[MUSIC PLAYING] ESHA: Hello, everybody. Welcome to our first
episode of "Live with Google for Nonprofits." We'll get started in
just a minute here, but just to make
sure, let us know if you have any issues
hearing or seeing me. And then, we'll go
ahead and get started. As you can see on
the right, there is a live chat functionality. So you can go ahead and
ask your question there. You can let us know what
you think of the livestream, and you can go ahead
and let us know if you have any connectiv
ity
problems as well. So yeah, so we'll go ahead
and get started here. So you may be wondering,
what is "Live with Google for Nonprofits?" So we started a new show. And it will be every other
Thursday, starting today. And the time zone will
change for episodes. So take a look at
our YouTube channel to make sure you set a reminder. And every other week,
we'll be broadcasting live with members of the
Google from Nonprofits team, as well as other
experts from Google from different product areas. We
'll also have some speakers
from various nonprofits being asked to tell us
more about their stories. And if you have any
suggestions or any topics that you'd like
us to cover, we'll have a survey at
the end of the video and you'll be able to put
your responses in that survey and let us know if
there's any topics that you'd like us to
cover in the future. So we started this
new show because we've heard from nonprofits around
the world through our surveys and adding with
one-on-one conversations,
you'd really love more
touch points with the Google for Nonprofits team. We know we're available in
many countries around the world and we have hundreds
of thousands of nonprofits who use
Google for Nonprofits tools, so we want to make sure we're
as accessible as possible. So you are live every week. You'll be able to
ask your questions, and we'll be able to
cover topics that we know you're interested in. Just so you know,
the session will be recorded so you'll
be able to access this session at
a later
time through the same link that you're watching it now. So you can go to
our YouTube channel, and there also will
be a "Live with Google for "Nonprofits" playlist. And in this playlist, you'll be
to see future episodes, timing for the episodes,
the subject, as well as a survey in which
you can basically request certain talks. Awesome. So today on our
first episode, we'll be introducing a few
members of our team. Alessia and Fiona from the
Google for Nonprofits team will be joining to giv
e us a
quick introduction to who they are, how long they've
been on the team, and some information
about themselves. And then we'll also have Rebecca
from the Applied Digital Skills team. And she'll be taking us through
Applied Digital Skills, which is a free training resource
with lessons and tutorials to help you upscale
your nonprofit, as well as those that you
will provide services for. So we'll go ahead
and get started. I'll start with my introduction. So I'm Esha. I've been on the Google f
or
Nonprofits team since March, but I've been at Google
for almost four years now. I'm from the Midwest originally,
but now I am based in Oakland. I am getting some feedback that
I am a little bit pixelated, so what I will do is, I'm going
to try to switch my camera off for a second. So just give me one moment to
make sure that you can hear and you can see me. So give me one moment here. All right, I'm back. So it sounds like my
sound quality is OK. My video isn't great. But that's OK, because
i
t's more important for you to hear our guest speakers and
our other team members today anyways. So we'll go ahead
and just keep going. All right. So as I was saying, I'm Esha. And I'm from the Midwest,
but I'm based here in Oakland, California. So I'm giving the livestream
from my house here. I'm super passionate about
the Google Nonprofits team. Joining Google, I wanted to
really work in social impact. And I love that our mission is
to really empower nonprofits with technology. And my favorite
part of my job is talking to nonprofits
on a day-to-day basis and learning about
their challenges and seeing how Google
and other technology can really empower
nonprofits around the world to drive more impact. So that's a bit about me. And then now, I will
pass it on to Fiona, who's another member of the
Google for Nonprofit team to tell us a little
bit more about herself. So Fiona? There she is, and I'll
let her take the screen. FIONA SODERBERG: [AUDIO OUT] ESHA: Fiona, we
actually can't hear y
ou. I think you might
be on mute, if you want to unmute your mic though. FIONA SODERBERG: Yep. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Thank you for bearing with
us through our challenges. Just like all of you,
we're working from home and dealing with
livestreams and making sure that everything works OK. We're working with Esha
to get her video quality and sound quality
up there again, so we should be good to go. But yeah, as Esha
said, I'm Fiona. Very excited to be here today
and speak with all of
you. I've been at Google
11 years next week. Time flies when
you're having fun. But I've been on the
Google for Nonprofits team about three and
a half years now. I focus on some of our product
operations and customer support operations. So maybe sometimes
you'll see my name hopping in our
community forum, or I'll be involved in different
launches for our product. That's kind of what I
focus on day-to-day. I'm originally from
the Midwest as well. Actually, Esha and I are
from the same suburb, whi
ch is kind of crazy. Many years later, we're
working on the same team. And I would say
my favorite thing about working on
the team is being able to use all the
knowledge that I've gained over the decade at Google
to help nonprofits day in, day out. I've always been able to connect
with nonprofits in whatever role that I had at Google. But this one allows me
to focus 100% of my time on that, which is [AUDIO DROPS]. ALESSIA SCARPELLINI:
Hi, everyone. I am Alessia. You might have seen me
in a few l
ivestreams we have delivered recently. I am originally from Italy. So I moved to the
US a couple of years ago to join the Google
for Nonprofits team. I'm a program
manager on the team, and I work a lot with
nonprofits to tell their stories and tell their impact stories
with Google from Nonprofits, which is probably
my favorite part-- getting to talk to nonprofits,
sharing their stories on our social channels,
our blog posts. So that makes me very proud
about being part of the team. Originally, a
s I
said, I'm from Italy. My background is all
in corporate social responsibility. I studied corporate
social responsibility, and I worked also in the
international corporation fields in Milan, Paris, and New
Delhi before moving to Dublin, where I worked for
seven years at Google as a product specialist. Again, my passion is
all about social impact. So I was so happy to join
the team in San Francisco a couple of years back. ESHA: Awesome. Thank you so much for
the introductions, too, Alessia and
Fiona. All right. So now we will move on to
our main topic of the day. So I'd like to bring on Rebecca
from our Applied Digital Skills team to tell us
more about herself and more about the Applied
Digital Skills program. All right, so here is Rebecca. Thank you so much
for joining us today. REBECCA HARDY: Thank
you for having me. So I will also do an intro. So hi. I'm Rebecca Hardy. I'm a program manager at Google
on Applied Digital Skills. I've been at Google
12 years now. So like Fiona said,
time does fly. And I've been on this
team since March. I am originally from
Savannah, Georgia, but I now live in San Francisco. My team's mission is
expanding opportunities and reducing inequities
with technology, which is really well-aligned
with my personal passions. And so I'm here today to
share some information about a free digital skills
resource for nonprofits that we recently
launched in partnership with the Google for Nonprofits
and the Google Ad Grants teams. And so let me go
to my nex
t slide. All right, it's all working. All right, so what is
Applied Digital Skills? Applied Digital Skills is a free
online video-based curriculum. Its focus is to teach
learners of all ages the practical
digital skills needed to succeed at school, in
the workplace, and in life. And on the site,
there are lessons for both middle and
high school students, as well as adult learners. And you can sort by audience. So I'm going to explain
a little bit about what I mean when I refer to a lesson. Each
lesson is a video series
of instructional videos that teaches learners how to
do really practical things that someone would frequently
have to do at work-- so something like
building a presentation or managing a project. So each lesson has,
typically, six to 10 videos, and they're around two
to seven minutes each. In the videos, we walk learners
through a set of skills. So we explain what
they will learn, why they would need to do
it, and then we take folks through how to do it. And then learner
s are asked
to try the skills being demonstrated in the video. And video playback speed can be
adjusted to the learner's pace. And we also provide an
instructional summary to reference a skill
set next to the videos. Lessons usually take about
30 minutes to two hours to complete, depending
on the complexity of the skills being taught. And all of our lessons use
project-based learning. So what I mean by this is, each
skill that is being learned contributes to a deliverable. So at the end of
the l
esson, learners will have something really
tangible, like a basic resume or, say, a budget tracker
built in Google Sheets. And we have hundreds of lessons
with a wide range of skills and Google applications. Our focus is really to create
learning experiences that are relevant to learners' lives. And we want to provide
opportunities for them to practice with authentic
performance tasks. And really, we hope to
create lifelong learners by building
confidence and success through meaningful
learning
experiences. So go to the next slide. All right, so why
should nonprofits be interested in using
Applied Digital Skills? So earlier this year,
my team teamed up with the Google for Nonprofits
team and the Google Ad Grants team to create a
set of resources that can help nonprofits who
are getting used to the Google for Nonprofit suite. So first, we took a look at
a lot of the great lessons that we already have, and
we curated a collection specifically for nonprofits. And these lessons seek to
tea
ch common activities that either nonprofit employees
or volunteers might need to do in Google applications. And so we now have
a custom web page with lessons focused on helping
your staff and your volunteers help the organizations stand
out online and increase donor engagement, improve
productivity, and improve communication and collaboration
remotely or in-person. The second thing we did-- the Ad Grants team
shared that one of the biggest
challenges for nonprofits is improving donations. So at
Google, we
provide $10,000 a month in free search advertising to
help qualified nonprofits raise awareness and drive site
traffic and online donations. But we also know that digital
advertising and search advertising can be pretty
confusing to get started with, particularly for time and
resource-strapped nonprofits. So we built in a lesson called
"Launch a Successful Ad Grants Campaign." And that walks nonprofits
through signing up for Google for Nonprofits and
Ad Grants, all the way through to
launching a search campaign. All right. So where are these resources,
and what do they look like? So I have a GIF here. It kind of scrolls through
the collection page. You can find the
Google for Nonprofits collection at the link
on the top of the page. So it's kind of lengthy-- applieddigitalsk
ills.withgoogle. com/c/en/nonprofits. Or you can really just go to
google.com and Google "Applied Digital Skills Nonprofits,"
and it'll be the first search result. So this collection of
lessons could be
super helpful if you're trying
to learn how to-- PHONE: --result with search. REBECCA HARDY: Oh my gosh. Sorry. My phone is also
responding to me because I've said
Google too much. So anyway, we think that this
collection could be helpful if you're trying
to learn or you're trying to teach your
employees or your volunteers how to upskill in the
Google for Nonprofit suite. It can help strengthen your
organization's digital skills by practicing really
relevant activities. And so you can learn thin
gs
like how to create a business profile on Google,
and that helps you get discovered
on Google Maps, and it helps you manage how your
nonprofit shows up on Search. Or you could learn
how to plan an event or manage a project with digital
tools, and a whole lot more. Let's go to the next slide. All right. And then the new
lesson that we launched teaches you how to launch a
successful Ad Grants campaign. And it's the first lesson
in the Google for Nonprofits collection. This lesson is especially
h
elpful for nonprofits if you're trying to onboard to
the Google for Nonprofits suite or to Google Ad Grants. But the lesson can be
used to teach, really, any employee or volunteer who
wants to learn how to launch a new Ad Grants campaign. And there's a lot of
step-by-step videos that show you how to do things
like understanding eligibility requirements and sign
up for Ad Grants, learn terminology and
concepts of digital marketing, using Google Search
ads, determining appropriate digital
marketin
g nonprofit goals, identifying requirements for a
successful nonprofit marketing campaign, and then setting
up your Search campaign to achieve a typical
goal for nonprofits, like building awareness
or driving donations. Let's see if I'm on
my next slide, which I'm having a hard time
following right now. Oh, sorry about that. OK. All right, yeah. OK. [LAUGHS] So outside of the lessons
that we specifically curated and created to
help nonprofit employees and volunteers, we think that
Applied Digita
l Skills lessons can actually potentially
help nonprofits upskill the communities
you serve as well. So if your organization does
any education or job readiness activities, you could use
Applied Digital Skills curriculum to train your
program's participants. As I mentioned
earlier, there are over 100 lessons for middle
and high school students, as well as adults. And they're completely
free for anyone to use. So for the best experience,
we recommend signing in with your Google account. So if you
sign in as a
student, basically, this allows you to see all
the lessons you've taken, and you can track your progress. And if you need to pause
in the middle of a lesson, you can pick back up
where you started. And if you sign in
as a teacher, this could allow you
to create classes. You can add different
lessons that could be applicable
to your learners, and then you can share
a class code with them. And you can track
their progress as well. All right, and then
finally, we encourage you to chec
k out all
of these resources and to give them a try. And so if you do,
we would love it if you went to the bottom of
the Nonprofits collection page where you'll see the section
that says "Tried a Lesson." And you can share your
story for a chance to be featured in a
social or a blog post. And that is really all I
have to share with you today. So I will pause now and pass
it back over, I think, to Esha. And maybe we will be
answering questions. ESHA: All right, I
think I'm on mute, but I think yo
u can hear me now. So thank you all for your
