (whether they come back and how often).

If you’re curious about where your visitors are located, you’ll want to spend some time using the Map Overlay report. Not only can you visualize what countries, states, and even cities your visitors come from, you can use this information to improve location targeting in AdWords, customize ad text to speak to users in different locations, and understand which areas have historically been the most successful for your organization.

I also love pairing data from the Map Overlay report with data from Insights for Search to see where there’s additional opportunity to reach the desired users. You can look at Insights for Search for some of your organization’s most important search queries and see how interest in those terms is indexed in different locations. We recently discussed using Insights for Search to manage seasonality.

By comparing the data you see there to the volume you’re currently getting on your site from different geographic areas (again, through the Analytics Map Overlay report), you can pinpoint which geographic areas or cities might be good places on which to focus in the future.

Whether your goals are to drive additional awareness, look for new markets in which to grow your presence, share your resources and knowledge with more people, or recruit volunteers, make sure you’re using all the data available to you to make those decisions.

For additional Analytics resources, you can view quick 60-second tutorials or watch other short videos on leveraging AdWords data paired with Analytics reports.

Posted by Jennifer Kim, Account Strategist, Healthcare

Are you a social entrepreneur? Do you want to start your own non-profit? Running a socially-conscious business or non-profit is a challenge, and none more so than today. Not only is outreach expensive, but IT maintenance can be a real drain. Google is here to help!

Google is dedicated to helping non-profits, devoting 1% of its equity and yearly profits to philanthropy and building a free set of powerful tools to help you change the world.

Your organization

Communicate and Collaborate
Improve your work practices, avoid IT hassle, and facilitate your interaction with your users by using Google Apps for non-profits. Learn the specifics on how to use GMail, Calendar, Docs and more by watching this video. Check out how Mercy Corps used Google Apps to improve their day to day operations.

Collect Donations
Increase donations for your cause by using Google Checkout for Non-Profits. It’s a fast, convenient and secure way to collect online donations and increase online giving to your organization. Direct Relief raised money and online support by providing users all over the world an easy way to donate through their Google Checkout account.

Track your web traffic
Get Google Analytics to track and understand your online users and adjust your online presence to fit their needs as well as yours. Google Analytics data can help you convert more of your users into donors and make strategic decisions to drive more traffic to your site. Read New York Public Radio’s story on how Analytics improved their understanding of their users and drove strategic decisions on their team.

Your cause

Broadcast your cause
YouTube’s non-profit program offers you the opportunity to spread the word while engaging and attracting more supporters online. Video is a powerful tool that can help you effectively reach out and energize your base. For example, by adding the Call-to-action overlay on your videos, you can drive traffic directly to your cause. Charity : water recounts their fundraising efforts in this video. They were able to raise $10,000 for clean water in one day!

Launch targeted ad campaigns
The Google Grants program empowers your org to achieve its goals by helping you promote your websites via advertising on Google.com. Your ads appear when users search on Google.com. For example when you search for "world poverty" on Google.com, relevant text ads appear on the right hand side. Clicking on one of the ads brings users directly to the website being advertised. You can be that website by participating in the Google Grants program.

Posted by Rawan Hakeem, News Team

Last Thursday, we held the final session in the Google Grants Advanced Webinar series with NTEN.org. This session was focused on two distinct topics: optimizing your Google Grants AdWords campaigns and maximizing your organization's online initiatives with other Google for Non-Profit products.

The first half of the webinar was led by Lainey, a Google Grants volunteer and AdWords Specialist. In the session, Lainey shared strategies for successfully optimizing your campaigns, whether by targeting your audience by location or language or through properly structuring the themed ad groups within your campaigns. The benefits of using Conversion Tracking and Website Optimizer were also covered by Lainey during the session.

