Google announced today that it is contributing $3 million to Polaris Project, Liberty Asia, and La Strada International as a “Global Impact Award” for fighting human trafficking. This amounts to a total of $14.5 million from the company for this cause, after some grants it gave in 2011.

Google’s Jared Cohen and Jacquelline Fuller write in a joint blog post:

Global Impact Awards support nonprofits that use technology to launch disruptive solutions in their sector. We launched the Global Impact Awards program last December to fund new ideas with a potential for huge scale. And at the Google Ideas INFO summit over the summer, we brought together technologists, leaders, and those with unique personal experiences — including former weapons brokers and survivors of domestic and international human trafficking — to look at illicit networks and their defining obstacles. By connecting technologists and experts with those who understand and have lived through trafficking situations, our discussion centered around a fundamental question: What if local, national, and regional anti-trafficking helplines across the globe were all connected in a data-driven network that helped disrupt the web of human trafficking?

Since the summit, we’ve worked with Polaris Project, Liberty Asia and La Strada International to make this concept a reality. These organizations exist to provide vital help to victims in need across the United States, the Mekong Delta region and Europe. Now, working across borders, this new Global Human Trafficking Hotline Network will collect data from local hotline efforts, share promising practices and create anti-trafficking strategies that build on common patterns and focus on eradication, prevention and victim protection. To enhance the participating organizations’ ability to better share, analyze and act upon their data in real time, Palantir Technologies will expand on its existing relationship with Polaris Project by donating its data integration and analytics platform for this project. In addition, Salesforce.com supports Polaris Project’s hotline center and is helping scale their call tracking infrastructure internationally.

More on last summer’s Google Ideas initiative here.

“Now, whether your nonprofit is 10 people or 10,000, you are eligible to start using Gmail, Calendar, Drive and more,” says Katie Kellogg with the Google for Nonprofits team.

“Google Apps for Nonprofits allows your organization to reduce IT costs and helps your team collaborate more effectively,” says Kellogg. “The suite of tools uses cloud computing to securely store and update documents, calendars and email in real-time – meaning you can access data anywhere, anytime. Google manages all of the updating and maintenance in the cloud, so you’ll never be required to install hardware or update software. And if you need help, we have a 24/7 support team available.”

New users can join the Google for Nonprofits program here. Google will then send instructions on how to enroll. There’s also a guide here.

In other Google/nonprofit-related news, Google.org is donating millions of dollars for increased access to the Internet in emerging markets.

For one, it is providing $3.1 million to the Network Startup Resource Center (NSRC) to help get local network engineering expertise to universities and national research & education networks in Sub-Saharan Africa.

“Through labs and a train-the-trainers program, NSRC will provide hands-on training on campus network planning, deployment, and management for over 600 university and NREN staff,” explains Google.org principal Jennifer Haroon. “Their work will bring the Internet to students and staff at over 50 institutions and increase network engineering know-how in Sub-Saharan Africa.”

Additionally, Google.org is providing $1.3 million to the Internet Society (ISOC) to improve and create Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) in emerging markets.

“IXPs play a big role in core Internet infrastructure, allowing Internet Service Providers to peer locally (and cheaply), which can lower end user costs, promote competition, and improve user experience,” says Haroon. “ISOC will create a toolkit for those who want to create and improve IXPs and build an industry portal to share IXP information and data.”

According to Google, five billion people are currently without access to the Internet.

Image: NSRC

YouTube has just launched another tool to help the nonprofit organizations enrolled in their YouTube Nonprofit program. Now, YouTube wants to give channel owners a “digital thermometer” for their videos.

It’s simply called “Campaigns,” and it allows YouTube Nonprofit members to set specific goals and broadcast them to viewers.

“This new feature allows nonprofits to create campaigns with goals like increasing views or subscribers, track their progress, and let people to contribute to their goals,” says the company in a blog post. “A campaign consists of one or more videos…Once a campaign is created, videos in that campaign will show an overlay on them, encouraging viewers to contribute to the campaign.”

