I’m getting a jump on my summer reading!    Colleagues Kari Dunn Saratovsky and Derrick Feldmann have published a new book called Cause for Change:  The Why and How of Nonprofit Millennial Engagement.  The book is based on their many years of research, convening, and consulting with nonprofits on how to engage with this younger generation.     The book is a must-read and their annual conference, MCON, is a must attend – if you want the latest thinking about strategy to engage younger people in the sector – both inside and outside of your nonprofit’s walls.

The book is a great read for nonprofit leaders of all generations.  It takes us through why it is important for nonprofits to connect with Millennials based on a good synthesis of recent research and follows through with informative chapters that will help your nonprofit build a solid strategy for connecting with the connected generation in your organization’s communication’s strategy.  It also offers examples, inspiration, and best practices for developing the leadership potential of these leaders in your nonprofit’s organization.

I found the chapter about motivations and tips for encouraging Millennnials to volunteer very valuable.   It begins with a story about Team Rubicon,  a new model for  disaster relief organization and veteran-focused enterprise founded by Jake Wood shortly after the Haiti Earthquake.   Wood, like many Millennials, are trying to find meaning in their work and delaying entry into the traditional workforce.    The book gives the example of enrollment numbers in AmeriCorps which are at record numbers, but more importantly talks about how their alumni represent a paradigm shift, an opportunity to harness on-the-ground experience into a new leadership generation – either in the US or abroad.

Millennials are a new breed of doers and as a result nonprofits need to better understand how to engage them in volunteer work.    As the book points out, it goes beyond providing good volunteer opportunities to offering a relational experience between the volunteer and the organization.   The book suggests that nonprofits need to solicit feedback, provide follow up, and ask what they could do better.    While there are fantastic platforms for nonprofits to recruit volunteers, they have make the experience an engaging one for this generation in order to transform them into champions and supporters.    The book offers some advice:

• Provide experiences based on skills
• Focus on the 3 R’s  (Recruitment, Retention, and Recognition)
• Build a continuum of engagement from micro-volunteering to deep engagement of serving on a board of trustees
• Key to retaining Millennial volunteers is providing: flexible opportunities, leverage their social/personal networks, provide career building opportunities, engage for their skills
• Be open, transparent and solicit feedback
• Create an advisory group of Millennials to help guide your volunteer program

As the book points out,  Millennials want to serve and many are willing to combine service with giving – if nonprofits can incorporate these practices in their volunteer programs.     How is your nonprofit adapting its volunteer program to attract younger people to serve and as future donors?

If you want to learn more about how to work with Millennials from both inside and outside your nonprofit,  head to MCON Conference in Indianapolis in July.  More information here.

 

Posted by Denis Teplyashin, Software Engineer, Google Drive

(Cross-posted on the Google Drive Blog.)

The process of creating and accessing your stuff shouldn’t be, well...a process. Today, the Drive app for Android is getting several improvements to make creating and accessing your stuff on-the-go even easier.


To help you find the content you care about, Drive files will now be displayed in a clean, simple card-style. You can swipe between files to see large previews that let you quickly review and discover the information you’re looking for. And if you want to keep some Drive files on your Android device, you’ll now be able to “download a copy” from the actions menu inside settings.

The updated Drive for Android app also gives you to a way to keep track of important paper documents like receipts, letters, and billing statements. Simply click “Scan” from the Add New menu, snap a photo of your document, and Drive will turn the document into a PDF that’s stored for safekeeping. And because Drive can recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, a simple search will retrieve the scanned document later. No more frantic scrambling through drawers looking for a receipt or digging through your pockets to find that business card -- just scan, upload and search in Drive.


The editing experience in Google Sheets has also gotten some improvements: now you can adjust font types and sizes for a spreadsheet and tweak the cell text colors and cell alignment right from the app. Plus, the Drive app comes with Cloud Print support so you can print anything from Drive with a Cloud Ready printer -- perfect if you need to, say, print a contract right before a meeting.

Get the Google Drive app today on Google Play. 

Posted by Derek Gallimore, MD of Boutique London Lets

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Derek Gallimore, MD of Boutique London Lets, a provider of luxurious short-stay accommodation in London. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Our young company was founded just over four years ago, when I spotted a niche for offering luxury accommodation to business travellers and tourists looking to avoid costly hotels. Our customers come to London from all over the world for business and pleasure, and it’s our job to make sure their stay is as comfortable as possible.

Our key market is composed of international travellers who are spread across the world in different timezones, so I wanted to build an international team from the start. From day one, we’ve used Google Apps as our main form of contact, including Gmail, Hangouts, and a collaborative inbox. We wouldn’t be where we are today without it. We now have more than 20 staff spread across the world, from the Philippines, to London, to the US and Australia, and they are able to quickly respond to queries from their local markets, instead of waiting for the sun to rise in London.

Hangouts have allowed us to recruit and hire over video conference, rather than fly around the world to meet candidates. By interviewing candidates in this way, we can get a sense of their personality and experience, as well as save thousands of dollars on flights. We also started using Google Hangouts for staff training.

It can be difficult to create a sense of community with a globally distributed team. But with Google+, we’ve formed an internal social media network where employees can share their water cooler moments online. From wishing a member of the team happy birthday to sharing a funny online video, our employees are better connected.

The collaborative inbox feature within Google Apps has transformed our communication from frantic to efficient. When we first started, all email enquiries came into my inbox and I delegated tasks to staff. This was great for keeping track of everything, but quite hap-hazard. Collaborative inbox allows me to distribute and track responsibilities among the team. If a customer reaches out with a query about a specific property, a group of my employees can easily access the inbox, guaranteeing a response within minutes. I can also ensure quality control and consistency across our customer communications by storing template query responses, apartment specifications, and internal documents online in a shared folder that my teams can access.

Google Apps has helped me start and grow an international business in a way that simply wouldn’t have been possible for a start-up ten years ago. As testament to this, we’ve tripled revenue turnover every year for the last three years and I’m sure the platform will continue to be at the heart of our operations as we grow.

Posted by Mike Salguero, CEO and Co-Founder of CustomMade

Editor's note: Today's guest blogger is Mike Salguero, CEO and Co-Founder of CustomMade, an online platform for buying custom goods from local Makers. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

CustomMade is built on quality craftsmanship. We’re an online marketplace that matches our customers with a network of nearly 10,000 of the world’s best craftspeople - we call them Makers - to give them access to high-quality, custom-made goods. My co-founder, Seth Rosen, and I started CustomMade because we love working directly with Makers to build things that matter to people. We’ve been able to make it successful because we have tools that let us maintain the high metabolism that small companies require.