The next portion of the webinar covered Google for Non-Profit products beyond AdWords and Google Grants. This section was presented by Jay from Google.org. Jay touched on several free Google tools from which non-profits can greatly benefit. Jay discussed fundraising tools like the YouTube Non-Profit Program and Google Checkout for Non-Profits, cost-cutting tools like Google Apps for Non-Profits, and recruitment and outreach tools like Google Earth Outreach and Google Maps. You can find more information about these and other Google for Non-Profit tools here.

If you missed the session and are interested in these topics, you can find slides from this session and purchase the audio here.

We hope everyone who attended the Beginner and Advanced Webinar Series with NTEN.org enjoyed the sessions and found the content we covered to be useful in helping maximize your account. And for those who couldn't attend, we hope these blog post wrap-ups have been informative as well. See you next time!

Posted by Kristie Mun, Google Grants Team

This month's resource round-up includes a success story from YouTube's Video Volunteers program, strategies used by organizations in response to the disaster in Haiti, a grantee's story about using social media effectively, information about using mobile giving as a non-profit, an announcement about YouTube for Non-profit's recent launches and a quick reminder on keeping your grant safe from phishing.

Put YouTube to work for your org

YouTube's Video Volunteers program has been underway since last summer and has been put to work by many organizations that needed outside video-making talent to showcase their cause. In this piece on CNN.com, The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank and a Toronto-based film-maker/philanthropist show how an unlikely pairing made through YouTube's Video Volunteers can result in success for everyone involved.

And YouTube for Nonprofits is now available in Canada and Australia, in addition to the US and UK!

Mobile phones and disaster response

During and since the recent disaster in Haiti, organizations around the world have been employing social media in different ways to serve their constituencies and the people of Haiti. This article from NetSquared's Amy Ward, describes how mobile phones are a key player in how we react to and provide service during global disasters, including mapping, fundraising and missing persons strategies.

Learn more about using mobile giving for your organization at Mobile Giving, the mGive Foundation and MobileActive.

Using social media effectively: A grantee's story

Mercy Corps, an international relief organization, was an early adopter of social media but had seen little effect from all of their efforts until they determined that the way to reach their constituents was to extend the strategies deployed on their website to the different social media outlets. In this blog post on NTEN.org, Roger Burks of Mercy Corps, talks about how they have made social media start working for them.

A reminder about phishing and your AdWords Grants account

We've posted before about the dangers of phishing and how to keep your account safe, but it bears repeating. This series from the Trust and Security team here at Google can help you avoid phishing and keep your account safe. Here's some AdWords-specific information that's good to keep in mind with regard to phishing emails that may appear in your inbox.

If you come across resources that would be useful to the greater non-profit community, feel free to post it to Non-profit and grantee resources topic in our discussion forum so that everyone can benefit. If you'd like to review previous round-ups, just click here and read through previous months' round-ups or search for "resource round-up" from the search box at the top of the page.


Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

During a recent visit to Africa, the Google Earth Outreach team announced the availability of the Google Earth Outreach program in most African countries.

Now, organizations in Africa have new tools to help them use Google Maps and Google Earth to bring awareness to causes in a more visually appealing and impactful way.

For instance, if your organization is focused on providing humanitarian support to various regions around the world, with many projects taking place all the time, Google Earth can help you showcase all of these projects in a Google Earth Layer and give users the ability to get more information on the individual projects themselves while keeping a holistic view of all the projects your organization has underway.

The Surui Tribe of the Amazon Rainforest has recently partnered with the Jane Goodall Institute to create a Google Earth tour which flies viewers on a virtual tour through the Gombe Chimpanzee Reserve and the Surui Indigenous territory to show what indigenous people are doing to preserve their rainforest and prepare to enter the global carbon marketplace.

Organizations can use Google Maps and Google Maps API to plot their organizations' unique offerings, programs, impacts, constituencies and news in an easily accessible way and then embed these custom maps within a website. Watch brief video tutorials here.

World Justice Map uses Google Maps to showcase information about global rule-of-law promoters and makes it easy for users to identify organizations by name, status, activities and discipline. United for Africa uses Google Maps to document and track persecution and other assaults throughout South Africa. Users can submit incidents and customize their view with various filters. Many organizations are also using Ushahidi, an open source platform using Google Maps API, to allow anyone to submit information from webforms, emails and texts to a visual map representation.

