Flickr photo: Logan was his name-o

It's been just a few hours since one of the largest recorded earthquakes and subsequent tsunami hit off the coast of Japan. The photos and video coming out of the region are awe inspiring and scary. Our hearts go out to the people of Japan.

Fortunately, the quick response to the quake, especially in the realm of technology, has been equally impressive.

We are all very excited to announce today that NTEN has received a $1.15 million grant from the Google Inc. Charitable Giving Fund of Tides Foundation. This is the first grant NTEN has received from Google. The grant will support NTEN's work to educate technology leaders about the evolving role of technology in nonprofit work, and beyond that, to produce research and training on cloud technologies and data management, visualization, and collaboration.

You can read the official press release, but we thought you might rather read what a few members have to say:

When last we tuned in to the soap opera that IS the net neutrality debate, the fate of our Internet had been left in the hands of FCC Chairman Genachowski, who had architected a process he hoped would lead to some action. Things weren't moving quickly, but they were moving, and down a definable path. (Thanks to the nearly 500 NTEN community members who signed the nonprofit petition!)

On August 4, the New York Times broke the bombshell that Verizon and Google were meeting about net neutrality to broker their own proposal. Then, on August 9, Google and Verizon took a left turn, and announced their own joint proposal for an "open internet." It looks like the empahsis should be on the "an."

You probably already know that Google Grants gives qualified nonprofits free advertising in the form of Google Adwords, those little ads that appear on the right side of Google search results. (You should: we cover it often enough!) Crafting a great ad could help raise awareness about your organization's programs. But do you know how to get the most out of your grant? Or should you...

> Register for our Beginner Webinar Series: Learning to Use and Maximize Your Google Grant

The Google Grants team has announced their very first grantee conference, to be held in early August at Google HQ in Mountain View. That's right: you'll get to learn how to maximize your AdWords account while visiting the mothership.

From the Google Grants blog:

During the event, grantees will have an opportunity to learn tips and tricks from successful grantees, attend AdWords seminars taught by in-house experts, and learn how to maximize Google for Non-Profits products. Our goal is to provide content for a diverse mix of attendees with different interest areas, locales, sizes, and levels of AdWords experience. In the typical Google spirit of making information accessible and useful, we will record this event and post the videos online after. So, even if you aren't able to attend, you won't miss a thing.

But are they running an AdWords campaign to promote the event?

Due to limited space, they're going to hold a lottery to select the invitees. You need to enter the lottery by June 30th, so I give you permission to hurt our bounce rate by going to sign up right now.

Maren, German, and Kristie, Google Grants

On the Google Grants team, we receive a lot of questions from grantees on how best to evaluate their AdWords performance. We put this article together to give guidance around monitoring and evaluating your Google Grants account using a few strategies we find valuable. We hope you do, too!

Flickr Photo: akakumoYesterday, I had the privilege of sharing the stage at an event on cloud computing hosted by the Salesforce.com/Foundation, Facebook, and Google. My job was to set the stage for the day and talk about why cloud computing is important for our sector. (If you want the slides, I put them up on slideshare, so free to download them.)

Though I think the cloud presents its own set of challenges for our sector, I also think it presents us with some amazing opportunities -- not just to save money on infrastructure and IT support, but to go about our work differently than we have before.  

I'll confess that I owe the genesis of my thinking around this to Steve Wright at the Saleforce.com/Foundation. I had the chance to interview him about his upcoming NTC session, and that set me to thinking about just what we COULD do with the cloud if we were able to look beyond the bottom line. 

What that is, I think, is collaboration and evaluation, facilitated by free-moving data.

You've noticed this, I'm sure. In the last decade, the pile of data we have to sift through to make decisions has grown from a molehill into a mountain. As communication and interaction have moved from analog to digital, we're able to capture more information than anyone thought possible. 

Think about it. If you ran a phone bank in the early 90's, the only way you had to guage whether or not your message was effective was to count the number of hang-ups. Now we send out an email and not only know whether or not folks took action for us, but which part of the message compelled them to click, and which parts of our list found the message most compelling. And we can know dozens of other things as our databases record those clicks. (This example is inspired by The Numerati. Buy it.)

Making sense of all this data is going to be our key challenge as a sector as we move forward. But the cloud is going to help us in this regard, because the cloud makes it exponentially easier for us to move data around. 

In the cloud, we can share client service data with other organizations and map it against the need demonstrated by census data. In the cloud, we can create visualizations of our data that make those multi-colored spreadsheets finally make REAL sense. In the cloud, we'll be able to record even more of the ways our constituents interact with us, and interpret what that means. 

That's the promise of the cloud. Now all we have to do is live up to it. 

Also - I have to mention that there were some great panelists with some really cool insights to share at this event.  Some of my favorite tidbits came from Scott Beale, Jake Brewer and Judi Sohn.  They all had great real-life examples of the challenges and joys of the cloud. 

My favorite advice of the day came from Judi who was addressing how difficult it is to get end users to switch to the cloud when they are used to, say, Outlook.  Judi's really smart advice?  Smart by moving the data to the applications they already use.  Pop your gmail to Outlook.  And, as users have questions or needs, point them to the cloud for answers.  Eventually, they will give up their software for the cloud.  

Every Adwords user out there can agree on one thing: there's no one answer when it comes to Adwords. Making your campaign work for your organization can seem one part sweat, one part knowledge, one part pixie dust. But how do you make pixie dust, anyway?

The folks at Google have been more than generous in sharing that recipe with the NTEN crowd. Not only do they give NTEN members priority treatment for new Google Grants accounts, they've also shared their Adwords secrets in our Adwords webinar series. (Shhh. We're doing more in the spring!)

At the 2009 NTC, Google's own nonprofit Tinkerbell, Kristie Ferketich, will share her pixie dust formulas in her session, "Hey Buddy, Can You Spare $1: Effective Strategies to Maximize Google Grants". I got to talk to her about that session, some of the other Google goodness at the NTC, and her favorite San Francisco place, Dolores Park:

To publicize our CMS and CRM Vendor Satisfaction Reports, we tried including, in an AdWords campaign, the names of the software covered in the reports -- "Plone", "Drupal", "Salesforce", and so on. For 2 days, our impressions shot into the thousands. On day 3, it dropped to, oh, 36, 37 per day, and there was a message from Google that said, basically: "Your clickthrough performance is too anemic to be worthy of these keywords, so we've turned them off. Please increase your bid or improve your CTR."

Aaaaand they're still turned off.

So, I'm looking forward to our upcoming webinar, "Optimizing Keywords in AdWords", the 2nd in our series on AdWords, presented by some wonderful people on the Google Grants team.

We at NTEN love us some Google Grants. After a little trial and error, our complimentary AdWords account now provides nearly 5% of our total site traffic, almost all of it new to our community. Okay, a lot of trial and error. And some grumbling. And maybe a little cursing. If only we scheduled our webinars to meet our internal learning needs!

Our upcoming webinar series on Google Adwords, to be presented by members of the Google Grants team, promises to take a lot of the mystery out of a system that only appears simple.

> Learn more and register today!