Google's nonprofit program offers a variety of services your organization can leverage to the benefit of your community. If you aren't a member of the program (read their eligibility guidelines) here is a run down of what the service offers:

• Free or discounted version of Google Apps for your organization
• Free AdWords advertising
• Premium branding and increased uploads on YouTube
• Free licensing for Google Earth, SketchUp, and Maps API

The services they offer at a free or discounted rate are worth the time it takes to apply, which isn't very long.  A few thoughts on proceeding:

• Apply to the nonprofit program with an email address that's not your personal account, like googlegrants@yournonprofit.org. After approval, at the very least enroll in Google Grants (which will give you up to $10,000/month to spend on AdWords) and YouTube for Nonprofits.
• When setting up AdWords, you have to set up a unique account that's not already in use.  You might want to consider using the same googlegrants@yournonprofit.org.
• For ease of access, use that same email to set up your YouTube channel.  You'll want to link your YouTube channel to AdWords.  Once you're in AdWords, look to the bottom left corner to link them.
• Use the same email address again to set up both Google Analytics and the Google Webmaster Toolkit. Both of these services require you to install meta data and code snippets into your site to verify ownership. Once in place you should link AdWords to Google Analytics, and then Analytics to the Webmaster Toolkit.
• To link AdWords to your Google Analytics, head to the Tools and Analysis tab in AdWords and click on the Google Analytics option, this will walk you through connecting the two services.
• To link Google Analytics to the Webmaster Toolkit, go to your site profile in Analytics, click Admin, then Property Settings, scroll down to the toolkit section, click Edit and link the profile on Analytics to the profile on the toolkit.  When you are finished, click Apply on Analytics.

The point in linking these services  is to gain an understanding of how users find your content and to allow you a level of control in that process. And using one designated account to manage access will save a lot of headaches.  With this account, you can grant access to other users, but this master account remains untied to any one person.

You'll also note the benefit of linking these various tools when the data from one service begins to appear in another.  For instance, you'll see better query data from the Webmaster Toolkit appear in Analytics or traffic data appearing in AdWords.

For more information on the nonprofit program - http://www.google.com/nonprofits/

In an ideal world we would quickly respond to emails, keep the clutter to a minimum and access the information needed to communicate effectively. Unfortunately for most of us, this is almost never the case.

Where do you begin to address a messy inbox?

These two rules apply whether you use Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo or another email client:

1. Always aim for ZERO emails in your inbox - respond, delete, archive, unsubscribe.  It's not impossible, but with that as your goal, it will help you cut the clutter.
2. Archive everything - unless it's spam, archive it.  Archiving messages under a corresponding label helps you quickly find those emails later on.

Now for Gmail specifically, there are a number of additional tools for your fight toward a zero inbox.

My first suggestion is to access the Gmail Labs feature.  You can find this by heading to Settings (the gear icon in the right corner) then to Labs and turn on any of the experimental features you find useful.  Personally I use Create a Document, Flickr and YouTube Previews, Google Calendar, Docs & Maps gadgets, Send & Archive and Undo Send, amongst others.

Here's a list of third-party tools you can use.

Note: Any service must use OAuth, the Google Authentication method, to ensure your privacy is intact. All of these services do.

• Unsubscribr - helps you to easily unsubscribe from unwanted email messages.
• Greplin - a search tool that scans your Gmail, Google Docs and other sites, helping you quickly locate important information.  I wrote a Tools for Transparency post on the service last July.
• Email Game for Google Chrome - an add-on for Chrome that turns Gmail into a game, giving you points for responding to and archiving messages.

In a recent Noupe.com post, they list a number of additional services to help you clean up your inbox while staying on top emails as they come in.  Here are a few from their list -

• Find Big Mail - for locating very large files, useful for discovery or deleting files eating up space.
• Google Mail Checkers for Chrome & Firefox - alerts you to new messages
• Better Gmail for Chrome & Firefox - adds useful features to your inbox like "hierarchical labels, an unread message icon on your browser tab, file attachment icons" and others.
• Rapportive - this add on compliments your account by adding context to the people you are emailing, like LinkedIn and Twitter account information, Lanyard profile and so on.
• Boomerang - this service allows you to schedule when you send and receive emails.

I would love to hear about any other useful tools or ideas you use to keep your inbox trimmed down.

The Google Analytics URL Builder is a simple tool that helps you track traffic statistics for specific campaign related links.  The tool works by adding parameters to a link from a page on your site that you then track using Google Analytics.  When running an advertising or social media campaign, this is incredibly handy for tracking your ROI.

I'll walk you through how I used the URL builder for this past Tuesday's Sunlight Live coverage of the State of the Union address.