We started in 2009 as a two-person company working out of my one-bedroom apartment, and by being nimble and operating quickly, we’ve grown to 40 full-time employees working out of our headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Google Apps for Business is the agility engine that helped us get there. It’s been the backbone of our communication and collaboration, letting us focus on getting work done rather than how we get it done - a crucial distinction for a small business.

Google Apps helps us smooth out the rough edges of running a small business, like onboarding employees. Teaching new hires about the business and culture is inherently difficult, but since most of our hires use Gmail on a daily basis, we don’t have to spend as much time teaching them how to use our technology. By giving them the tools they’re already familiar with, they’re able to adapt quickly and jump right into their jobs without worrying about how to set up a meeting with Calendar or share a Doc with their teammates.

With thousands of Makers selling tens of thousands of different products, we’re a very numbers-focused company. Google Apps makes tracking goals across all of our teams incredibly simple. Our sales, concierge, and product teams all work towards weekly goals, such as site traffic and requests for custom items, which they update constantly in a shared Google Sheet. This gives me visibility into each team’s performance and metrics, and I know the data I’m looking at is always up-to-date. We also use Docs and Sheets for operational tasks, like storing creative briefs and tracking licenses, contractors, addresses and funnel conversions.

Google+ Hangouts are our secret productivity weapon. We work with 15 freelancers and consultants, including 10 in India, one in the UK and the rest across the US. Hangouts make it feel like they’re right here in the office with us. Our team hosts five to 10 Hangouts each day - they’ve become an integral part of our day-to-day routine.

Moving fast and staying nimble is essential to CustomMade’s success, and Google Apps keeps us on our toes and forging ahead. Instead of spending time worrying about IT problems or outdated Excel worksheets, we focus on connecting Makers like Marv Beloff with bow tie enthusiasts and helping bring dreams of custom wood tables to life.

Last month, during the Nonprofit Technology Conference plenary session on placing little bets and learning from failure,  we  issued a challenge to 1,000 nonprofits  in the audience.   Let’s do more than just give failure lip service,  let’s put it into practice and share learning from a failure or placing a “Little Bet.”     A ‘Little Bet” as defined by Peter Sims, author of the book – Little Bets, is a small action that you can take to discover something new.  It’s an affordable loss that leads to innovation.

Place a little bet & or share your #failure story… you could win a Surface! #13ntcbets ow.ly/k24ok

— Case Foundation (@CaseFoundation) April 13, 2013

The Case Foundation offered to give away a Microsoft Surface and so we issued a call to nonprofits to submit their “Little Bets” stories.  We received 18 fabulous stories about small fails in fundraising, project management, communications, social media, and internal planning.    But the winner was a story about stepping out an organization’s comfort zone to try to avoid repeating past mistakes.     The winner is Heartland Pride and here’s their story:

Little Bet: After years of having a local organization that planned pride in the Midwest fail numerous times, our organization was formed.  We started out with a task force that began to analyze what was working and not working in regard to the prior organization.  After many months and the realization that things were beyond repairable with the old organization we formed a new one.  We took all the necessary steps to become an official 501c3 and we made little changes to the event in the first year we hosted it.  The second year we made changes and moved our event to a large park in Omaha and in doing so we were able to save the organization more than 25K in expenses and make it possible for us to retain more of our profits allowing us to provide larger grants and scholarships to help the local LGBT community!  When we started we literally had a 5 member board that planned everything and over the past few years we have grown a volunteer base that is allowing us to continue to grow!

Learning: We learned that by not changing what was happening over  the years we were doomed to repeat the mistakes of the previous organization.  By stepping out of the comfort zone we were able to seek out new partnerships and the organization was able to increase it’s financial gains!  I for one am extremely proud of the work we have done and look forward to continued success!

It was hard to select a winner because all of the stories were terrific.  Here is a summary of the stories and what people learned from the experience:

Events

Youth Business Initiative:    Planning and implementing a big idea for an event on a small budget and for the first time, will no doubt include some mistakes and problems will arise that are beyond your control.   However, don’t be afraid to try something new, look at both the positive outcomes and reflect on how to do it better the next time around.    Don’t try to do something like this along, build a support system to help.

The Gifted Learning Project: Whenever you plan a fundraising event, double check the calendar and dates in all your external communications.

Social Media

Dr. Mani Children Heart Foundation:  To raise money using social media as part of your strategy, you need a group of champions with tight connections to your mission and voluntary opt-in email works well for this.  Loose ties or people you are connected with on social networks are good for spreading awareness and you need them as part of your campaign, but to raise dollars strong ties are essential.

Jewish Federations:     When developing a strategy for an engagement campaign, don’t be off the cuff.   Use the planning process to get internal buy in from staff.

Energy Employees Claimant Assistance Project: If asking your community to generate content, make sure they know how to use the platform and tools.

Partnerships

K02 Adventures Community Interest Company:  Patience is needed when you partner with an organization or government entity that has a different way of working than your nonprofit.

Helping Our Peers:  Asked two local government entities to apply for a grant for a program but they said no.    Got permission to apply and after the two government entities did not receive the grant,  rose above the personal politics and offered to share the funding.   Taking the high road in partnerships always works.

Working With Consultants

Dominican Sisters of Springfield, IL:  When hiring a consultant, always do your due diligence.  Check references before you hire.  Make sure the deliverable is reasonable and tie payments to deliverable items in the contract.

Internal Planning and Project Implementation

Domuskids:  Facilitating a staff meeting where participants are asked to brainstorm, something not typically done at staff meetings requires more preparation for staff to make the shift into a different mindset.   Introducing the idea and smaller ways to practice the new way of thinking can help make this exercise more productive.

JCamp 180:  If you are rolling out a big project, break it down is small chunks for easier monitoring.    If the project includes an assessment and learning process, design it so people can easily learn from one another.

Drop in the Bucket:  When developing a project for a remote area in a developing country, the less obvious things can get in the way.  Test your assumptions.

Children’s Hunger Fund:  If you are collecting feedback from participants in a program using an online platform, make sure you test the system with participants before rolling out widely.

Fundraising

Smile At Your Baby:   If you are doing a fundraising event, make sure the venue is appropriate and acceptable to your audience.  ”Free” use of a space should not be the only criteria.

The Piedmont Environmental Council: Proof your fundraising emails before you send them out.

Disability Network:   When you plan a fundraising project, make sure you have a solid team of volunteers to help you implement – and train and equipment them to support the effort.

Motley Zoo:  Don’t set an unrealistically large fundraising goal because it is too daunting.   Break it down into smaller, bit sized campaigns.

These are terrific examples of how to learn from mistakes and little bets.

 

Sunrise on Sacred Maori Land outside of Auckland, NZ

I’ve just returned from an amazing trip of facilitating workshops, discussions and master classes as well as a keynoting a conference on “Measuring the Networked Nonprofit”  in Australia and New Zealand.    It made me very happy to be teaching non-stop for almost two weeks.     I’m always learning as I help others learn.    Here’s a couple of reflections from my “trainer’s notebook.”