There are an enormous variety of ways to customize Google Earth & Maps to benefit your organization. Google Earth and Maps are open to organizations in Africa and elsewhere around the world and you're encouraged to apply for a software grant of Google Earth Pro today! Visit the Google Earth Outreach site to find out more.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

One of the challenges now facing Haiti is connectivity.

To help with the search efforts, a team of Googlers worked with the US State Department to create a PeopleFinder gadget that you can embed on your organization's website.

With this gadget, users can submit information about missing persons and also search for people via the database. The gadget is currently available in English, French and Creole and easy instructions for installing the gadget on your org's website are here.

Google Voice is also offering free phone calls to Haiti for the next two weeks for US families with relatives in-country. Those without a Google Voice account can request an invitation here.

To help you connect with your supporters, get your word out via YouTube using annotations.

If you're a grant recipient providing relief to those affected by the earthquake in Haiti and have questions about managing your AdWords account to scale with traffic increases, please contact our team so we can make sure you reach those in need and those who can help. Be sure to include "Haiti Disaster" in the subject of your request.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

As regular readers of this blog and Google enthusiasts know, Google offers a non-profit version of Google Apps, a suite of communication, collaboration, and publishing tools. One valuable component of Google Apps is Google Docs; Google Docs gives your group the ability to create and share documents, spreadsheets, and presentations online, all without managing attachments. This can help your organization be more efficient internally and externally, while also saving money.

You can check out real user examples on the Google Docs website. We love this story from a New Orleans volunteer organization that is putting Google Docs to work for their needs:

"We are using Google Docs to share info with other volunteers in our neighborhood association in New Orleans. We have "Block Captains" who each compile data on infrastructure issues related to Hurricane Katrina so that we can accelerate rebuilding our homes and our lives. One person uploads the data into Google Docs regarding the issues we find (like leaks and broken catch basins, missing street signs and stop signs). The spreadsheets are then shared with other members of the association, the Water board and the City so they can view the issues and address them."

This group concludes by saying, "Google Docs makes it easy for us to enter & is the ONLY way for us to share the up-to-date data." Read this story and other use cases from students, teachers, and more on the Google Docs site. When reviewing these stories, think about ways your organization could benefit from using Google Docs and the entire suite of Google Apps for Non-Profits to better meet your mission.

To learn about other products Google offers to non-profits, please visit our Google for Non-Profits page.

Posted by Kristie Mun, Google Grants Team

At the beginning of the year, most people take time to reflect on what they've accomplished in the past year and what their goals are for the next year. New Year's Resolutions are a chance to reinvent yourself and try out new experiences.

It's also a good time for businesses to reflect on their past year and what they plan on accomplishing in 2010. At Google, we overhauled the AdWords interface and released a number of enterprise-class features in Analytics.

Take the time to reflect on your 2009. Not just the quantitative accomplishments, but the risks you took and the new strategies you tried. Did you change your focus? Did you launch a new marketing plan?

Google has some tools to help you plan for and test your new strategies in 2010.

Planning for 2010:

1. Insights for Search
   Insights for Search is a great tool to plan for the seasonality of your organization. Use the "Compare by Time Ranges" functionality to see the seasonality for your top keywords. Here is an example of seasonality for the keyword phrase "donate to charity."


2. Ad Planner
   Google Ad Planner allows you to gain a better understanding of demographic and traffic trends for your website. See if you have any new customer segments that you haven't pursued in the past, and plan for engaging with them in 2010.


3. YouTube
   Start planning now for how you can take advantage of all the opportunities to engage with your target demographic via YouTube. If your organization has compelling commercials or video, post them on your own YouTube channel in order to reach the world's largest online video community. Check out our dedicated non-profit page: www.youtube.com/nonprofits.

Happy 2010!

Posted by Lee Anne Grant, Google AdWords Team