Google for Non-Profits Newsletter - December, 2008
2 views
Skip to first unread message
Galen Panger
Dec 23, 2008, 7:59:57 PM12/23/08
to googlefornonprofits, googlefornonprofits-discuss
Google for Non-Profits Newsletter - December, 2008
If you haven't seen it, check out our Holiday Collaborative Spreadsheet Art. Seasons greetings, and warmest wishes for a happy holiday from Google.
--
Google Accounts snags
Helpful new features in Blogger
Friend Connect
Active ad campaign management: Year-end Google Grants tips and suggestions
More useful gadgets for your site
Marking the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
--
Google Accounts snags
Many people own and use more than one email address as a part of managing workflow and keeping work communications separate from personal communications.
Many people don't know, however, that you can use Google services with any email address you own, not just Gmail addresses. If you use Yahoo! Mail at home, for example, but you'd like to collaborate with friends and family via Google Docs or Google Calendar, go to Google Accounts and register your Yahoo! email address -- and then get started with Docs and Calendar.
If your office hasn't yet made the switch to Google Apps, go ahead and register your work email address for use with Google services, too, so that you can keep all of your work Docs and Spreadsheets out of your personal email inbox and personal Google Docs list. You can register work addresses as Google Accounts, like personal addresses, but to take advantage of some workplace-specific features (such as within-organization document sharing), it's best to register your work address as a Team Edition account.
With Google Accounts, it's pretty easy to manage the basic structure of your online identities and how they interact with Google services. For more advanced options, Gmail lets you set up filters, for example, or even send email from your Gmail inbox as if it had been sent from one of your other addresses.
--
Helpful new features in Blogger
The Blogger team continues to innovate with new ways to enhance your blog and build community. The gadgets feature allows you to add functionality to your blog, such as a new "followers" gadget that lets people declare themselves as readers of your blog. There are polls, slideshows, blogrolls and more. Learn how to customize your layout with a gadget.
For those of you who would prefer to host a blog on your own domain rather than at blogspot.com, Blogger now allows you to do so. We've also just announced a new Import and Export feature, allowing you to merge two or more blogs into one, move individual posts from blog to blog, back up your blog, or move your blog elsewhere (God forbid).
For a peek at more new features coming down the pike for Blogger, read the Blogger in Draft blog, or just try out the experimental version of Blogger yourself at draft.blogger.com.
--
Friend Connect
Social networks and discussion groups are great ways to build communities around your non-profit online, but why not add social features directly to your site or blog? A new tool called Google Friend Connect gives you access to a wealth of new social tools that you can add simply by copying and pasting a few snippets of code.
Visitors to your site click a button to join using the same Google, Yahoo, AOL or OpenID accounts they already own. They can then start interacting with other people on your site, invite their friends and contacts, and begin commenting, rating and interacting with your site's community. The Google Friend Connect team explains in this video.
For more information, visit google.com/friendconnect.
--
Active ad campaign management: Year-end Google Grants tips and suggestions
Optimizing a Google Grants or AdWords account is a constant affair. Successful Grants accounts, like successful websites, aren't just set up and forgotten. They're monitored, pruned and nurtured.
That's why December's (Ad)Word is "Optimization," defined as "the process of modifying your ad campaigns to improve the quality and performance of your AdWords ads," according to our AdWords Glossary. By optimizing your campaigns to improve your keyword Quality Scores, you can help lower your ad's costs without losing your position on a search results page.
Quality Scores, and how they interact with keyword bids to produce your ad rankings, are a complex and admittedly confusing topic, even for Googlers. To help clear things up, we sat down and came up with two new videos that we hope can help explain how it all works.
So how do you keep your ads fresh and boost your quality scores? Our Google Grants team shares "Optimization Strategies & Tips for the Holiday Season" (read part 1 and part 2). Our friends at National Public Radio were also kind enough to share their best practices for AdWords and Analytics this month.
One more stocking stuffer: Last week, Google announced a new version of the downloadable AdWords Editor for Mac and PC. Editor allows you to make mass changes to your ad campaigns quickly and easily, which in the end could save you hours. It also works offline when there's no Internet connection. If you've never tried AdWords Editor, give it a try. Learn how to get started here.
--
More useful gadgets for your site
Speaking of stocking stuffers, this month we stumbled across a couple of gadgets we thought non-profits would love. The first is a simple tool that lets you provide driving directions to your office or event location right from your site. The other lets you offer instant access to automatic translations of your site.
Best of all, both are as simple as copying and pasting small snippets of code into your site.
Get the code: Driving directions and Translation.
--
Marking the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
December 10th marked the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in commemoration, YouTube featured a sample of some of the videos that non-profits and human rights groups produced to raise awareness about the historic declaration. The YouTube blog has more, including an awesome video created by the Human Rights Action Center.
In related news, Google announced a new homepage in Sierra Leone, and reiterated our determination to bring our search technology and other products to all African countries. Wherever you are, whatever language you speak, we believe you deserve the same access to information as everyone else.