I started with a full-day workshop outside of Auckland called “The Networked NGO in New Zealand,” this workshop was for activist organizations and focused on strategy, measurement, and best practices for managing and implementing social media as a network.   Stephen Blyth, a nonprofit capacity builder who I met when I keynoted Connecting Up in 2008, hosted my trip to NZ and arranged for this workshop to take place on Makaurau Marae which is the land of Maori.

The workshop started with a welcoming ceremony.    We sat in the hall – two rows – the guests and the Maori.  We sang the song of welcome which is also about being networked and working together.     After finishing the song, we rubbed noses which was a traditional welcome gesture.  One thing I have learned working mostly outside of the US is to start a training by honoring a local tradition.   I couldn’t have asked for a more authentic, culturally appropriate start to a workshop.    The spiritual nature of the welcoming ceremony set the tone for a day of reflective practice for participants.

Effective learning that creates results and transfers to action over time starts with unleashing people’s existing knowledge – they need to pull forward pre-existing information.  Too many times I have observed trainers simply launching into the new content without honoring what participants already know.   You also need to challenge participants thought processes and stimulate curiosity  about what you are teaching.    This includes meeting and greeting people, setting up the room for interaction, getting people to move around, to be actively involved with the content, and appreciating learners.

New Zealand Workshop: Burning Questions

Connecting Up Master Class

One technique I use is the “Burning Question” board.   I used it for my master class at Connecting Up in Australia as I have used it for almost every training I’ve done over the past twenty years.    Here’s how it works.   When learners enter the room,  I ask them to reflect on their “burning question”  or why did they want to take this workshop.  What question do they want to answer by the end of the day?  Not only does this give learners a chance to think about questions they have, but also helps me figure out how how well agenda matches expectations and manage them throughout the day.  I’ve used the burning question technique in many different ways over the years, this is an example of one way to do it.

Circle and Workspace in New Zealand

New Zealand: Tables for Small Group Exercises

The room layout and physical space is very important to setting the right mood for energized learning.  I have written about this in great detail here.  I had my ideal set ups in Australia and New Zealand – rooms with circle seating or round tables and space in the room to move around or work on interactive exercises such as creating your organization’s networking map.

Space to Move Around

In the orientation or beginning of the workshop, it is also important to get people moving around and talking to one another – and to honor what they already know. This is something you do at the beginning but throughout your content delivery. Effective training is not about stuffing content down people’s throats, but giving them an opportunity to digest it. One technique that I have been using over the past twenty years is share pairs — having people talk with another participant and puzzle about how they might apply the content to their situation.    It is also great to see colleagues, like John Kenyon, apply these techniques to their own practice.

Pass the Ugly Doll in New Zealand

Having a formal closing to your training helps extend the learning to action.   Learners, despite their best intentions, might find it difficult to apply what they’ve learned right away.    That’s why I always do a reflective exercise at the end with the question, “What one thing can you put into practice next week?”   I also give everyone a chance to say a few words at the end of the training and pass the “ugly doll.”  The green ugly doll has accompanied me around the world and has been in the hands of many people who work for NGOs and social change.  So, there is a spiritual ending and a commitment to applying what has been learned as well as communal ending.  The ugly doll got passed in New Zealand and in Australia.

Pass the Ugly Doll in Australia

For this workshop,  John Kenyon and I were teaching simultaneous workshops.    We thought it would be a great opportunity for the participants in both of our workshops to share what they learned.  So, we did a double closers.  I suggested that we used my “Hello My Name” share pair that I have been doing for the past five years and adapt it as a closer.

My Name Is What I Learned

We asked participants to create a name tag comprised of key words of what they learned.   My workshop participants used the red tags and John’s used the blue tags.  Then we facilitated a series of small groups so they could cross pollinate.    Finally, since we were on the Gold Coast on the beach,  I suggested that we do a walking debrief on the beach, although we adapted it to the beach promenade.   This is an exercise I used in Tunisia.  Getting fresh air and walking helps people digest.

Walking Debrief on the Beach Promenade - My Favorite Closer

Walking Debrief

Line up #surfers #13cu #netnon (note tourists joined in) Made with @vineapp vine.co/v/bEZXiLl7HEU

— Paul Rees (@paul3141) May 15, 2013

We made quite the spectacle stopping traffic and at one point a tourist took a photograph of us posing for a photograph.

Meeting with Funders in New Zealand

And, for every social media workshop, I like to close by taking a photo of the participants such as the session I did with funders in New Zealand where we discussed social media capacity building and peer learning design.

@kanter great master class today. Most useful handouts and activities ever! #13CU #netnon

— Christiana Stergiou (@scribblybark) May 15, 2013

The formula for a great training session includes:

• Energizing learners to be curious
• Great content and learning design
• Closing exercises that inspire learns to apply what they learned

 

Posted by Cristiano Barbieri, CIO of SulAmérica Seguros

Editor's note: Our guest blogger today is Cristiano Barbieri, CIO of SulAmérica Seguros. Founded in 1895, SulAmérica is the largest independent insurance company in Brazil with more than 5,000 employees and over 30,000 brokers throughout the country. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

We've been in the insurance industry for more than 100 years and have continued to grow because we value high quality customer service, creating opportunities for our employees and preserving our company traditions. In today's fast-paced world, we realize that in order to continue to focus on our mission, and better serve our 6.7 million customers across Brazil, agility and innovation are key. With that in mind, we have decided to implement three of the solutions that Google Enterprise provides.

Google Apps for Business was one of our biggest steps towards technology innovation. Before, I had three people dedicated solely to managing our email on LotusNotes, which required constant maintenance because of limited capacity. Google Apps offers over 100x more storage capacity, 3x better service level availability, and is the only solution in the market that is entirely cloud-based. Since adopting Google Apps with the help of Google Apps reseller IpNet, we smoothly moved 7,000 accounts in less than 6 months and reduced our infrastructure by over 60 percent. Our goal? To have no hardware, saving more than $3 million in technical and operating costs.



The most noticeable shift that I encounter every day is how Google Apps makes collaboration easy company-wide. For example, we use Google Sites to manage mergers and acquisitions to ensure there is a historical record of the project, all of the documents are in one place, and the different teams that need help with the project (finance, legal, marketing, etc.) can all be on the same page. The end goal: no matter the division, team or location, our employees can access and edit the records in real-time.

Communication has also improved tenfold because of universal access to features like a more collaborative inbox on Gmail, Google Talk and Google+ Hangouts. Specifically, we expanded our face-to-face communication while saving money and travel time. We used to only have access to video-conference equipment in 10 conference rooms, but now our employees can chat at all times of the day with Hangouts. They can work together from anywhere: from their phones, tablets and laptops, at their desks or on the go. Mobility is key and also allows our employees to have direct contact with customers without traveling thousands of miles.

