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Here at AssociaDirect, we pride ourselves on relaying sound information to the association / nonprofit world and being on the forefront of how technology can help our clients achieve their objectives more effectively. In my 10 years of association design and marketing support, budget has always been the #1 concern, so I decided to write a brief overview highlighting the FREE tools and support that Google offers to qualifying nonprofit organizations.
Google offers a suite of tools such as Docs, Gmail, Sites and Calendar. These tools are excellent for the smaller organizations trying to be a little more effective on limited budgets. I think we all know about Gmail by now, but you can give your organization the appearance of being larger by having a custom email address like mike@yournonprofit.org rather than the usual @gmail.com. Along the same lines, Sites, Docs and Calendar provide nonprofits with similar tools used by the largest corporations. The real value however and the focus of this article is Google Adwords and Google Donations.
Google Adwords
The greatest obstacle most nonprofit organizations face is getting the word out. Getting the word out, building awareness, and building your brand typically all require a significant budget. However utilizing Google Grants for In-kind advertising is a great way to maximize your budget since it is FREE. The program works the same way as Google Adwords so when Google users search keywords related to your organization, your ad appears next to relevant Google search results under the Sponsored Links sections. A click on your ad then takes users directly to your website. Not every organization will qualify but if you do, it’s just free advertising that puts you that much closer to acheiving your goals. Go to http://www.google.com/grants/ to see if you organization qualifies.
Google Donations
Perhaps an equally important goal for most nonprofit organizations is raising donations. There are web developers and software companies out there selling ecommerce solutions that are no more effective and outragously expensive. For what? Google offers this solution that can be easily incorporated into your current website with streamlined checkout, enhanced data security, without any monthly fees until 2009.
These offerings in my opinion are a great way to maximize your budget, increase awareness, raise donations and generally improve all around efficiency. An added level of comfort should come from knowing all of these things come from such a reliable source as Google. To see if these tools will work for your organization, more detailed information can be found at http://www.google.com/nonprofits/