--
That's it for this year's newsletters. As always, please send any suggestions for the newsletter or Google for Non-Profits site our way.
We'll see you next year.
Galen from the Google for Non-Profits Team
If you haven't seen it, check out our Holiday Collaborative Spreadsheet Art. Seasons greetings, and warmest wishes for a happy holiday from Google.
--
Google Accounts snags
Helpful new features in Blogger
Friend Connect
Active ad campaign management: Year-end Google Grants tips and suggestions
More useful gadgets for your site
Marking the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
--
Google Accounts snags
Many people own and use more than one email address as a part of managing workflow and keeping work communications separate from personal communications.
Many people don't know, however, that you can use Google services with any email address you own, not just Gmail addresses. If you use Yahoo! Mail at home, for example, but you'd like to collaborate with friends and family via Google Docs or Google Calendar, go to Google Accounts and register your Yahoo! email address -- and then get started with Docs and Calendar.
If your office hasn't yet made the switch to Google Apps, go ahead and register your work email address for use with Google services, too, so that you can keep all of your work Docs and Spreadsheets out of your personal email inbox and personal Google Docs list. You can register work addresses as Google Accounts, like personal addresses, but to take advantage of some workplace-specific features (such as within-organization document sharing), it's best to register your work address as a Team Edition account.
With Google Accounts, it's pretty easy to manage the basic structure of your online identities and how they interact with Google services. For more advanced options, Gmail lets you set up filters, for example, or even send email from your Gmail inbox as if it had been sent from one of your other addresses.
--
Helpful new features in Blogger
The Blogger team continues to innovate with new ways to enhance your blog and build community. The gadgets feature allows you to add functionality to your blog, such as a new "followers" gadget that lets people declare themselves as readers of your blog. There are polls, slideshows, blogrolls and more. Learn how to customize your layout with a gadget.
For those of you who would prefer to host a blog on your own domain rather than at blogspot.com, Blogger now allows you to do so. We've also just announced a new Import and Export feature, allowing you to merge two or more blogs into one, move individual posts from blog to blog, back up your blog, or move your blog elsewhere (God forbid).
For a peek at more new features coming down the pike for Blogger, read the Blogger in Draft blog, or just try out the experimental version of Blogger yourself at draft.blogger.com.
--
Friend Connect
Social networks and discussion groups are great ways to build communities around your non-profit online, but why not add social features directly to your site or blog? A new tool called Google Friend Connect gives you access to a wealth of new social tools that you can add simply by copying and pasting a few snippets of code.
Visitors to your site click a button to join using the same Google, Yahoo, AOL or OpenID accounts they already own. They can then start interacting with other people on your site, invite their friends and contacts, and begin commenting, rating and interacting with your site's community. The Google Friend Connect team explains in this video.
For more information, visit google.com/friendconnect.
--
Active ad campaign management: Year-end Google Grants tips and suggestions
Optimizing a Google Grants or AdWords account is a constant affair. Successful Grants accounts, like successful websites, aren't just set up and forgotten. They're monitored, pruned and nurtured.
That's why December's (Ad)Word is "Optimization," defined as "the process of modifying your ad campaigns to improve the quality and performance of your AdWords ads," according to our AdWords Glossary. By optimizing your campaigns to improve your keyword Quality Scores, you can help lower your ad's costs without losing your position on a search results page.
Quality Scores, and how they interact with keyword bids to produce your ad rankings, are a complex and admittedly confusing topic, even for Googlers. To help clear things up, we sat down and came up with two new videos that we hope can help explain how it all works.
So how do you keep your ads fresh and boost your quality scores? Our Google Grants team shares "Optimization Strategies & Tips for the Holiday Season" (read part 1 and part 2). Our friends at National Public Radio were also kind enough to share their best practices for AdWords and Analytics this month.
One more stocking stuffer: Last week, Google announced a new version of the downloadable AdWords Editor for Mac and PC. Editor allows you to make mass changes to your ad campaigns quickly and easily, which in the end could save you hours. It also works offline when there's no Internet connection. If you've never tried AdWords Editor, give it a try. Learn how to get started here.
--
More useful gadgets for your site
Speaking of stocking stuffers, this month we stumbled across a couple of gadgets we thought non-profits would love. The first is a simple tool that lets you provide driving directions to your office or event location right from your site. The other lets you offer instant access to automatic translations of your site.
Best of all, both are as simple as copying and pasting small snippets of code into your site.
Get the code: Driving directions and Translation.
--
Marking the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
December 10th marked the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and in commemoration, YouTube featured a sample of some of the videos that non-profits and human rights groups produced to raise awareness about the historic declaration. The YouTube blog has more, including an awesome video created by the Human Rights Action Center.
In related news, Google announced a new homepage in Sierra Leone, and reiterated our determination to bring our search technology and other products to all African countries. Wherever you are, whatever language you speak, we believe you deserve the same access to information as everyone else.
--
That's it for this year's newsletters. As always, please send any suggestions for the newsletter or Google for Non-Profits site our way.
We'll see you next year.
Galen from the Google for Non-Profits Team
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages