How can students hone their marketing skills and help an NGO at the same time? Sign up for the Google Online Marketing Challenge and compete for the NGO Impact Award. The Challenge is a global student competition open to any higher education institu…

How can students hone their marketing skills and help an NGO at the same time? Sign up for the Google Online Marketing Challenge and compete for the NGO Impact Award. The Challenge is a global student competition open to any higher education institu…

There are a variety of strategies for increasing online donations, and tapping into corporate gift matching is one that holds a lot of promise but is a little harder to get at since it requires extra work on the part of the donor and involves processes that can be hard to find or difficult to follow.

One Google Grantee, Direct Relief, has started using a new strategy to help their donors easily activate their employers’ gift matching programs at checkout. Basically, when a donor begins the checkout process, they are given the option to search for their employer from the database. If a match is found, that employer’s gift matching program details are shown for the information of the donor.

Once the donor completes the donation, the process for completing the gift match is shown so that they know what to do next in order to activate the matching funds.

The process is far simpler from a donor’s perspective, and Direct Relief has kindly offered to share their experience with you so that you might be able to try this strategy for potentially doubling up each donation that comes through your online doors, too.

Soup to nuts – what was the cost and time investment to get this up and running?
Direct Relief: We purchased this module from a company called HEP Development Services in Leesburg, VA. (www.hepdata.com) The cost was less than $10,000 to purchase the module, and we contracted for multiple years. The time to implement was a few weeks with a little bit of back and forth, as we decided exactly how and where to implement it on our site.

What’s the process for purchasing the module and installing it?
Direct Relief: Once you let HEP know how you want to use the module, they advise on how much it will cost and then produce the necessary code and send you a link. I built a page to host introductory content and the search box, then when a user searches their company, the results populate on a HEP-hosted page. It took some basic coding ability to implement on our site. Also, we integrated it into our online donation form, which makes it really easy and convenient for donors to use.

What process did you use for building out the company donation match database?
Direct Relief: HEP maintains the company match database, and we provided names to them to see how many of our donors have the potential to have their companies match their gift.

How much have you seen donations from company matches go up since you installed it?
Direct Relief: None yet – it takes about three to six months for matching gifts to be disbursed from most companies (installed in November 2010). We think this could increase our matching gifts by about 20%, however.

On a scale of 1-10, how helpful has this tool been for increasing donations compared to other tools you’ve used?
Direct Relief: So far, we’d rank it an 8. Nothing’s confirmed yet, but we’re very hopeful that this will encourage donors to have their gift matched because it’s so easy to use.

Anything you think new users should know about it or consider before getting started?
Direct Relief: Decide how and where you want to use this functionality on your site before you get started so you can communicate exactly what you’re looking for to HEP. That streamlines the process.

If you have strategies for increasing online donations that you’d like to share or just want to talk shop with other Grantees and non-profits, visit our Discussion Forum and start a conversation today.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

There are a variety of strategies for increasing online donations, and tapping into corporate gift matching is one that holds a lot of promise but is a little harder to get at since it requires extra work on the part of the donor and involves processes…

We hope you’ve all enjoyed your holiday season and are ready to get back to AdWords in full force.Sure, you’ve made all kinds of New Years resolutions already, but there’s still time for one more important one… 2011 is the year to make your AdWords g…

We hope you’ve all enjoyed your holiday season and are ready to get back to AdWords in full force.Sure, you’ve made all kinds of New Years resolutions already, but there’s still time for one more important one… 2011 is the year to make your AdWords g…

In November, the Benelux Google Grants team had the pleasure to welcome more than 30 different non-profit organizations at the first ever Google Grants Day in Amsterdam. The attendees were a mix of existing grantees and non-profit organizations that we…

In November, the Benelux Google Grants team had the pleasure to welcome more than 30 different non-profit organizations at the first ever Google Grants Day in Amsterdam. The attendees were a mix of existing grantees and non-profit organizations that were new to the Grants program. The day kicked off with a series of workshops and ended on a high note with insights into different aspects of online marketing from our 3 speakers.

The workshops for our existing grantees began with a hands-on optimization session, where grantees got the chance to brainstorm with our AdWords specialists on how to maximize their Google Grant to meet their organization’s mission and goals. This was followed by a session on how to create exposure and awareness through YouTube and a workshop on how non-profit organizations can get the most valuable information out of Google Analytics.


For the organizations new to the Grants program there was a special surprise: we made sure that they would leave the Amsterdam office as the proud owners of new and shiny Google Grants accounts! During their sessions these non-profits got the chance to set up their account, get acquainted with the AdWords interface and learn all about basic optimization. Suffice to say that these new grantees left the Grants Day happily surprised and extremely content.


