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March 18, 2008

Google Launches Non-Profit Portal

Duncan Riley

25 comments »

google-for-non-profits.jpgGoogle has launched a dedicated portal of Google services for non-profit organizations.

Google for Non-Profits offers “a one-stop shop for tools to help advance your organization’s mission in a smart, cost-efficient way.” This site includes ideas and tutorials on ways Google tools can be used to promote non-profits, raise money and operate more efficiently.

Features include standard Google services such as Gmail (including hosted email), YouTube, Blogger, Gadgets, Earth, Calender and Analytics. The two interesting services are the provision of Google Checkout for free to non-profits who want to take donations on their site, and Google Grants, free advertising for non-profits via Google’s Adwords network.

While there isn’t much there that wasn’t already available, free advertising and merchant services will undoubtedly make the pitch very appealing for non-profits looking to save money and promote themselves.

(via Google)

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. randy

    March 18th, 2008 at 4:07 pm

    “Google Beggar”

  2. Darren Stuart

    March 18th, 2008 at 4:21 pm

    This is a great idea, it just smacks to me of PR and we do no evil.

    maybe I am just being jaded but does anyone else just think this is a filler announcement because they not released anything of note in a while and this will get on all major news sites.

  3. Billy

    March 18th, 2008 at 4:21 pm

    Thanks for posting about this. I’ll have to check it out for my organization.

  4. Boring Market

    March 18th, 2008 at 4:28 pm

    Google is a mammoth part of the web today, which obviously spills out into everyone’s experience on the web. The only question I have is why does Google creates applications/software that doesn’t relate to their revenue stream?

  5. Christopher Calvi

    March 18th, 2008 at 4:29 pm

    This is excellent news! I’m on the board of the 24th Street Theatre in Los Angeles, and we’ll definitely try to make use of this.

  6. Michael Parkatti

    March 18th, 2008 at 4:43 pm

    This is cool, but why not come out with some highly publicized bundling of their applications for the ‘for-profit’ market as well? It’s amazing how many people out there have no idea that web applications exist and continue to fork over their cash for desktop applications. My dad used google calendar for the first time the other week, and called me like it was an event or something. I’d bet that 85% of people didn’t even know google does things other than search.

  7. Wayne Schul

    March 18th, 2008 at 4:51 pm

    Google Apps for Domains has been out in the for profit world for quite some time. I dropped my Microsoft Exchange hosted account and switched entirely to Google Mail via imap on my iPhone. I blogged it over at Geardiary and also (successfully I believe) called Google crazy for sponsoring moon races, securing landing rights for their Boeing 767 and pledging hundreds of millions for green energy. Talk about non-core activities. We’ll see how many of those pet projects stay around as ad spending slows in this recession.

  8. Anrkist

    March 18th, 2008 at 5:28 pm

    Someone who is going to find this information on Google probably already knows about these services… I mean, it’s cool they kind of put a bunch of links together on a page but this doesn’t really seem all that special.

  9. Soren G

    March 18th, 2008 at 5:36 pm

    Link does not seem to work . . .

  10. dbiz

    March 18th, 2008 at 6:08 pm

    @#4: 1 word: ads. Google is not a search engine, it is an ad network and all of their products serve to drive greater traffic through their ad network. The non-profit market is highly fragmented, but most people know about Google; if they can get this fragmented market more engaged in their platform, Google gets more eyeballs spending more time seeing more ads - so it is directly related to their revenue strategy. Another brilliant move from Google.

  11. Martin_Australia

    March 18th, 2008 at 7:21 pm

    Yet another press release from the serial PR junkies at Google…what is worse the stream of media releases from Google or the media sites which simply put them up even when (in this case) they are simply rebadged existing services? Cmon guys at TechCrunch do some real reporting or investigative stories rather than simply being a PR proxy for Apple and Google!

  12. Marsello

    March 18th, 2008 at 8:12 pm

    Thanks for the post, there are tons of non profit organizations in our area (washington, dc) who could use this tool. I’m planning to forward this to all of my friends who work for non profit.