Below is a screenshot of the URL builder.  In the first field, you enter the main URL you want to track. In this case, I'm watching http://sunlightlive.com. The next few fields determine the "Campaign Source" or the traffic referrer you'd like to watch, the "Campaign Medium," the way in which the traffic referrer is driving to your site, and the "Campaign Name." For Sunlight Live, the source was Facebook, the medium was through an advertisement and the name of the campaign was SOTU-2012.

After entering in this information, click the "Generate URL" button, which will add those parameters to your original link:

http://sunlightlive.com/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Ads&utm_campaign=SOTU-2012

..Which we then used to direct Facebook ad traffic to the Sunlight Live site. Check out the full entry process below:

To track every medium you use, whether it's Facebook, Reddit, Google+, Delicious or some other site, you'll need to create a unique URL for each.

Once the campaign is over, open your site profile on Google Analytics to access your link statistics.  On the left side navigation, head over to Traffic Sources, then Sources, then Campaigns:

To set the date for the life of the campaign, look in the top right corner. Google Analytics will show you the campaigns for that time period, you'll need to sort them by Source so you can differentiate the sites. Above this list click on Source then Traffic Sources then Source:

Below you'll see the statistics by Source for the Sunlight Live State of the Union campaign over the course of two days. You can see that our Facebook Ads brought in the most traffic by far. (You may also notice I wasn't consistent with my naming conventions for Source -- I need to work on that.) For reference, our Facebook drivers are the Facebook link posted above (top driver) and our fan page (second driver):

Remember, this is only traffic to our Sunlight Live page through tracked links we pushed through social media and advertising. The screenshot below captures all traffic to the page, including both links we promoted and organic links from followers of Sunlight.  The first two links are ads we ran for the campaign, though the Google ads weren't captured in the campaign view (I'm unsure of the reason for that):

While Google Analytics provides plenty of information and site data, using the URL builder makes it much simpler to track the ROI on your campaigns and on your efforts to promote them.  What are your experiences with tracking campaigns? Have any of you used the URL builder tool in the past?

 

In July, I wrote about a recently launched service called "If This Then That", IFTTT.com. This services helps you automate certain aspects of online life, like sending you emails based on Twitter interactions or posting links to your Facebook wall from your LinkedIn account.

Recently, IFTTT added a new feature called Recipes, which allows you to share your automations with everyone else. You can sort the recipes by type as well as by popularity -- how new or how 'hot' it is.

I have added ten Sunlight Foundation related recipes to IFTTT to help you automate and share Sunlight-related content and events. You can see them below:

• Sunlight Foundation news updated to your email
• Get Sunlight Foundation news added as a link to your Facebook wall
• Get Sunlight Foundation news shared to your LinkedIn wall
• Send an IM when there is now Sunlight Foundation news
• New Sunlight Scribd documents will send to your email account
• New Sunlight Foundation Tumblr posts update to your Facebook wall
• Get Political Party Time events added to your Google Calendar
• Get Sunlight Foundation blogposts on Readability
• Get Sunlight Foundation Reporting news on Readability
• Retweet anything from the Sunlight Foundation Twitter account

I don't want to inundate you with Sunlight recipes, so I'll stop at 10. Let me know how these work for you and if you have other ideas for recipes I could create. If you have your own you would like to share, please the recipe with a link in the comments.

Mobile access to Sunlight content -- across our main site and many of our projects -- has grown exponentially year-on-year since 2006. It's safe to assume we'll see this growth trend continue as smart phones, iPads and tablets continue to proliferate.

That being said, I've been a fan of how the Flipboard app for the iPad (and now the iPhone) has made social media and other forms of news accessible and easily digestible. I've gone as far as to contact Flipboard with the thought of creating a Sunlight channel to access an emerging mobile audience, ultimately to no avail. At the moment users are only able to access their own social media feeds and pre-selected partner feeds, with self-service coming in the Spring.

Luckily for Sunlight, Google launched a product called Currents, which allows content creators to publish their own content to mobile devices in a user friendly magazine-style layout, very similar to how Flipboard displays media. This self-serve platform gives Sunlight an accessible mobile venue for content promotion and user engagement.

As the video above shows, Google Currents, which launched yesterday with over a dozen featured media partners, makes it simple to set up your own mobile channel. The process is as easy as adding a few RSS feeds and customizing a handful of options (which are only accessible through Google Chrome for the time being) before publishing.

In another post I'll walk you through setting up your own channel, but in the meantime you can check out The Daily Sunlight here. You'll need to install the Google Currents app on your mobile device, but once you do, you'll be ready to go.