After these product-focused and practical workshops, the speaker sessions offered the grantees a chance to think about online marketing from a broader point of view. Topics covered by speakers from Google ranged from Search Engine Optimization and Google Webmaster tools to Google Earth Outreach and the work that Google does through Google.org such as Google Crisis Response. Then, Jeroen den Tex, Chief Marketing Officer at Red Cross the Netherlands, enlightened us with insights into how the Red Cross puts the online landscape to good use.

Following the speaker session, the grantees had the opportunity to get to know their fellow grantees while enjoying a bite to eat. We were happy to learn that our grantees found it very useful to be able to share advice and best practices with other grantees, and we hope that this will encourage valuable collaboration between non-profits in the future!

Overall, the attendees were very eager to learn more about Google Grants and Google for Non-Profits products and tools. We would like to thank all the grantees for attending and all the Googlers for helping us to make this day a huge success! We hope to repeat this in 2011!

Posted by Anne-Christine Polet, DCS Benelux

Webmaster level: Beginner

Cross Posted on the Webmaster Central Blog

In our previous post, we did some source code housekeeping — just in time for the holidays. But once users have landed on your site, how can you make sure they’ll know how to get around?

As it turns out, easily accessible content on your site can make a big difference. Users tend to have a better experience when a site helps them find and understand its content. Having an accessible site not only empowers users, it also helps search engines understand what your site is really about.

So if you’ve resolved to boost your site’s user experience and online presence for the new year, improving your content accessibility is a great way to start. Thankfully, there are tons of features you can add to make your site more accessible. In this post, we’ll highlight three of them:

• Intuitive navigation
• Concise, descriptive anchor text for links
• Unique, accurate page titles throughout the site

Intuitive navigation

Help users avoid confusion by providing them with intuitive navigation, so that when they arrive at your site, they’ll know where to click to find the information they’re looking for.

Here are three features you can implement in order to lead your users down the right path:

• Navigational menu: Having a menu with links to the site’s most important pages is the fastest, easiest way to show users where to click next.
• Text-based links: While drop-down menus, image-based links, and animation-based links can be appealing, keep in mind that users on text-only devices and some search engines may not be able to see or understand these links. Thus, many users prefer text-based links, which are also easier for search engines to crawl and interpret.
• User-viewable site map: 59% of our submissions did not have a user-viewable site map. By providing one, you display the structure of your site and give the user easy one-click navigation. If users are having trouble finding specific pages on your site, a site map can help them find their way. Don’t send your users into the wild without a map!

Let’s explore how these features can make a site’s navigation more intuitive by looking at one of our submitted sites, Philanthropedia.

Thanks to this site’s clean navigational menu, users can find all of the site’s important pages within a few clicks. Wherever users end up on the site, they can always click on the “Home” button to return to the main page, or on any of the links in the menu to return to the site’s important subpages. Like all of the links on this site, the links in the navigational menu are text-based links, which make it easier for both search engines and users to access the site’s content. Finally, Philanthropedia has included a user-viewable site map, shown below, in case visitors are looking for a specific page not listed in the main menu.

Concise, descriptive anchor text for links

Anchor text — the clickable text of a link — can help users quickly decide which links they want to click on and find out more about. Meaningful anchor text makes it easier for users to navigate around your site and also helps search engines understand what the link’s destination page is about.

20% of our submissions could improve their sites by improving the anchor text used in some of their internal links. When writing anchor text, keep two things in mind:

• Be descriptive: Use words that are relevant to the destination page, avoiding generic phrases like “click here” or “article.” Make sure the user can get a snapshot of the destination page’s overall content and functionality by reading the anchor text.
• Keep it concise: Anchor text that contains a few words or a short phrase is more attractive and convenient for users to read than a sentence or paragraph-long link.

Let’s take a look at how anchor text played out in two user-submitted examples:

Organization	Anchor Text Examples	Anchor Text Behavior	User Friendliness
The Mosaic Project	Work for Mosaic Order Our Curriculum Guide Outdoor School	Active verb phrases and rich nouns accurately describe the pages that the links are pointing to.	High: Users can get an accurate idea of the content on the links’ destination pages just by reading the anchor text.
Asian Liver Center	Learn more here	Generic phrases give little insight into the pages that the links are pointing to.	Low: The anchor text is too generic and does not give users an idea of what the linked-to content is.

You can learn more about anchor text and internal linking strategies by checking out this blog post on the importance of link architecture.

Unique, accurate page titles throughout the site

Each page on your site is different, so flaunt your site’s diversity by giving a unique title to each page. Giving each page a unique title lets search engines know how that page is distinct from others within your site. In our analysis, over 28% of sites could have improved their site quality by adding unique page titles.

