Google for Non-Profits Newsletter - May, 2009

[Galen Panger]

Google for Non-Profits Newsletter - May, 2009

Last week, Google hosted our second annual Google I/O Conference for developers in San Francisco. Even if you're not a developer and have no interest in developer-speak, you can still ride the Wave, Google's exciting new communications and instant collaboration technology. Learn more about Wave or sign up to be notified when it's available to the public.

We hope you enjoy this month's update from the Google for Non-Profits team.

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Earth Outreach site gets a makeover
More developing countries added to Google Maps
Busting myths about Google Analytics
Turning your site into a social platform with Friend Connect

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Earth Outreach site gets a makeover

Google Earth Outreach is dedicated to giving non-profits and public benefit organizations the knowledge and resources you need to visualize your cause and tell your story in Google Earth and Maps to the hundreds of millions of people who use them.

This month, the Outreach team completely revamped their website, dividing content into three major sections. The first is a Showcase of great uses of Google Earth and Maps by non-profits, from basic Google MyMaps to advanced Earth layers.

In the Tutorials section, the Outreach team has complied a huge set of trainings on how to create great content with Google Earth and Maps, each of which starts with a video so you can get an idea of what each tutorial is about before diving in. Once you've mastered the basics, dive into intermediate and advanced tutorials.

The third section, Community, features resources for getting involved and getting support.

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More developing countries added to Google Maps

Back in September, we told you about a Google tool called Map Maker, which draws upon the whole Internet community to help create maps for countries, especially developing countries, where no maps existed before.

NGOs will tell you that they need good maps to help develop many of these regions but, traditionally, great maps are only created once a place is already developed. This is why Map Maker was born.

This month, 63 new countries were added to Google Maps as a result of Map Maker, bringing the total number of Map Maker-created countries in Google Maps to 95. To celebrate, we pasted the country names into Google Spreadsheets and created a map from the "Insert > Gadget" menu, and then put the gadget on a Google Site.

Explore the map of countries here. For the full list, click here.

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Busting myths about Google Analytics

Over time, the Google Analytics team has noticed some misconceptions about the website analytics tool floating around, and thought they'd take a shot at busting the most common ones, like:

- "You get what you pay for." Google Analytics is free, which means the system is down a lot.
- Google Analytics is basic and doesn't have any "advanced" features or metrics.
- Google Analytics is not really accurate.
- It's not possible to export your data from Google Analytics.
- There is no professional support for Google Analytics.
- You have to spend a lot of money to get "real" web analytics.

Get answers to these common misconceptions on the Google Analytics blog.

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Turning your site into a social platform with Friend Connect

Building an online community is a great way to generate support for your cause, and there are lots of social networks that can help you do just that. With all of the buzz, though, it can be easy to forget about your organization's own website and the social features you can add directly to it.

Google Friend Connect offers quick and easy ways to strengthen the community that visits your site by enriching it with social features. With Friend Connect, anyone visiting your site can join and discover other members on your site by using accounts from a variety of services, including Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Twitter. You can also choose from a gallery of what we call "gadgets" to add features such as commenting, ratings and reviews, and opinion polls to your site. You can make your event marketing more engaging and social, and a recommendations tool allows your visitors to recommend the parts of the site they like best and view top content.

It only takes a few minutes to add Friend Connect to your site and you don't need any programming skills whatsoever. Upload two files to your site, then copy and paste a few snippets of code, and Friend Connect does the rest. It's that simple.

And we're constantly coming up with more features you can add to your site, such as the social bar and the Get Answers gadget. To stay updated on what's going on with Friend Connect and other Google products helping to make the web more social, visit the Social Web Blog.

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That's it for this month's newsletter. As always, please send any suggestions for the newsletter or Google for Non-Profits site our way.

Have a great rest of the weekend!

Galen from the Google for Non-Profits team