Watching the successful rollout and adoption of Google Apps motivated us to use more of Google's Enterprise products. Within a few months, we also adopted Google App Engine and integrated Google Maps. Using these tools, we built a medical reference network that uses the power of Google search so our customers can look for a doctor, hospital or laboratory. The result provides a list with names, specialities and addresses, and the accompanying map provides geolocalized results. We couldn’t do this before because it was slow, complicated and costly. With Google App Engine we were able to build this directory on the web just as easily as we did for mobile, so our customers can access the network anytime, anywhere through an intuitive, familiar interface. Now, we receive more than 500,000 searches per month, which is direct contact with our customers that we didn’t have before. We're impressed by the momentum and scalability.

By implementing Google Enterprise solutions that save time, money and are extremely scalable, we can offer easy-to-use, innovative solutions to improve our core business. Our employees work better together and we provide new avenues for contact directly with our customers. At SulAmérica, we aren’t focused solely on selling insurance. We believe that by going Google we are able to focus on what's most important: making our customers' and employees’ lives easier and safer.

Posted by Amit Singh, President, Google Enterprise

Yesterday, we kicked off the 6th annual Google I/O developer conference, with over 6,000 people attending live in San Francisco and millions more around the world tuning in to the livestream. The conference this year focused on a growing trend that affects our lives at home, at work and at school: the move towards a multi-screen world. In this world, tablets and mobile phones are quickly becoming as commonplace—and as useful—as desktop and laptop computers.

As you shift between devices, your experience should be seamless. And the same tools you use in your personal life should be available in the workplace, so you can work the way you live. To that end, here are some highlights from this week that are particularly relevant to our business, government and education customers—including tools for developers, features to simplify your life, and new ways to connect and collaborate with others.

Tools for developers:

• Google Cloud Platform: We announced that Google Compute Engine—which provides a fast, consistently high-performance environment for running virtual machines—is now available to anyone by visiting cloud.google.com. We also introduced Google Cloud Datastore, added the PHP runtime to Google App Engine, and added sub-hour billing charges so you don’t pay for compute minutes that you don’t use. 
• Admin SDK: The new Admin SDK lets developers build customized administrative tools for organizations that use Google Apps. The SDK consolidates many of the existing domain APIs into a new uniform structure and introduces new functionality with the Directory API and Reports API. 
• Google+ API for businesses: The new Google+ API for businesses is now available as a pilot for developers who want to build apps that handle tasks like auto-provisioning Circles and reading or writing posts.

Simplify your life:

• Gmail: New quick action buttons in Gmail are designed to help you get things done faster and take action on an email without ever having to open it -- like opening a Google document that’s been shared with you or responding to a calendar invitation. And we’re beginning to roll out a new integration between Google Wallet and Gmail, so you can quickly and securely send money to friends and colleagues directly within Gmail—even if they don’t have a Gmail address. 
• Unified storage: Google Apps customers will now have 30 GB of unified storage to use between Drive, Gmail, and Google+ photos. Just as before, files created in Docs, Sheets and Slides don't count against your storage quota. As a result of this change, Gmail inboxes for Google Apps customers are no longer limited to 25 GB -- any additional storage you purchase can be shared and used by Gmail. 
• Nexus tablets and Google Play for Education: There are now 25 million students, faculty and staff around the world using Google Apps for Education. Later this year, Google will expand its education offering beyond Chromebooks and Apps to include Nexus tablets and Google Play for Education. Schools will be able to efficiently manage tablets and discover, purchase and distribute content and applications with ease. Schools who want to receive information about the program when it launches later this year should complete the interest form available at google.com/edu/android.

Connect and collaborate with others:

• Google+: The new look and feel for Google+ brings a modern design to the stream and makes it easier than ever for you to connect with colleagues and quickly learn more about topics or posts that interest you. The new Google+ also looks and feels the same across all your devices.
• Hangouts: Apps customers now have the option to replace chat in Gmail and Talk on Android with a new version of Hangouts that combines text, photos and live video calls across desktops, laptops, as well as Android and iOS phones and tablets. The new Hangouts is designed to help bring all of your real-life conversations online, across any device or platform. Just as before, Apps customers can invite up to 15 colleagues to a video call.

Hangouts brings video calls and messaging across all you devices
Work doesn’t always need to feel like work. Technology should make your life easier, so you can get work done more efficiently and focus on what really matters: building your business, teaching your students, or serving your constituents.

Google I/O continues through the end of tomorrow. Tune in to live sessions at google.com/io.

Posted by Jean-Martin Thibault, Senior Enterprise Architect at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Editor's note: Our guest blogger this week is Jean-Martin Thibault, Senior Enterprise Architect at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada’s oldest broadcasting network and national broadcaster, known commonly as CBC and officially as CBC/Radio-Canada. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.



Deeply rooted in the regions, CBC/Radio-Canada is the only domestic broadcaster to offer diverse regional and cultural perspectives in English, French and eight Aboriginal languages. As Canada’s national broadcaster, we bring Canadians programming when, where and how they want it ― through a comprehensive range of radio, television, Internet, satellite-based services and mobile devices. Our team is stationed all over the world, which means real-time communication is key for up-to-date, consistent reporting.

Achieving this at such a large scale isn't always easy. For more than 10 years, we had been using an on-premise, corporate-wide system for email/calendar. We also had a separate system for collaboration, but neither solution was integrated and drove true inter-office collaboration.

With a company-wide goal to reduce infrastructure and a need for better messaging and collaboration, we decided to look at public cloud solutions, especially Google Apps. It was clear that Google Apps was the right solution for us based on cost, proven service level and availability guarantee and the breadth of tools the platform offered for collaboration. We also had great support from the media groups in our company (about 70% of our employees), as many of them had been using personal Google accounts to communicate already with external users. Once we decided to “go Google” we were able to complete a smooth 90-day deployment with the help of Google Apps reseller, Onix, by March 1, 2013.

Since we went live, adoption of the whole platform has well exceeded our expectations of email and calendaring. Google+ Hangouts has revolutionized the way that our employees interact with each other. Long conference calls are now becoming a thing of the past. We can now jump on a Hangout and have a face-to-face meeting with colleagues across the country via our smartphones, from home or the office, without getting on a plane. It’s cost-effective and more efficient without compromising our core business.

Additionally, Google Docs are helping our reporters become better and more efficient storytellers. For example, before, our writers and reporters in our newsroom brainstormed and drafted copy in separate Word documents, which inevitably led to version confusion and unnecessary time spent merging documents. Now, they use a single, shared Google Doc for all their stories, so the entire team can collaborate together, in real time, regardless of where they’re working. Our freelancers use Docs to make quick edits and communicate on the fly since it's simpler for them to share content and edit in real-time.

