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/

Over a year ago we got the idea to internally send social media alerts for important Sunlight news and project launches. These email alerts consist of a collection of links to sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn that help our staff promote important news with just a couple clicks of the mouse.

It's quite simple: depending on the service, the link will populate a message that Sunlighter can share making it easy to post important information quickly.

Here's what those links might look like if I wanted to promote this blog post:

• Share on Twitter
• Post to Facebook
• Share on LinkedIn
• Like on StumbleUpon
• Bookmark on Delicious

The url is populate with the required parameters and a link to the actual post, take a look:

• Share on Twitter - https://twitter.com/intent
  /tweet?text=RT+%40sunfoundation+Tools+for+Transparency%3A
  +Social+Media+Alerts+https%3A%2F%2Fbitly.com%2FpLPJQh+%23gov20+%23opengov
• Post to Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fsunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/07/14/tools-for-transparency-social-media-alerts
• Share on LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=http%3A//sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/07/14/tools-for-transparency-social-media-alerts
• Like on StumbleUpon - http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/8AKY4R/sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/07/14/tools-for-transparency-social-media-alerts
• Bookmark on Delicious - http://delicious.com/save?url=http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/07/14/tools-for-transparency-social-media-alerts

This is by no means a comprehensive list of social media services and we often add other services, like Reddit or YouTube, while removing others. While participation is opt-in, it still helps us effectively promote Sunlight events.  What do you think? Do you have any ideas or tweaks we might use?

Since I started the Tools for Transparency post back in July, I've written about quite a few social media resources we could all use to help move open government and transparency forward. I've decided to round-up those 12 posts, starting with my first from July 15th, in case you may have missed them.

• Tools for Transbearency: Q&A Sites for Open Government September 29, 2010
• Tools for Transparency: 6 Ways to Crowdsource Government September 23, 2010
• Tools for Transparency: 5 Buzz Tracking Tools September 16, 2010
• Tools for Transparency: GitHub September 9, 2010
• Tools for Transparency: Google Fusion Tables September 2, 2010
• Tools for Transparency: Scribd – making documents accessible August 26, 2010
• Tools for Transparency: Live Streaming to the Web August 19, 2010
• Tools for Transparency: The Vote-to-Promote Model August 12, 2010
• Tools for Transparency: PolitiWidgets August 5, 2010
• Tools for Transparency: YouTube Direct July 29, 2010
• Tools for Transparency: The Power of Aggregation July 22, 2010
• Tools for Transparency: Arc90′s Readability July 15, 2010

As I continue writing about Tools for Transparency, what areas would you like to see me touch upon?

Online video has made quite a bit of progress since the early days of Quicktime and RealMedia, technologies so slugish it was easier to walk to Blockbuster and back before you could view a full thumbnail-sized clip. Online video changed for the better in 2005 with the launch of YouTube, leveraging Adobe Flash to quickly stream video to your desktop. Within the next few years competitors quickly began rolling out their own platforms, copying and piggybacking on much of what YouTube had developed while collectively pushing the medium forward.

Between 2005 and today, new platforms have continued to amaze;  from the likes of Google Video (which ultimately purchased YouTube) and Vimeo; peer-to-peer technology in the form of Joost; and live streaming video from Qik and Ustream. Our own Sunlight Live has done well with adding context to live streaming events like the financial reform and health care debates.

A new-ish addition to the arsenal of video technology is YouTube Direct. This tool leverages Google's App Engine and the YouTube platform to allow you or your organization, in a sense, to become the video distributor.

YouTube Direct allows you to embed the upload functionality of YouTube directly into your own site, enabling your organization to request, review, and re-broadcast user-submitted videos with ease. News organizations can ask for citizen reporting; nonprofits can call-out for support videos around social campaigns; businesses can ask users to submit promotional videos about your brand.

So who's using it and what does this mean for the transparency movement?

ABC News, NPR and Huffington Post to name just a few, but you don't have to be one of the big media outlets to use YouTube Direct.  From the smallest of websites to the largest of organizations, you have an additional tool to help move the conversation forward and shine a little light in the places that need it the most.

What do you think? Any readers already using it? I'd love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.

For more information on YouTube Direct, check out the video below.

This past fall’s national election was historic and groundbreaking in so many ways. Add the public’s unprecedented use of the Internet to that list. Thanks to a new survey by Pew, we now know more than half of the voting-age population accessed the Internet to get information and/or to get involved in the process during the year. Some 74 percent of Internet users--representing 55 percent of the entire adult population--went online in 2008 to get involved in politics or to get news and information about the presidential and congressional elections, according to a report just released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

With blogs and social networking sites coming to the fore during the election cycle, some have dubbed 2008 the YouTube election, with interested citizens increasingly sharing their views on the campaign online. I think of it as the Online Election. According to Pew’s report:

• Nearly one in five (18 percent) Internet users posted their thoughts, comments or questions about the campaign on an online forum such as a blog or social networking site.
• Fully 45 percent of Internet users went online to watch a video related to a campaign.
• One in three Internet users forwarded political content to others. Indeed, the sharing of political content (whether writing and commentary or audio and video clips) increased notably over the course of the 2008 election cycle. While young adults led the way in many political activities, seniors were highly engaged in forwarding political content to their friends and family members.
• Young voters continued to engage heavily in the political debate on social networking sites. Fully 83 percent of those age 18-24 have a social networking profile, and two-thirds of young profile owners took part in some form of political activity on these sites in 2008.