Let’s check out a few more examples to see what a difference unique, accurate page titles can make:

Organization	Page Title Examples	Page Title Behavior	User Friendliness
VAMS International	Upcoming Events | VAMS International Request Service | VAMS International FAQ’s | VAMS International	Concise, rich language joined with the organization’s name accurately describes the corresponding pages. The titles show how each page is unique while also acknowledging that they are all associated with one organization.	High: Each page’s content is relevant to its title, and the user can get a good idea of each page’s unique offerings and functionality.
MHCD Evaluation and Research	MHCD Evaluation and Research	This page title is too general and does not accurately describe the content on each page. The same title is used across all the pages on this site.	Low: This site contains a lot of diverse content and rich functionality; however, the uniform page titles do not convey these strengths.

Wrapping things up

We hope that this blog post has given you some ideas on how to ring in the new year with improved content accessibility, which can boost the user experience and online presence for your site.

To learn more about the features discussed here and in our previous two site clinic posts, check out our SEO Report Card and SEO Starter Guide.

This blog post wraps up our website clinic for non-profits. We send our warmest regards to all the great non-profit causes you are working on, and thanks to everyone who took the time to submit their sites and read our posts!

Posted by Jen Lee and Alexi Douvas, Search Quality Evaluation Team

Contributors: Aditya Goradia, Brandon Falls, Charlene Perez, Diara Dankert, Michael Wyszomierski, and Nelson Bradley

We’re excited to announce the launch of Grantspro, an updated version of the Additional Services Program, aimed at better serving grantees involved in this segment of the Google Grants program.What is Grantspro?Grantspro offers an additional $30,000 pe…

We’re excited to announce the launch of Grantspro, an updated version of the Additional Services Program, aimed at better serving grantees involved in this segment of the Google Grants program.

What is Grantspro?
Grantspro offers an additional $30,000 per month (for a total of $40,000 per month) to grantees who meet certain requirements. The updated requirements are detailed on our website.

How is Grantspro different from Additional Services?
Grantspros are not required to submit quarterly analytics reports as they were in the Additional Services program. All analytics data is requested on the Annual Survey, which was sent to all grantees this year on November 1, 2010, and is sent annually in Q4.

New applicants to Grantspro will first participate in a Grantspro test aimed at setting expectations about the demands of managing your account at the increased budget and requirement levels.

Grantspro’s required spend level is higher, but the required period of time for this spend is shorter, to allow for non-profits who experience seasonality and fluctuations in traffic patterns.

What if I’m currently enrolled in Additional Services?
You’re all set. Just continue to submit your Annual Survey results yearly and follow the Active Account Management requirements to remain active as a Grantspro. You don’t need to reapply for the program or resubmit analytics data (you covered it with your Annual Survey this year).

Additional FAQs about Grantspro can be found in our Help Center. If you’d like to continue discussing the launch of Grantspro, we invite you to start up a conversation in our Grantspro discussion forum.

Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team

Webmaster Level: Beginner
Co-hosted on the Webmaster Central Blog

A New Year’s resolution
In the spirit of the holidays, here at Google we wanted to take the time to help out those who spend their days making our world a better place: non-profit organizations. A few weeks back, we asked webmasters of non-profits to submit their organization’s site to our Search Quality team for analysis. After some number crunching and trend analysis, we’re back to report on general areas for improvement and to guide you towards some useful resources!

Making our list, checking it twice
First, we’d like thank all of the amazing organizations who participated by submitting their sites. We got some great results, and are excited about all the diverse non-profit causes out there.

Our analysis will take place in the following two posts. The first post will focus on cleaning up HTML tags in your source code, while the second will examine improving user experience via better content accessibility.

Visions of… URLs… dancing in our heads
The great news is, every single site submitted had at least one or two areas to tweak to make it even better! So this information should be helpful to everyone out there, big or small. Just to whet your appetites, here’s a quick list of items that will not be addressed in our following posts, but that had some room for improvement in a large percentage of submitted sites:

• Keep an eye on proper canonicalization: 56% of analyzed non-profit sites could improve their canonicalization practices. You can read more about canonicalization in this blog post from a previous site clinic.
• Make sure your volunteer/support sections are visible: 29% of our submissions could improve their sites by making their support, volunteer, or donation sections easier to find. A great way to accomplish this is to add a donations tab to your navigation bar so it’s just one click away at all times.
• Protect your confidential information: Lots of non-profits, especially those in the medical industry, deal with some very important and confidential information. Read up on how to control your crawled and indexed content, and remember to protect confidential content through proper authentication measures.
• Make your Flash sites search engine friendly: We saw some beautiful sites running on Flash. Search engines have a hard time understanding Flash files, and we’re working to improve Flash comprehension on our end, but here are some discussion points on how you can help us understand your Flash content.

Posted by Alexi Douvas & Jen Lee, Search Quality Evaluation Team
Contributors: Aditya Goradia, Brandon Falls, Charlene Perex, Diara Dankert, Michael Wyszomierski & Nelson Bradley

Webmaster Level: BeginnerCo-hosted on the Webmaster Central BlogA New Year’s resolutionIn the spirit of the holidays, here at Google we wanted to take the time to help out those who spend their days making our world a better place: non-profit organi…

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