We are proud to bring the best tools to our company and see the cultural shift that is happening amongst our employees. We are moving away from managing IT and into improving our core business of content creation. We’re excited about what this means for the quality of our reporting and the happiness of our employees.

Update [May 15]: A slight edit was made to this post.

Posted by David Mihalchik, Google Apps for Government Team

Last month, the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA) successfully completed the migration of all 4,500 Archives employees to Google Apps for Government. The National Archives is the country’s record keeper, preserving and providing public access to hundreds of years of historical documents and terabytes of modern media. Last year, NARA decided to move to cloud-based email and put out an open RFP asking for the best solutions to update its email and collaboration tools. The agency received many bids proposing a range of different solutions and late last year announced its selection of Google Apps with Unisys, a Google Apps Authorized Reseller, as the implementation partner.

The Archives chose an aggressive timeline, getting the new collaboration tools to its employees in just a few short months, one of the fastest transitions that we’ve seen. In keeping with best practices, the migration proceeded in three phases: an IT pilot, the early adopters, and the global go live.

By replacing an aging, on-site email system with Google’s modern tools, NARA employees are already discovering the benefits of Google Apps. For an agency that understands the importance of storing documents, the addition of approximately 22 terabytes of Google Drive storage allows employees to access and share their documents with ease.

I’ve spent more than a dozen years helping government adopt new technology, and never have I seen an entire agency migrate to a new tool so quickly and with such enthusiasm. We’re proud to bring Archives employees more modern, reliable tools to help them do their important work of preserving our nation’s history.

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Director of Product Management, Chrome for Business and Education

Just as Google Docs has changed the way we create documents, other business web apps are also changing the way we work -- by offering access to tools, people, and data from anywhere, on any device. In fact, today’s information workers use an average of 9.6 web applications to do their jobs.

But business users are discerning about their apps. And enterprise solution providers like SAP are meeting users’ demand for intuitive design and cross-device accessibility by developing web apps on the latest HTML5 web technologies. At the Sapphire conference this week, SAP launched SAP Fiori: a new suite of productivity web apps built for the modern web.

SAP Fiori apps are optimized for Chrome. Now, the tens of millions of SAP customers who perform common tasks to manage customer relationships, human resources or finance, can get the best user experience with Chrome. Sam Yen, SAP’s global head of design and user experience, explains, “SAP Fiori can be used on mobile devices and desktops using browsers that support HTML5. As a secure and cross-platform modern browser that’s always up to date with the latest web technologies, Chrome allows SAP Fiori apps to shine on any device.”

The web has become a universal platform for powerful business applications, from enterprise solutions like SAP to a company’s internal apps. Chrome provides the security, speed and control that enable IT to deploy and manage these apps for employees. To learn more, visit Chrome for Business.

Posted by Urs Holzle, Senior Vice President

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Platform Blog and Google Developers Blog)

Watch the live stream of the Cloud track kickoff now

Over the last fourteen years we have been developing some of the best infrastructure in the world to power Google’s global-scale services. With Google Cloud Platform, our goal is to open that infrastructure and make it available to any business or developer anywhere. Today, we are introducing improvements to the platform and making Google Compute Engine available for anyone to use.

Google Compute Engine - now available for everyone

Google Compute Engine provides a fast, consistently high-performance environment for running virtual machines. Later today, you’ll be able to go online to cloud.google.com and start using Compute Engine.

In addition, we’re introducing new Compute Engine features:

• Sub-hour billing charges for instances in one-minute increments with a ten-minute minimum, so you don’t pay for compute minutes that you don’t use 
• Shared-core instances provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads 
• Advanced Routing features help you create gateways and VPN servers that enable you to build applications spanning your local network and Google’s cloud 
• Large persistent disks support up to 10 terabytes per volume, which translates to 10X the industry standard

We’ve also completed ISO 27001:2005 international security certification for Compute Engine, Google App Engine, and Google Cloud Storage.

Google App Engine adds the PHP runtime

App Engine 1.8.0 is now available and includes a Limited Preview of the PHP runtime - your top requested feature. We’re bringing one of the most popular web programming languages to App Engine so that you can run open source apps like Wordpress. It also offers deep integration with other parts of Cloud Platform including Google Cloud SQL and Cloud Storage.

We’ve also heard that we need to make building modularized applications on App Engine easier. We are introducing the ability to partition apps into components with separate scaling, deployments, versioning and performance settings.

Introducing Google Cloud Datastore

Google Cloud Datastore is a fully managed and schemaless solution for storing non-relational data. Based on the popular App Engine High Replication Datastore, Cloud Datastore is a standalone service that features automatic scalability and high availability while still providing powerful capabilities such as ACID transactions, SQL-like queries, indexes and more.

Over the last year we have continued our focus on feature enhancement and developer experience across App Engine, Compute Engine, Google BigQuery, Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL. We also introduced Google Cloud Endpoints and Google Cloud Console.

With these improvements, we have seen increased usage with over 3 million applications and over 300,000 unique developers using Cloud Platform in a given month. Our developers inspire us everyday, and we can’t wait to see what you build next.

Posted by Dean Peck, Senior Business Solutions Analyst and Project Manager, Allianz Global Assistance

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Dean Peck, Senior Business Solutions Analyst and Project Manager, for Allianz Global Assistance in Australia and New Zealand. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At Allianz Global Assistance, we have a simple and often rewarding task: we’re here to help people, anytime, anywhere. With over one million members in Australia and New Zealand, every year we help roughly 120,000 people stranded during car breakdowns and connect those in need with a complex network of service providers — from locksmiths to emergency medical personnel.

To make this happen, we rely on minute-to-minute mapping data to pinpoint our customers’ location and then find, dispatch and track service providers. We have thousands of service providers, and we store the information about them in our incident call centre system called ‘MIDAS’. Until recently, our mapping software was also embedded within MIDAS but it lacked some vital functionality.

We set out to look for a contemporary, cost-effective alternative that would integrate with MIDAS. After considering a range of options, we chose the Google Maps API because of its familiarity, reliability, accuracy, ongoing innovation and relationships with other data providers.


We use the Google Maps API to pinpoint the whereabouts of customer and service provider vehicles when they share their location with us. The Google Maps API is also used to overlay the incident address from MIDAS. Using different layer shadings, service assistants can quickly see which providers offer the needed services within the right coverage area. They can accurately calculate travel time and distance to the incident and overlay traffic information to warn service providers en route if they are about to encounter a slowdown.

The integration of Street View with Google Maps helps us deliver better customer service too. When our assistants are on the phone with stranded customers, they’re able to see exactly where the client is located and provide them with reassuring feedback.

