Caroline Faucher

As budget constraints are a harsh reality for most non-profit organisations, programs especially built to help charities compete with companies are often a live-saver when campaigning.

Last week, I spoke at a conference in Sydney on how to drive social change through community engagement. While speaking with some attendees afterwards, I noticed that some online community managers did not know about some of the great, free tools for non-profits.

Here are my top three 3programs that I hope can help you maximise your campaign resources.

Google Grants is a program that helps non-profit organisations by providing in-kind advertising on Google. The program was launched in 2003 and is available in Australia, USA, Canada, the UK and many other countries (http://www.google.com/grants/domains.html).

After submitting a simple application, grantees are awarded advertising through Google Adwords to a value of almost $10,000 per month ($329/day). Grantees are then able to create ads that may appear in the Google search results of people searching for specific keywords.

Grantees must follow guidelines and are responsible for their advertising account, where they can manage ads, keywords and look at statistics.

I became aware of this program after listening to a presentation from Clair Diaz Ortiz (@ClaireD), who leads social innovation at Twitter. Claire was talking about how you can change the world one tweet at the time and how Twitter can help charities do just that.

Since 2010, after launching their Promoted Tweets advertising platform, Twitter has been very active with their pro-bono programs that provide Promoted Tweets and accounts to various charities.

In December 2011, according to Twitter, “more than 50 organizations worldwide have received pro-bono ads amounting to over $300,000 worth of donated advertising on our platform".

Twitter Ads for Good can be particularly useful in times of crisis, helping raise critical crisis-relief funds.

To apply, charities need to contact Twitter and fill out a simple questionnaire. Australians can also apply for this program.

The YouTube non-profit program helps charities connect with their supporters via video. Through the program, non-profits can apply to have access to a channel at no cost where they can brand it, interact with people and showcase their videos.

One of my favourite features is the ability to use the call-for-action overlay at no cost, which means you can lead your supporters to your website where they can take action or donate.

This program is also available for Australian not-for-profit organisations.

These are just a few of many programs available to non-profit organisations and, as we go along, I intend to make you discover many more tools that will help your efforts online.

While many non-profit organisations are still catching up on Facebook’s page redesign last year, others have already taken the lead and rolled out their new profile before the new layout is imposed on March 30^th.

When it first became available for pages, the timeline was quickly criticised for the loss of opportunities for companies, particularly for those that used tabs to engage supporters. But looking a little bit further, one can see that the new layout will enable organisations with small budgets to engage more easily without having to build sophisticated tabs.

Here are 10 examples of non-profits in Australia and around the world that have already published their timelines.

RSPCA Australia

Cancer Council Australia

Greenpeace Australia Pacific

Doctors Without Borders

WWF Australia

Greenpeace International

Oxfam America

The Salvation Army USA

The Breast Cancer Site

Alzheimer's Association

Tips for non-profits switching to timeline:

Do you have any more tips you wish to share with us?