It's been a while since I've posted a round-up of the latest Tools for Transparency posts. Take a look at the posts you may have missed over the past few months:

Google+ Pages - November 10th, 2011

Fundraising with Square - November 3rd, 2011

Chat With Your Audience on Google Hangouts - October 21st, 2011

Use Topsy to Track Your Content - October 14th, 2011

Use A Cell Phone to Collect Campaign Signatures - October 6th, 2011

Finding Uses for SoundCloud - September 29th, 2011

Monitor Your Site with Chartbeat - September 23rd, 2011

Managing Contacts with Rapportive - September 15th, 2011

Digest Content in Minutes with Topicmarks - August 18th, 2011

Track the People Tracking You with Ghostery - August 11th, 2011

As I continue writing about Tools for Transparency, do you have any thoughts on topics I should write about?

Though Google+ launched this past June, they only just this week launched Google+ Pages for groups, nonprofits and businesses. You can find out a bit more below:

Google+ Pages is similar in functionality to what's already available to individual users, with features like circles, sharing links, status updates and posting photos and videos.  At the moment, the service is limited to one admin per page.

We were quick to set up a Sunlight page when the service opened up this week and I've had fun posting even in its current limited capacity.  At the moment I don't foresee our usage of Facebook Fan Pages diminishing, but rather Google+ Pages complementing our overall social media presence.

To see some example pages, take a look at these partners that were  available at launch:

Anderson Cooper 360 Good Morning America Save the Children Special Report with Bret Baier

Are you interested in creating your own page?

It's a fairly straight forward process; you'll need a personal Google+ account and then click through here.  Select the category of page you want to create, whether for a group, a business, a nonprofit or for something else.

Once you've selected the category, Google will ask you for some basic information related to your page, like the name, a related web site url, the page administrator and other info depending on the page type.  When you finish, your page is created and you can begin posting text, photos, videos, links or your location.

To access your page again, you'll need to go to your personal Google+ home screen and click on the drop-down next to your name:

You can also add Google+ Page buttons and badges to your website by going here.

How does Google+ Pages compare to Facebook Fan Pages? Do you find the interface easy to use? Any tips or tricks you've learned this week?

 

Google Hangouts is an excellent free tool that lets you video chat anyone with an internet connection and a web cam.  You can connect with up to 12 different people to video chat, IM or watch YouTube videos together.

Two Hangout features I think are incredibly useful are the ability to make conversations public and to add various types of content to the conversation via Google Docs and screen sharing. This way, you can work on ideas collaboratively and review documents in sync with another person no matter where you are. You could even potentially run your own version of Sunlight Live.

So how would you do this?

When you start a Hangout, you can add additional content to your conversation by clicking Hangouts with extras:

Google will take you to the extras page where you can name your Hangout, see its URL and choose to add specific guests or make your conversation public. If you choose to make your Hangout public, you can still invite up to 11 individuals of your own choosing:

Once your Hangout has started, you can collaboratively edit documents...

Open documents and presentations from your Google Docs account...

Screen share other open applications or screens...

And chat with other participants...

You can see the potential for interacting, collaborating and communicating with small groups and large audiences. All you'd need to make your own Sunlight Live, for example, is a video stream. You could feed that into a Google Hangout, add prepared content and host a few people to answer questions and add facts and commentary.

What do you think? Have you used Google Hangouts? Do you have any ideas or tips on ways to use it?

Topsy is a real-time search engine that pulls links from Twitter and Google+ to help you gauge popular content and trending topics.

A quick search for tweets over the past 24 hours from the Sunlight Foundation reveals related posts and direct links to our content, as well as sites that mention Sunlight by name. Digging a little deeper, we see how related content is faring through the number of tweets, the influence of a link and its momentum, velocity and peak.

This Washington Examiner piece, which mentions a post by Sunlight's Bill Allison,  has garnered 60 tweets and, as you can tell in the screenshot of Topsy analytics below, appears to be picking up momentum.

Topsy also allows you to sort by time frame, content type, language, date and relevance. Although you can filter through Twitter or Google+, you can't do both simultaneously. The advanced search gives you a few more options -- like search by referencing site -- which I find to be highly useful. (To get a good sense of this feature, click to take a look at the results for Sunlight posts related specifically to Huffington Post.) Another useful feature of Topsy is the alert tool: You can subscribe to keyword alerts by email and RSS feed, which will help you stay on top of trending content.

Other uses?

• Monitor the popularity of a specific keyword over the past so many days.
• Track popular images and videos related to your terms of interest.
• Determine authoritative sources related to a hashtag or keyword.
• Push the conversation forward by sharing your search results.

What do you find useful about Topsy? Do you have any tips you can share?