Google Maps API is making a positive difference to agents, the business overall, and most importantly to customer satisfaction. The fluid, simple functionality, familiarity, visual nature, easy pan and zoom, and accuracy of Google Maps allows our agents to serve customers better. And these improvements have made us all realise that we can genuinely make a difference in our customers lives.

Note from Beth: I’ve just finished doing some social media workshops in New Zealand with Volunteering Auckland and now in Australia.  Next month,  I will be traveling to Washington, DC for the NCVS Conference and can’t wait.  I will be doing  a panel on using social media as part of volunteer recruitment.   While I’m still “down under,”  Michelle Nunn agreed to share this guest post about conference highlight

 

Get the Scoop at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service in Washington, DC #NCVS guest post by Michelle Nunn

I’m eager to let readers of Beth’s Blog in on the best, old-fashioned way to be a networked employee at a networked nonprofit dedicated to social change: Come to Points of Light’s annual Conference on Volunteering and Service in Washington, D.C. next month.

From June 19-22, more than 5,000 people from around the nation and the world will gather to discuss best practices in engaging volunteers and new ways people can power solutions to some of our most pressing social challenges.

If you come, you’ll find out:

• Why I think this is the best time in history to be working for social change.
• Why Wharton professor and bestselling author Adam Grant thinks serving others is the key to individual success.
• What Republican strategist Karl Rove and Democratic strategist David Plouffe have in common.
• Why Frans Johansson subtitled his bestselling book, “What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation.”
• What New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has to say about ways volunteers can drive recovery after a natural disaster.
• What Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry have in common.
• What Beth Kanter has to say about using social networks to advance the cause of volunteerism.
• What entrepreneurs and those who create business models can teach the rest of us about engaging volunteers.
• Who will sing for his supper at a huge gathering on education reform.
• How you can help clean up the national mall, feed the hungry in D.C. and get your members of Congress engaged in service.
• How you can help Chase, our conference title sponsor, decide how to invest more in the nonprofit sector.
• How to meet tons of great people, engage in great conversations and learning, and have a great time in our nation’s capital.

There will be 13 Conference Tracks to engage any imagination. They include: Nonprofit Capacity Building, Service Innovation, Business, Economic Opportunity, Emergency Preparedness and Response, Excellence in Education, Faith, Global, Leadership, National Service, Veterans and Military Families, Volunteer Management and Youth Service and Leadership.

I hope you’ll make a plan today to join us for Points of Light’s Conference on Volunteering and Service in Washington, D.C. Together, we can network our way to a better future.

Find out more and register here: www.volunteeringandservice.org.

Michelle Nunn is the CEO of Points of Light, the largest organization in the world dedicated to volunteer service, and author of Be the Change

Note from Beth: Greetings from the Gold Coast in Australia.  I’m here to keynote Connecting Up Conference,  While I am in OZ,  I invited Jon Stahl to share this amazing case study.   Enjoy

For several years now, nonprofits have been investing time, energy and money building Facebook pages and working to engage supporters on Facebook. Unfortunately, as Beth has pointed out , Facebook doesn’t always make it easy to generate meaningful and measurable results that drive your mission or your bottom line.

About a year ago, Facebook began rolling out a series of important changes, most notably the launch of Facebook Open Graph, designed to empower app developers (like us here at ActionSprout) to create tools to help brands and organizations get more out of Facebook.

Over the past year, large corporate brands have embraced Facebook apps from companies like Wildfire (purchased by Google), Buddy Media, (now part of Salesforce) and WooBox, for things like coupons, sweepstakes, and contests. Others have spent tens of thousands of dollars to build custom Facebook apps from scratch. These apps help organizations take advantage of Facebook’s new functionality in order to generate more meaningful and measurable fan engagement.

These are powerful tools. But even nonprofits that can afford them find that they don’t address our sector’s unique needs to engage people in advocacy, organizing and fundraising. That’s where ActionSprout comes in.

In this blog post, I’ll show off a simple campaign that generated some great, measurable results for Best Friends Animal Society. Best Friends is a nonprofit organization that is working to bring about an end to pet homelessness and the shelter killing of nearly 4 million animals a year. The Society has a large and vibrant online community, including a Facebook page with more than 300,000 fans, and many of their posts get thousands of likes and hundreds of clicks and shares. (And yes, many of their posts feature cute dogs

But, like many organizations, Best Friends Animal Society has struggled to find a seamless, consistent and budget-friendly way to convert those fans into email list subscribers, donors and action-takers. Changes to Facebook’s EdgeRank formula have only added an extra layer of complexity. With a goal of converting thousands of “likers” into leads, Best Friends turned to ActionSprout to help make that goal a reality.

Red’s Get Well Card

Best Friends’ first ActionSprout campaign was designed to engage Facebook users in supporting a long time friend of the organization who had recently learned that her adopted paraplegic dog, Red, had been diagnosed with cancer. Best Friends created a “Get Well” card for Red, and invited Facebook fans (and their friends) to sign it and add their best wishes forRed’s speedy recovery. The resulting call to action was a richer, more engaging and measurable online action than the typical like, share or comment.

Promote It With A Wall Post

Best Friends promoted Red’s Get Well Card with a single Facebook wall post.

Cute dog photo: check. Emotionally compelling, urgent call to action: check. But instead of sending people away from Facebook, when people click on the link in the post, they are taken to the campaign located on the ActionSprout app on Best Friends’ Facebook page.

Users click “Sign” to sign the card. If they have never taken action through ActionSprout before, they get a standard Facebook App permissions dialog. This dialog gives us permission to read (and share with Best Friends) basic contact information (name, email) from their Facebook profile and to use Facebook Open Graph to share their online actions. After users sign the card, they can also leave Facebook comments on the card itself, generating additional engagement–and more shareable Facebook activity!

ActionSprout includes more than 30 different actions you can choose from, each of which can have many different kinds of objects, giving you a broad creative canvas to play with when designing your own campaigns. Once Best Friends had their content written for the post, it took them about 5 minutes to configure and launch this campaign.
Measurable, Meaningful Results
Best Friends launched Red’s Get Well Card with a single Facebook wall post, let it run organically for about 48 hours, then promoted it with $300 worth of Facebook “promoted post” advertising. All told, the post was seen by about 65,000 people.

 

1265 people signed Red’s Get Well Card, or about 2% of the people who saw the initial wall post. The biggest surprise of this campaign was that of the 1265 signers, only 216 were already fans of Best Friends’ Facebook page, and only 142 were already in Best Friends’ email file, so Best Friends was able to generate more than 1100 new supporters with this single campaign.