  13. allan

    March 18th, 2008 at 8:30 pm

    haven’t checked the link, but will share with several people I know who are trying to stop profiting from their terrible dead-end jobs and, instead, develop revenue streams that won’t profit a cent.

  14. Sneezy Melon

    March 18th, 2008 at 8:52 pm

    Nothing new. Google Grants provides advertisment for only Public Service Organizations

  15. valleyguy

    March 18th, 2008 at 10:14 pm

    This is complete bs. Google has started to annoy me because they are trying to misuse the non profit moniker to gain publicity for their less popular products viz. Google apps, gmail etc.

    Absolutely nothing new in the announcement same old garbage.

    Free google checkout. BS — infact they should pay the non profits a % revshare of search thru the sites thatthe non profit creates and a bounty for every new chevkout user ( donor )

  16. vikash

    March 19th, 2008 at 4:34 am

    This is a good market strategy.

  17. Wayne Schul

    March 19th, 2008 at 6:09 am

    What’s news here?

    How about free Gmail with your domain (no idea on the limit), free ability to advertise via AdWords, free ability to accept donations via Google Checkout.

    Just because you aren’t the target market, don’t think this isn’t news. For most Non-Profits with limited funds this is indeed big news. And many people are involved in some way with Non-Profits — think churches, charitable foundations, etc.

    This is indeed newsworthy and anything offered “free” generally has some type of hook or benefit to the organization offering it freely.

    Not every story can be tracking Facebook or FriendFeed…..

  18. Paul Migliori

    March 19th, 2008 at 7:06 am

    Read the fine print, they start charging very high fees per transaction in the second year of the contracts - nonprofits beware.

  19. Grantsleuth

    March 19th, 2008 at 4:14 pm

    Just a few points with regard to the comment made by “Boring Market”
    –there are an estimated 2,000,000 nonprofits in the United States
    –nonprofits in the U.S. account for more than 5% of the G.D.P.
    –300 Billion was donated to U.S. Charities in 2006
    –Nonprofits spent one-third ($100 billion) to raise the 300 billion
    –Nearly 1 out of 10 working adults is employed by a nonprofit.

    A boring market to some, but lots of eyeballs and lots of money.

  20. Dan Melton

    March 20th, 2008 at 7:29 am

    Anyone else think the AdWords ‘grants’ program is a little limiting? I am thankful that they will be granting adwords space…but a quarterly review process for thousands upon thousands of nonprofits with each having dozens of messages….and each one needs to be approved? Its not scalable or timely for social campaigns. Could Google just offer free adwords to any 501c3 for certain terms, like ‘hunger’ or ‘fight racism’?

  21. Jake Brewer

    March 20th, 2008 at 9:55 am

    In response to Grantsleuth and Dan Melton:

    Grantsleuth, I’ve been working in the nonprofit sector for 5 years and have spent the last 2.5 with Idealist.org as our Director of Partnerships. I can completely and utterly confirm that there is a huge interest in the eyeballs and the branding possibilities that exist within the sector for corporations. I will say, though that you’re a little off in the number of orgs in the sector. There are more like 1.5M rather than 2M and when it comes down to it, there are about 200k that are actually substantial enough to do very much. Two great databases for them are Guidestar.org and Idealist.org. The level of contribution to the economy is sometimes estimated even higher than 5%, though no one can completely say with certainty. Either way, it’s somewhere between 600Bn and 1Tr USD.

    Dan, we were one of the first AdGrant recipients and have since received about $1.5M worth of free ads through Google. At this point there are about 4000 nonprofits participating in the program, and you’re right, the applicaiton process is not scalable given the staff that they’ve allotted the program.

    Keep an eye out on this weeks NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference for an announcement about how they plan to streamline and manage the process in the future.

    http://www.nten.org/ntc

  22. arl

    April 4th, 2008 at 8:34 am

    “Read the fine print, they start charging very high fees per transaction in the second year of the contracts - nonprofits beware.”

    Still lower than paypal’s fees, which is what a lot of small nonprofits (including mine) currently use for online donations.

  23. soobrosa

    April 14th, 2008 at 7:17 am

    hey-hey

    Not Found
    The requested URL /nonprofits/ was not found on this server.

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