Google for Non-Profits Newsletter - September, 2008

[Galen Panger]

Google for Non-Profits Newsletter - September, 2008

It's back-to-school season here at Google, and we've got a lot of great stuff for you and some exciting opportunities in this month's newsletter. Please especially don't miss our non-profit survey, the results of which we will use to make our products even more useful for non-profits.

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Non-profit survey - It's not the usual yada yada.
Chrome
Google Map Maker
Knol
Interview with Camron Assadi, Mercy Corps
Google goes to the Amazon
AdWords and Web tools trainings
Free the Airwaves campaign
Google Street View in New Orleans
YouTube captions
Analytics in Google Sites

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Non-profit survey - It's not the usual yada yada.

In the coming months, we will devote more engineering time and resources to making Google products and technologies more useful specifically for non-profits. Before we get to work, we need your help finding the features and improvements that would make the biggest difference for you and your organization. This is a big opportunity, and we hope to have you involved.

If you have a few minutes to spare, please complete this survey and forward the link on to your other friends and colleagues in the non-profit community. If you're able to complete it by Friday, September 19th, we'd be much obliged.

Here's the full link to the survey: https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pJhSqSo19URJTAyRBk7igEQ

Thanks for helping us be a more effective contributor to all of the great work that you do.

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Chrome

Chrome is Google's new open source browser, designed for the future of cloud computing and online applications. What you'll notice is what you won't notice: Chrome is fast. When a web site misbehaves, Chrome closes just the window or tab containing that web site -- not the whole browser and all of the Internet applications you have running. Chrome also doesn't take up a lot of screen real estate and it's not intrusive with alerts or in the way it handles downloads. Best of all, Chrome is open source, so anyone can use the code to make it even better or build their own browser and further stimulate innovation on the Internet. If you use Gmail or any of the Google Apps within your organization, this is the browser for you. To learn more about Chrome, click here.

If you have a Windows machine, you can download the beta now, and we're hard at work on versions for Mac and Linux.

Try it, we think you'll like it.

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Google Map Maker

In countries like India, great maps and comprehensive local data are hard to come by, and traditional mapping approaches are stretched to the limit because infrastructure and local businesses are evolving at a furious pace. This challenge inspired the team in Google India to design and build Google Map Maker, which enables users everywhere to create rich, deep maps and fresh local data. You can mark your favorite spots in your city and hometown, add features such as roads, parks and buildings, tag small businesses to help users find them, and collaborate to map neighborhoods of interest.

Learn more about Map Maker in this video, or click here to try it yourself.

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Knol

The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web, and that goes for much of the knowledge and expertise of non-profits. An enormous amount of information resides in people's heads and within organizational walls: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge.

Knol was built to help experts share their knowledge with the world. Knols, which are units of knowledge, all have a unique and transparent author who puts his or her name behind the content, and readers are invited to collaborate and add information with the author's approval.

Non-profits know a lot of useful information, and Knol is a great platform to start sharing that knowledge with the world. Have a look and let us know what you think.

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Interview with Camron Assadi, Mercy Corps

Camron Assadi, the Deputy Internet Director of Mercy Corps recently sat down to talk to NetSquared about how Mercy Corps employees use Google Grants and applications like Gmail to stay connected with each other and with their stakeholders around the globe. Here's what he had to say about Google Apps, which gives you free hosted e-mail, documents, spreadsheets and more:

"We were an early adopter of Google Apps before they released Google Apps for non-profits. We were also an early adopter of Gmail, hosted e-mail. It's so great. For an organization like Mercy Corps that is distributed in 35 countries, it takes the IT load off of the headquarters office, and each office can really manage their own e-mail systems because it makes it so easy to use."

...and here's what he had to say about Google Grants, which awards non-profits free advertising on Google.com search results:

"We use that grant quite heavily. Since 2003, there's been three quarters of a million dollars in advertising value given to us. It's more than a million visitors over five years. The value of that, besides the dollar amount, is immense to Mercy Corps. It's probably responsible for half our web traffic. It is wonderful."

For more from Camron's interview, click here.

