Advice for Nonprofits New to the Web

hello my name is Whitney lemon I work on Google's get your business online team joining me today in the Google small business community is Erika Johansen Erika works on the social impact team at Google focused on helping nonprofits make the most of the web prior to Google she was a strategy director at purpose where she worked with NGOs brands and corporations to define and achieve the impact they wanted to have on the world today we're chatting with Erika on advice for nonprofits and new to the

web Erika thank you so much for taking time out of your day to be with us it's great to be here so like I was saying Erika works on Google for nonprofits now she works we used to work at purpose so you have tons of great information and actually your purpose is to help nonprofits make it on the web I'm so excited you're gonna have a lot a lot to talk to us about excited to what defines a non-profit so you know I think the nonprofit industry really evolved because a lot of the the ills of societ

y and and and social issues that people cared about we're very hard to tackle from a business perspective and so nonprofits we're really they're really founded to make sure that we're able to tackle those issues and set up organizations that don't necessarily have to make money or meet a bottom line their bottom line is really all about how can we push the needle on social issues that affect our communities what advice do you have for nonprofits or for businesses also about taking advantage of t

he web what tools should they use what should what should they do yeah well I think a lot of the tools that businesses and nonprofits use are very similar and we actually see this in our work at Google for nonprofits so Google for nonprofits was basically set up because Google has built all of these incredible tools for business so we have enterprise software we have advertisements Google Adwords and all of these different these certain products could help businesses meet their bottom line but I

think you know all of those have a natural transition to the nonprofit community because nonprofits need to you know streamline internal operations and collaborate internally as a staff which is what Google Apps is really good for they also need to get the word out to their communities and and recruit new donors and new volunteers which is what AdWords is really great for also you can tell compelling stories through YouTube and Google Earth Pro but all of these tools I think translate across th

e the lines from small businesses to NGOs everyone can benefit do you have any examples of nonprofits that are using some of these tools successfully you're just using the internet successfully definitely you know I I have that's that's the kind of thing that I love I love talking to nonprofits who are using online tools effectively I just heard about this amazing organization called the Mental Health Foundation and what they do is they're actually they've been in existence about about 30 years

and they have created this incredible library and curriculum of mental health materials that can talk about suicide prevention anxiety all the different kind of mental afflictions that people suffer from but part of the challenge with them is they were facing an awareness gap you know in New Zealand and around the world we just saw this with the death of Robin Williams it's a very hard issue to talk about and so part of their challenge was how can you get people at these moments of crisis and in

tervene with these really incredible materials that they've developed and so what they found was a lot of people were actually turning to the internet for help and what they did was they actually used Google AdWords which is a tool that allows you to you know take your own website and and materials resources on your own website and promote that on Google search and and and use their Google Ad grant which is ten thousand dollars a month in free AdWords that we give people to promote on Google sea

rch and they've actually promoted the resources that will help people on Google search so if someone typed in anxiety help or a suicide prevention those resources for people in New Zealand will show up at the top of the feed that really tugged at my heartstrings because it was really an example of how a non-profit is effectively targeting a constituency using a Google product you mentioned just now give people grants to use Adwords it was eligible to receive those grants so anyone who's a 501 C

3 in America a charity in the UK and in many different countries around the world there are different denominations of charities so if you go to google.com slash nonprofits you can check in your country if you're eligible all right so we were just talking about technology and I've actually I've stat one in five US nonprofits receives donations online how important it is to do that I think that you know right now it's just one in five but I also think that number is and so organizations who are t

here when people search when people search for what should I donate to organizations that kind of top the list as I was saying before are the ones who are reaping the benefits of donations and you're seeing you know with the rise of organizations like charity water that do distributed donations people creating donation page themselves and then sending them out to their community to fundraise you're seeing this really interesting trend evolve where people are starting to kind of take it upon them

selves to do nonprofit donations and so I think that that sector or that that space is really only going to start to grow and so the more nonprofits can start to transition a lot of their donation activities online the better I'd love to know a little bit more about Google for nonprofits what it offers to nonprofits yeah so the program itself started because Googlers themselves were taking their 20% time which if you guys don't know it's one day a week that Googlers can spend on a passion projec

t and they were thinking about how you know Google employees were thinking about how they could help their favorite nonprofits be more effective start to get online start to reach new audiences and so groups within all of the different product families started talking about how they could start to engage in the space so the Google for nonprofits product family consists of four different tools so there's apps which is our enterprise tools for businesses that nonprofits get for free there's Google

Ad grants which is Adwords and so Google it's a grant ten thousand dollar grant every month that nonprofits receive to boost their AdWords campaigns there's YouTube which provides special permissions on YouTube to promote rich media and your cause and then there's Google Earth Pro which is a free license to our 3d mapping tool that allows you to tell stories through data and geo specific visualizations so we're just about out of time I'd love you to give us any final tips and also tell us where

people I'm watching can go to learn more about Google for nonprofits definitely I think my main tip for nonprofits is start dipping your toe in the water of online getting online because that's where people are now people are searching for products online people are searching for places online they're also searching for nonprofits online and when people go to research where they should put their donation dollars more than 75 percent of people actually go online and try to find a nonprofit that

they believe in and so I think you know making sure that your organization is online can help with your offline programs it can help kind of raise awareness across the board all of the the the factors are positive and as social change agents you know we have used every single tool at our disposal to make change in the past you know activists of the civil rights movement and and and Beyond have really kind of leveraged every tool at their disposal and so I think making sure that you're not avoidi

ng online media digital media just because it's new and scary it's really really important so you can get started at Google for nonprofits there's a ton of tools out there but I think you know those definitely help nonprofits touch on many of the base goals that you have as an organization thank you for joining us today Eric got so many great tips yeah thanks for having me thanks for all the time you guys have spent watching this video and on behalf of the entire get your business online team an

d the Google small business community I wish you great success growing your business