 

These 1100+ new supporters came on board because they saw their friends interacting with the campaign in a number of ways, including:

 

1. 4481 people “liked” the original wall post promoting the campaign.
2. The campaign received a total of 1377 comments, including both comments on the wall post and comments on the Get Well Card itself.
3. Supporters shared Red’s Get Well Card 2082 times. This includes both shares of the wall post, the campaign itself, as well as automatic shares generated through Facebook Open Graph by users taking the ActionSprout action.

Red’s Get Well card was one of Best Friends’ most popular and most engaging posts in February 2013. But even more impressive is the fact that unlike their other posts, the team can measure its success by:

1. Number of new supporters (with names and email addresses) acquired – over 89% of the supporters who signed Red’s Get Well Card were new to Best Friends’ file.
2. Number of fans whose contact information was acquired.
3. All of the standard Facebook content engagement metrics such as likes, shares and comments.

Happy Endings for All

Red’s Get Well Card is a simple example of what the next generation of Facebook engagement and organizing looks like: creative, meaningful social actions that users can take without leaving Facebook. More importantly, they include permission-driven capturing of contact information and integrated peer-to-peer sharing so organizations can begin to move their relationships beyond the walls of Facebook.

Campaigns like this can open up important new rungs on your Facebook Ladder of Engagement.

Oh, and our story has a happy ending for Red as well. On February 14, nine days after the card went live, Best Friends’ Melissa Lipani wrote:

“We’ve got terrific news to share! We received a call this morning from Diane, Red’s dedicated mom. She was happy to report that the veterinarian caring for Red let her know that surgery to remove the cancer was successful, and they were able to get ‘clear margins.’ Diane shared how touched she was to read all of the sentiments posted here and on Red’s card. She feels they are a big part of Red’s recovery! She let us know that Red is doing very well, and sending virtual kisses to all of his friends. A big thanks to all of you! -melissa l.”

Jon Stahl is Director of Strategy at ActionSprout, where he helps organizations engage, organize and fundraise on Facebook.

Posted by Joshua Lowcock, Head of Commercial Platforms and Products for News Limited

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Australia Blog)

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Joshua Lowcock, Head of Commercial Platforms and Products for News Limited, an Australian media company. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

News Limited is one of Australia’s largest media companies, spanning newspapers, magazines, online, and subscription TV. We publish over 140 online and printed newspapers in major Australian cities including Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Perth, as well as in suburban areas.

Classified advertising is a key revenue stream across all our markets, but traditionally booking and billing classifieds had been a manual and time-consuming process. We wanted to implement a solution that would allow customers to serve themselves by placing ads online.

Google App Engine has enabled customers to do just that. We chose Google App Engine as the application because it is easy to build, easy to maintain and simple to scale as the user base and data storage grows. Functionalities within the Google App Engine environment, such as Google BigQuery, have also been useful. We can do an in-depth analysis of our ads and item pricing, as well as provide an internal reporting tool, all using BigQuery.

The end result is a self-service, production booking and billing system - www.traderoo.com.au - which we have developed on Google App Engine. It’s proving to be a real winner for both our business and our customers. It’s fundamentally changed the way customers engage with our company, creating a more usable experience and superb responsiveness. It’s easy to use, and gives more control over ad content, as well as the ability to publish ads online immediately. Online ads are free, while print ads are optional and require a small fee, but complement online ads by extending the advertiser’s reach.

When customers book ads using the Traderoo website, they get automatic email notification from the platform that tells them how their advertisement is performing. Traderoo is optimised for PC, laptop, smartphone and tablet, so the browser and ad placement remain consistent, no matter what device our customers are using.

The real advantage for us is that our classified business has achieved faster time to market, lower costs and less overheads in the form of call centre time and manual data entry. The site has been a huge success, and we look forward to continuing to use Google App Engine as we develop Traderoo further.

Posted by Clay Bavor, Director of Product Management, Google Apps

Life gets a bit easier when your Google Apps products work well together -- whether that’s inserting a Drive file into an email or sharing Docs and photos from Drive on Google+. As that experience becomes seamless, having separate storage doesn’t make as much sense anymore. So over the coming weeks, you’ll get 30 GB of unified storage to use as you like between Drive and Gmail. Just as before, files created in Docs, Sheets and Slides don't count against your storage quota. Storage will also be shared with photos you upload to Google+ larger than 2048px.


With this new combined storage, you can use your storage how you need to. If your business or school is like most, you know how many important emails and attachments you receive every day. As a result of today’s storage change, Gmail inboxes for Google Apps customers are no longer limited to 25 GB -- any additional storage you purchase can be shared and used by Gmail. Or alternatively, if you’re only using a few gigabytes of email storage, but have a lot of large documents and files stored in Google Drive, you can now use your storage primarily for Drive.


We'll also be making updates to the Google Drive storage page, so you can better understand how you're using your storage. Simply hover over the pie chart to see a breakdown of your storage use across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos.

This update will roll out to Rapid Release domains over the coming weeks.

Posted by Susan King Glosby, VP of Operations at FIT4MOM

Editor's note: In honor of Mother’s Day, our guest blogger is Susan King Glosby, VP of Operations at FIT4MOM, a company that offers fitness programs for moms at any stage of motherhood. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.


Being a mom to three boys is my favorite job, but helping moms is a close runner-up. That’s what I get to do as VP of Operations at FIT4MOM, a franchise that offers fitness classes to help mothers stay healthy and in shape. We’re not your typical gym session; we run pre-natal classes for pregnant women, stroller classes for new moms with their little ones in tow and workouts for mothers of all stages to get their pre-baby bodies back. Since launching in San Diego in 2001, we’ve grown to 275 franchises and 1,300 locations nationwide, helping moms from California to Cleveland stay in shape, meet other mothers and have fun with their kids.

We’re a mobile company. Our franchise owners are busy moms who don’t have time to sit in an office and answer emails. They’re teaching classes in the local park, picking up their kids from daycare and taking care of their families. Unfortunately, when we looked at our technology, we realized our email and collaboration system wasn’t doing our on-the-go business owners any favors. After looking at some underwhelming solutions tailored for franchise operations, we discovered Google Apps and knew we’d found the platform we needed to help us get our work done whenever and wherever we had the time.

Our only remaining concern was whether moving from our old system to Google Apps would be difficult without a dedicated in-house IT lead. Our worries disappeared as soon as we spoke with Lark IT, our Google Apps Reseller. Lark walked us through the process step-by-step, from the moment we decided to switch to Apps to the moment we successfully migrated all 300 of our business owners and corporate team members.

Apps has been a game changer for our 11-person corporate team. We store all our essential documents in a single shared folder on Drive, so everyone on the team has on-demand access to HR-related forms, time-off requests and contact information for our franchisees and partners. We also have a shared Google Calendar that’s always up-to-date with training sessions for new franchise owners and opening dates for new FIT4MOM locations. That way, we know all our moms are always in the loop. Google+ Hangouts have become increasingly ingrained in our daily routine, both for recurring events, like our corporate staff meetings, and impromptu one-on-one check-ins with franchise owners.

