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

Kristie Ferketich, Google Grants Team

I'm happy to share with the NTEN community a major change in the Google Grants process designed to improve the experience for prospective Google Grantees.

It's the start of the 3rd week of our 2009 NTEN Member Appreciation Month!  On deck this week is another great member appreciation program: What is Google Grants? An Introduction to the Google Grants Program, Thursday, Nov 19th, 2pm ET / 11am PT. 

And we're starting the week off with some NTEN Gear for the daily prize, and I am happy to be sending some off to:

Beth Hynes-Ciernia, from the Parks & Trails Council of Minnesota!

Thanks, Beth, for being a member of NTEN and working with technology to help your organization achieve its mission!

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.

Flickr Photo: thelearnrOver the weekend, I encountered a new phenomenon: AdWords squatting. I met a guy trying to develop a business around finding obscure, but potentially lucrative search terms, building up a quality AdWords presence for them, then, presumably, selling the rights. His best success so far was -- and I cannot make this kind of stuff up -- "adult incontinence".

This is the mindset we're competing against with our Google Grants accounts.

Go search for "polar bear" on Google. You'll find ads from the NWF and Defenders of Wildlife up against ads for travel services for polar bear-based tourism.

Google's not going to give us top placement just because we're trying to do good, so join us for our Advanced Google Grants webinar series, "Maximizing Your Grant To Meet Your Organization's Goals", to learn best practices from the Google Grants team.

> Learn more and register today!

Flickr Photo: nasmacYou probably know that Google Grants gives out free AdWords accounts to nonprofits. With an account, if somebody searches for info on, say, "polar bears" -- we're told polar bears are ratings gold -- and your organization is trying to ensure there's an ice cap left for them to do polar bear-y things on, you can try to try to steer them to your web site. (The searchers, not the polar bears. If polar bears learn to use the Internet, we're all in trouble.)

Yes, you too can try to attract the attention of folks looking for specific information with 3 lines of text next to Google search results. But with all the competition, it's hard -- very hard. That's why we've enlisted the Google Grants team to lay out the best practices in our upcoming webinar series, "Learning to Use and Maximize Your Google Grant".

> Learn more and register today!

As the second week of Member Appreciation month starts to wind down, I'm glad for the opportunity to discuss today's particular NTEN give-away:

AdWords for Dummies, courtesy of Jossey-Bass/Wiley publishers.

Now, I can bring up Google's AdWords and how it could fit in with your nonprofit organization:

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.

[Update: Please note that this program has now ended.]

At the close of his session at the 2008 Nonprofit Technology Conference on Thursday afternoon, Google Adwords Evangelist Frederick Vallaeys announced a new partnership between Google and NTEN.

"Due to our similar goals in supporting the non-profit community, particularly through technology, Google Grants and NTEN are partnering to enhance their impact on non-profits. We would like to invite all qualifying NTEN organizations to apply to Google Grants and we will expedite the review of those that apply."

How cool is that? Very.

If you don't already know about Google Grants, they allow qualified nonprofits to use Google Adwords for the low, low price of free.

To take advantage of this offer:

• If you're not yet a member of NTEN, join today!
• Then, apply for the Google Grant at http://www.google.com/grants through Google's easy online application. Please spend some time reviewing the site to learn more about the program, eligibility, grant details, etc.
• Finally, send an email to grants-nten@google.com to help Google identify you as an NTEN member, which should hasten your application through the process.