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Clearing Up the Confusion E-Zine Vol 02 Issue 05
------- Clearing Up the Confusion E-Zine -------
Vol 2, Issue 5
I'm in the process of moving my website over to a new hosting
service. As a result, I'm having to switch the system I use to
send out these newsletters. As with any new system, there may be
a glitch or two, so I hope you'll be patient with me. That being
said, I thought I would write a bit about some Google tools. I
attended a seminar about a week ago about using various Google
Apps and tools especially for nonprofit organizations.
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In This Issue...
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1. Article: Nonprofit Google 101
2. Blog Posts
3. Shameless Self-Promotion
4. The Fine Print
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1. Article: Nonprofit Google 101
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Last week I attended a presentation about using a variety of
Google tools for nonprofit organizations. Our local Google
offices, in concert with the New Center's npServ program and the
Friends of CASA, gave a four-hour overview, including some of the
pros and cons of the various systems as well as some
opportunities which are available right now. I'll try to run
down the list as best I remember.
* Google Apps (http://docs.google.com/): With this I am referring
specifically to Google Docs, Google Spreadsheet, and Google
Presentation. These, of course, are Google's answer to the
Microsoft productivity suite of applications. These tools have
a clear benefit in that they have been designed for the web
with collaboration in mind. Their functionality is a little
bare-bones, but in general supports most of what you need to
create useful documents. I particularly like the Spreadsheet
facility and use it quite a bit in running my business. Using
these tools has an added benefit that all of your documents are
stored onine (though you can download them and store them
locally). This means you'll never have to worry about losing
important information just because one of the machines in your
office decides to die a grim and horrible death. Using the
Google Apps Team Edition (http://www.google.com/apps) you can
even limit document access to members of your group (without
specifically having to add each member of the group to each
file).
* Google Calendar (http://calendar.google.com/): Groups can
display both private and public event information. Using
Google's embedding capabilities, you can even display public
calendars on your website. I've already set up this feature
with one of my clients, CNP of Ohio, Ltd. Once it is in place,
Google's intuitive interface makes it child's play to keep your
website's event calendar up to date.
* Gmail (http://gmail.google.com/): Having an email application
which ties in with all of the other Google services can make
your life a lot simpler, too. In addition to just having a
good web-based interface, Google even makes it possible to
retrieve email from your other accounts and display it in the
Gmail interface. I do this myself so that all of my business
correspondence is easily searchable and available wherever I
can access the Internet.
* Google Checkout (https://checkout.google.com/sell): This is a
credit card processing system similar in capabilities to
PayPal. The benefit right now for nonprofits is that it is
free. Yes, let me repeat that. From now until the end of the
year, Google is charging zero fees for nonprofit organizations
to use Google Checkout. That means if you're organization
accepts $100 on your website, all $100 gets deposited into your
account. After the end of this year, nonprofits will have to
pay a fee, just like the rest of us. Even that, though, (2% +
$.20 per transaction) is better than services like PayPal for
pretty much every level of usage up to $100,000 per month.
* Google Adwords (http://adwords.google.com): Advertise your
organization, it's events and opportunities to those who are
actively searching for you. There are a lot of cool ideas with
Adwords -- tutorials to help you craft your ads, communities
which can give advice, and no charge (no matter how many ads
you create), unless someone actually clicks on the ad. Not
bad. How about one better? If your organization is approved
for Google Grants (http://www.google.com/grants/), you can get
*months* of advertising for *free*. Hard to beat that.
There were a couple of other tools we talked about -- Google
Sites (http://www.google.com/sites/) and Page Creator
(http://pages.google.com/). They seem to be a means to create
actual web pages and sites for your organization. I haven't been
able to play with it yet, though, so I'll hold off talking about
them.
Now, none of these tools are completely perfect. You will
undoubtedly run into challenges trying to use any one of them
because it doesn't *quite* work the way you want. Still for many
nonprofit organizations, this might be a great way to get most of
the features they need without having to break the budget for the
upcoming year.
If you try them out, drop me a line at gpeters@cyberdatasolns.com
and let me know how they work for you.
Copyright 2008, Greg Peters
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2. Blog Posts
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Links to posts on the "Clearing Up the Confusion" Blog from the
last year:
Monday, February 25, 2008 -- Don't Surprise Me!
http://clearing-confusion.blogspot.com/2008/02/dont-surprise-me.html
"The kind of surprises I can do without usually involve
software. Ironically it's often the little things that get under
my skin...."
Monday, February 18, 2008 -- Farewell, NoMonthlyFees
http://clearing-confusion.blogspot.com/2008/02/farewell-nomonthlyfees.html
"I was inspired by the post my friend, Andrew Miller of Your
Search Advisor, crafted recently wherein he bid a not-so-fond
farewell to Comcast as his Internet Service Provider. In my case,
though, it's time for me to say goodbye to my website hosting
service, NoMonthlyFees.com...."
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3. Shameless Self-Promotion
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The "Clearing Up the Confusion" E-Zine is a production of Greg
Peters, owner, chief cook, and bottlewasher of Cyber Data
Solutions. CDS has been helping website designers develop better
web presence for their clients for more than a decade. Visit us
on the Web at www.cyberdatasolns.com to see how we can help your
webmaster.
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4. The Fine Print
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