Our franchise owners are also over the moon about Apps because they finally have the tools to let them work efficiently and on their own schedules. With Gmail and Calendar on their phones, they have constant access to class schedules and can communicate easily with their instructors and the moms in their groups. No more time is wasted running home to check their laptops.

FIT4MOM isn’t just about fitness - it’s about bringing together active moms who want to be both healthy and part of a like-minded community. Between our Fit4Baby, Stroller Strides and Body Back classes, our employees and customers are getting fit and creating long-lasting friendships. And while we’re having fun on the playground, we know Google Apps is keeping the company running smoothly in the background.

Posted by Yoshihisa Matsuoka, Executive General Manager of Marketing at Clarion

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Yoshihisa Matsuoka, Executive General Manager of Marketing at Clarion, a global producer of in-car audio-visual and navigation systems used by car manufacturers around the world. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

As makers of in-car navigation and infotainment systems, we work to give our customers access to the most accurate and up-to-date information when they’re behind the wheel. Whether they’re exploring places in a new city, or discovering local gems in their hometown, we believe they should be able to find what they’re looking for quickly, easily and safely.

To give drivers access to even more information where and when they need it, we’ll soon be integrating Google Places, Send-To-Car and Voice Search into our new Smart Access cloud based infotainment system. The Google Places API will provide drivers with access to a rich and constantly refreshed database of over over 80 million restaurants, stores and other points of interest to explore. Send-to-Car will allow drivers to send a Google Maps destination like a restaurant, store or park, directly to their car’s Smart Access system. And with Google Voice Search, drivers will be able to safely discover destinations by speaking their queries instead of having to type them.


Smart Access is designed to give drivers the most secure and comfortable in-car experience, and Google’s APIs are just some of the features that we’ll be integrating into this innovative system. We look forward to being able to offer drivers around the world access to this connected driving experience when we launch Smart Access this fall.

Source: Gemma Correll – I Love Charts

Note from Beth: I just knew that I was going to start obsessing about charts and graphs after my Excel spreadsheet obsessions started.  I thought if I set up a tumblr blog curating great nonprofit spreadsheets, but the next logical step is create visualizations of your data.  What better way than in Excel.    I got into a wonderful conversation with Stephanie Evergreen, another nonprofit datanerd who loves spreadsheets who offered to write up this guest post about how to create the perfect graph.

Six Steps to Great Graphs By Stephanie Evergreen

Low budget? No programming skills? Me, too! Great data visualizations don’t necessarily require an expensive software package or a programmer on staff. Here is how you can work with what you already own, Excel, to increase the impact of your data visualizations. Let’s start with one basic dataset – a count of the number of followers, advocates, and donors for a non-profit over the last 6 years – and rock the graph so it is clear and compelling.

Step 1: Which Chart is Best?

Excel provides all sorts of default chart types to choose from, but the truth is, keep it as simple as possible. If your data adds up to 100%, you might choose a pie chart. It’s difficult to interpret area, so if you use a pie, restrict the number of wedges to 4 or fewer. People are better at judging length, so bar charts are a decent option also useful for comparisons. People are even better at judging points on a line, but box plots aren’t yet a default option in Word (here’s a tutorial on how to force one out of Excel, though http://stephanieevergreen.com/easy-dot-plots-in-excel/). Since we’re working with the defaults, here is how our social media data looks as a bar graph.

The bar graph is okay, but when trying to look at change over time, line graphs are a more appropriate chart type.

Ah, so much better! Now the trends are much easier to see at a glance. The choice in chart type should be driven by the relationships in the data we want to visualize. For more help, check out my favorite chart chooser tool.

Step 2: Use Color to Emphasize

Excel’s default colors are so equally dark that it can be difficult to tell the graph’s main point, without some serious cognitive effort. Changing the color http://stephanieevergreen.com/assigning-a-color-system-for-graphs/ can help bring attention where we want it. Of course, that means we have to know where we want it. So in this case, I’m suggesting we pay attention to the advocates, who used to be followers, and some of whom will become donors. I’m going to change the line color for advocates to green, my action color, and change the others to a shade of gray.

Your action color will likely be something from your brand. Use a color-picking tool to find out the exact color and navigate to the custom color area in Excel to match your shade.

Step 3: Delete What You Don’t Need

Little things in this chart still make it feel cluttered and distract from the data. Most of the time, we can do without the tick marks along each axis. Just right-click on each axis, and in the format area, change the tick mark option to None.

We can also lighten up the gridlines. They support estimation of the data values, but the default is so dark it can compete with the actual data lines. Right-click on them and change their color to a light gray. If you are going to put the number labels on your data lines, delete the gridlines altogether.  Just a few tweaks there cleans up the data visualization.

Step 4: Directly Label

Our brains make better sense of the data when we replace the legend with direct line labels. Just click on the legend and hit your delete key. It will feel good.

Then right-click on each line and select Add Data Labels. This will give you numbers. So right-click again for select Format Data Labels. Uncheck Values and check Series. Now each data point will have its appropriate label, like “Advocates.” But you only need the label at the end of the line, so click on the others and hit that happy delete key again.  This way, interpretation of which line stands for what is very obvious.

Step 5: Save as a Template

Whew – sounds like a lot of work, right? Make this process easier in the future by saving the chart as a template. Look in the chart types area of Excel and you’ll see a space to save what you have made up to this point. Name it something you’ll remember. Then the next time you need to make a three-line graph, click on your customized template and BAM – instant great graph.

Step 6: Annotate

Let’s get back to the original reason we visualize data – we’re looking for a pattern. We graph our social media impacts because we need to see how launching new platforms has influenced our clients. So now that we have taken lots of things out of the graph, let’s add back in some thoughtful annotation to help make the patterns clear.

Several pieces were added: I inserted icons along the timeline to illustrate when the nonprofit launched each social media platform. Based on that, we can see a series of changes in the data. After each launch, followers increase, and after a lag the advocates and eventually the donors increase as well. Let’s point out that pattern using the title. I left-justified the title and changed the text from something generic to a clear take-away point. No reader can mistake the message. I added a subtitle to further elaborate.

You can use Excel to do more  than create awesome line graphs. Are you inserting this graph into a slideshow for your Board?  Try the slow reveal.   Once you have mastered clean graph redesign, pull several together into a 1-page dashboard, like my annual report. Or entice your annual meeting invitees with scratch-off graphs.

Six steps help us tweak Excel’s defaults into rockstar data visualizations that help us understand our work and better communicate it to others.

Stephanie Evergreen blogs, tweets, and trains on how to make awesome graphs, slides, and reports.  Her forthcoming book, Presenting Data Effectively,  is coming soon, better early your copy now!