The survey also found, among the entire population (Internet users and non-users alike) the Internet equals newspapers and is twice as important as radio as a source of political information. Nearly half of Internet users accessed five or more news sites during the election cycle. And those citizens that went online for news were increasingly gravitating toward news cites that promoted a point of view.

It’s fascinating to see how the Web is increasingly becoming THE marketplace of ideas. Comparing the 2008 election cycle to the couple that preceded it reveals this in stunning fashion.

Nick Troiano at SocialGovernment.com has an interesting and important post about government transparency, the 2.0 version. Nick was reflecting from a discussion featured by the National Conference on Citizenship titled “In Transparency, We Trust?

He says “transparency 1.0” was government opening up its data for citizens to see. That age dawned in 1966 when Congress passed and President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Freedom of Information Act.  Another transparency 1.0 manifestation was when government entities started setting up Web sites. But the communication was all one way, flowing from government to the citizens. But as Nick points out, our expectations of transparency in government have changed and now include participation.” This is the essence of “transparency 2.0,” where “a window between the people and their government” no longer will suffice. We need to have the ability to reach through the window and “fiddle around.” Observation is fine, but participation is now key. Nick notes that progress has been made toward the participatory aspects of transparency 2.0. He lists congressional lawmakers communicating with their constituents via Twitter and YouTube, President Obama’s online town hall meeting and Sunlight’s PublicMarkup.org, were citizens collaborated together write and comment on sample legislation. Lisa Rosenberg, Sunlight’s government affairs consultant, participated in the NCoC discussion, and said that the goal of transparency should be to open up discussions, improve the deliberative process, and help our democracy live up to its potential.  If government conducted its business online and in real time a more thoughtful, deliberative conversation between elected officials and the public could be created. This, in turn, would result in better public policy, more careful monitoring of the public purse, and more trust in government. Nick predicts transparency 2.0 will be the backbone of a more social, and thus, responsive government. Empowered citizens working with public officials to make informed decisions are benefits that transparency 2.0 promises to deliver.

My good friend Allison Fine has an interesting post about the “power and limits of storytelling” via social media on her blog. As an example of best practices, she also embeds this cool video about telling the story of Red Riding Hood with social media:

Social media obviously us the ability to tell stories in more visual and powerful ways, allowing us to more adroitly communicate our messages. Allison lists YouTube, human rights advocates at Witness and National Public Radio as examples of folks using video effectively to tell stories. She also highlights the work of Andy Goodman, a longtime advocate (and another very good friend!) for using storytelling for causes.

Allison cautions how advocates need to be careful, however, not to let powerful stories drown out the real message they are trying to communicate. “It’s easy to listen to the loud voices because they’re, well, loud, but much harder to listen to the quieter ones who probably represent the norm of the experience with your effort.”

Here’s an exciting development! Last week, I blogged about an encouraging report by Doug Belzer at Federal Computer Week, where he wrote about how Twitter, blogs and other Web 2.0 tools are revolutionizing government business. The General Services Administration had determined that Twitter’s standard terms of service is compatible with federal use.

Two days ago, Doug has another exciting article, this time in Government Computer News, about GSA announcing that it has signed agreements with Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and blip.tv that will allow federal agencies to use new-media tools. Agencies can now begin using these tools to better communicate, network and share information via the Web.

Chris Snyder at Wired's Epicenter blog termed the move, "Web 2.0, meet dot-gov. Dot-gov, this is Web 2.0." He's right in calling it a "big step" for agencies attempting to become more transparent and interactive with citizens. "Now that the bureaucratic brush has been cleared, government agencies will be free, for example, to embed videos and create photo widgets that citizens can embed into their MySpace or Facebook pages," he writes. An example of a government agency already using Web 2.0 tools successfully is the Centers for Disease Control alerting the public about the recent peanut better product recall.

Chris quotes Andrew Rasiej, founder of Personal Democracy Forum and Sunlight's senior technology advisor, as saying it's another example of why it really matters who’s president of the United States. "Because we have the country's first tech president, the speed at which the government can catch up with the private sector and use of technology is exponential."

Each individual agency will determine their own guidelines for how their employees can use the tools. “The new agreements make it easier for the government to provide official information to citizens via their method of choice,” according to GSA’s administrator, who is in discussions with other new-media providers. They started with these four because of their popularity and large number of users.

We're excited about this development. You should be too.