patience with our connectivity skills and connectivity issues. But I appreciate your
attention and everything on this amazing presentation. So thank you, Rebecca,
for this awesome overview of Applied Digital Skills. So now, actually, we will
take some time for Q&A. So you can ask
questions about Google for Nonprofits in
general or questions for Rebecca about
Applied Digital Skills. And you can let us know
what your questions are. Cool. So the first
qu
estion that I think we're seeing a lot
of comments about are about Ad Grants resources. So yes, we hear you. Ad Grants is something
that it takes some work to make sure you're
setting up correctly. We have provided some
resources to help you there. So there is Help Center for
Google Ad Grants specifically. So you can check it out
there for any specific common questions that you may have. We also have a Community Forum. We highly recommend posting
in our Community Forum. Oftentimes, the
Ad Grants
experts jump into the Community
Forum and they answer specific questions. So I'll share the link
of the Community Forum. And there's also an
Ad Grants Community Forum specifically too. So you can use that
to post questions, and you will get
responses from members of the community, or members
of the Ad Grants team specifically, or the
Google for Nonprofits team. If you're setting
up and you want to learn how to launch
a successful Ad Grants campaign, that's what
Rebecca just talked about in our
session is that there's
a step-by-step tutorial that they built
to really walk you through exactly how to
launch your first campaign. So we highly recommend
starting there. Most of our common
questions that we get on the Community
Forum could be answered through those lessons. So we definitely recommend
checking that out. And then Ad Grants has its
own YouTube channel as well. So you definitely can do that. If you want to get more
specific Ad Grants help, there are some
partnered organizations w
ith whom you can find on
the Ad Grants page that are-- [AUDIO DROPS] we can
actually give you some one-on-one
support that way too. So those are probably
the main ways to get some Ad Grants support. And also, I highly recommend
subscribing to both the Ad Grants' and our YouTube channel
for more lessons and tutorials and ways to make sure that
you're making the most of grant. Awesome. So do we have any
other big questions? We'll give everybody a minute
to continue to ask questions. And in the mea
ntime,
something I wanted to make sure that
everybody is aware of is, we do have our YouTube
channel, our Twitter channel, our Facebook page,
and a Community Forum. There are links here where
you can check it out. On our social feed, we
often give some links to new tutorials, new
events that are coming up. We'll share more
episodes and more content from this show too. And you'll be able to see,
like, what other teams at Google are doing to support nonprofits. We also are sharing more
nonprofit s
tories as well. So if you want to read
more case studies of how other nonprofits are
using technology or Google tools in innovative ways, you
can check out these channels. All right. Cool. So it seems like we do have a
lot of individual questions. So that's great. We will leave the
stream up to make sure everyone has a chance to
get those questions answered. But it looks like,
for the group, we may be good on questions,
so we can go ahead and wrap up. One more thing that I wanted
to remind every
body of is, we do a survey. So you can let us know what
you thought of today's event by taking the survey. So it's goo.gle/webinar. And by going to this
link, we'll have a survey in which
you can provide us more information
of what you thought about the first episode of "Live
with Google for Nonprofits." This is the first
episode, so we're always trying to improve and work to
make it more and more relevant. So we're answering
your questions. We're providing you
with information that's helpful fo
r you. So please make sure
to fill out the survey if you have thoughts
and feedback. We know connectivity was
a little bit pixelated at the beginning. So we'll for sure work on
that for the next episode, and we'll make sure our
sound quality is even better. So thank you for being
patient with us there. And you also have to have a
lot space to actually write out some topics that you're
interested in learning. And we will be using
that to fill out the agendas to the next shows. So your feedback
ma
tters to us a lot. We want to make sure
that we are addressing what you're interested in. All right, so we will
go ahead and wrap up. But thank you so much. If you have questions,
our team members here will continue to answer
your questions in chat for the next couple minutes. So keep an eye on it. And if you do want to
rewatch this episode, you can find it at this link. It's the same link
that you're watching it on the Google for
Nonprofits YouTube page. Subscribe to our
YouTube channel. We're
constantly putting up more
tutorials, more live events. So we're excited to
have you all here. Thank you for joining
us on our first episode, and make sure to
fill out the survey. All right, have a
good one, everybody.
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