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Google goes to the Amazon

Several weeks ago, a group of Googlers traveled to Brazil to conduct our first-ever project in the Amazon. Organized by the Google Earth Outreach team, we went at the special invitation of Amazon Chief Almir Naramayoga Surui, who'd invited us down to train his people on using Google Earth, YouTube, blogs and other Internet tools in order to preserve their history and culture, protect their rainforest, and create a sustainable future for their tribe.

This was an unusual request especially because, until recently, the Surui Indians used stone tools and hunted and fished with bows and arrows.

Continue reading about our trip to the Amazon on the Official Google Blog.

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AdWords and Web tools trainings

Google offers powerful tools to help non-profits attract visitors to their sites and make their sites more accessible and useful. It's generally pretty simple to set up and start using products like AdWords (Google Grants), Webmaster Tools and Analytics, but most people need some extra help to take their use of these tools to the next level (that is, unless you have time to read the manual).

We want to make sure non-profits can leverage our technologies to their full capacity, and that's why we've begun offering seminars both online and in-person for many of our tools. Last month, we teamed up with TechSoup for a webinar on AdWords, and before that we did a whole bunch of trainings on our web tools (check out the Google Trifecta video in particular).

For folks who want to learn AdWords at a more advanced level and are willing to invest a little bit of money, we've begun a series of five webinars for non-profits with NTEN, and we've even started offering in-person AdWords trainings at the 101, 201 and 301 levels in cities across the U.S.

Where can you find out about more opportunities like these as they come up? Stay tuned to this newsletter or keep an eye on Google blogs like our Grants, Webmaster, and Analytics blogs.

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Free the Airwaves campaign

Google doesn't normally ask its users to sign petitions advocating any particular cause, but in the case of our Free the Airwaves campaign, the opportunity is too great and the public interest too clear to not ask everyone to get involved -- especially the non-profit and activist community that are some of the Internet's biggest advocates and heaviest users.

For quite some time we've been talking about the enormous potential of the unused airwaves between broadcast TV channels ("white spaces") to provide affordable, high-speed wireless Internet connectivity across the U.S. (and if successful, potentially in other countries, too), even in hard-to-reach rural areas. Call it "WiFi on steroids," with much greater capacity and range than current WiFi technologies and spectrum allow.

In order for this opportunity to become a reality in the U.S., the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) must allow unlicensed use of this "white space" spectrum. Read more about the Free the Airwaves campaign on our blog, hear activists speak directly about the campaign, or take action now at FreeTheAirwaves.com.

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Street View in New Orleans

Last month, Google launched our popular Street View product in New Orleans, so you can now get an on-the-ground perspective of New Orleans from any web browser. At the time of Street View's launch, Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu of Louisiana shared this message on our blog:

"In this time of recovery and rebuilding, it is important that we share real images of life in Louisiana and on the Gulf Coast. As you explore the streets of New Orleans, you will discover a city marked by extremes. You will see some areas spared the worst of Katrina's fury which have quickly recovered, and you will find other neighborhoods that remain flattened by the floodwaters that broke the levees. You will see that our residents call both FEMA trailers and antebellum mansions home. What you might not see is the incredible spirit of those who have given themselves to this city."

Read more from the Lieutenant Governor or check out Street View in New Orleans for yourself.

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YouTube captions

If you're a non-profit organization with global membership, or you have members who are hearing-impaired, YouTube is making it easier for you to communicate. A few weeks ago, YouTube launched a new captioning feature which allows people who would not otherwise understand the audio track in a video to follow along. You can add captions to one of your videos by uploading a closed caption file using the "Captions and Subtitles" menu on the editing page. To add several captions to a video, simply upload multiple files. If you want to include foreign subtitles in multiple languages, upload a separate file for each language. There are over 120 languages to choose from and you can add any title you want for each caption.

To find out more about the new captions feature and view examples of them in use, read the full blog post here.

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Analytics in Google Sites

Google Analytics is a free online service with stats, graphs, and reports about how people use your site, including what pages on your site are most popular. You can use Google Analytics with any site you own -- including now Google Sites. Whether you've set up a Google Site for public use or private internal use, data about how people are using your site is always helpful for making improvements.

Check out this Help Center article for instructions on how to track visitors to your Google Site using Analytics.

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That's it for this month's newsletter; did you hear about our survey? As always, please send any suggestions for the newsletter or Google for Non-Profits site our way.

Thanks for reading.

Galen from the Google for Non-Profits Team