Not only will the video itself show an overlay with the progress bar, but the campaign will display front and center on the nonprofit’s channel. The Campaigns box with show the goal progress bar, how many days left in the campaign, as well as the number of new shares of the particular video(s).

According to YouTube, they now have over 18,000 nonprofits enrolled in the program. They recently gave the option to include a more prominent donate button inside videos and also held the Next Cause program, a summit that enables charitable organizations to participate in a summit that gave them information on how to better achieve their goals.

“For a while now, we’ve been trying to help encourage some additional tools for redditors to be able to collectively raise funds,” says erik [hueypriest] on the reddit blog. “For nonprofit projects in particular we wanted to find some low or no fee options so that as much of redditors’ money goes to the cause and not to payment processing and other fees. We also wanted to see more built in accountability and fraud checks, so that redditors can be more confident that their money is going where they think it is.”

The first one, reddit.Crowdtilt.com, has already been applied to a reddit-based fundraiser picked by actor Luis Moncada (Marco Salamanca from Breaking Bad) to help educate kids about gang violence and drug abuse, but now others you can use it as well.

According to reddit, with this tool, people all over the world can contribute, it provides tax-deductible receipts, it verifies beneficiaries of campaigns, and there is only a 2.5% secure credit card processing fee (other fees waived).

The second tool is at redditdonate.com, and is powered by Dwolla and Stripe. Users can paw with Dwolla or with credit cards through Stripe. It lets subreddit moderators place a donate button into the sidebar, where users can directly donate. It’s limited to verified 501(c)(3) non-profits who have to confirm accounts.

You can see what the button looks like here.

Dwolla has more about its offering on its own blog.

YouTube asked for applications from nonprofits, which were due on February 27th. Now, YouTube has announced the first round of organizations selected to participate in the program.

The organizations come from big cities and small towns across the country from Illinois to Colorado to Texas to California and many work all over the world. They also work on variety of issues from animal abuse to homelessness to poverty alleviation to children’s health.

Autism Speaks
Children’s Hospital Boston
IFAW – International Fund for Animal Welfare
Sunlight Foundation
BuildOn
American Heart Association
CARE
American Foundation for Equal Rights
Malaria No More
The Humane Society
The Pablove Foundation
COTS – Committee on the Shelterless
Durango Discovery Museum
Save Mount Diablo
Art Resources in Teaching
breakthrough
Per Scholas
The Supply
Born Free USA
The Lazarex Cancer Foundation

On April 2nd in San Francisco, these participants will attend a one-day summit where they will receive training on how to best utilize YouTube for their organization’s benefit. This will include YouTube basic instruction, community engagement strategies, as well as one-on-one consulting sessions.

Check out the following story about the Lazarex Cancer Foundation and a special bracelet-making venture:

The awards will honor nonprofits in four categories: Best Small Organization, Best Medium Organization, Best Large Organization, and Best Storytelling Video. The winner of each category will be awarded several prizes, such as monetary compensation as well as a featured spot on YouTube’s homepage on April 5th. See YouTube’s video about this year’s contest for more information:

This is the 6th year for the DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards and the third year that YouTube has partnered with See3 Communcations in order to present the event. The window to submit is only this month – as in, February 2012 – and all videos must be submitted by the 29th of this month (good thing it’s a leap year so you have an extra day to get those videos in). In order to submit, though, you are required to be a member of YouTube’s Nonprofit Program. The winning videos for each category will be selected via public vote between March 14 and March 28 and the winners will be announced April 5.

If you’re new to the world of nonprofit video or you’re a nonprofit looking for a little inspiration, check out last year’s award winners:

One is “The Playbook Guide: YouTube for Good”. This is described as “a how-to resource specifically targeted at nonprofit organizations, with sections on how to create content, raise funds, connect with other community members and more.”

The donate button has also been made more prominent.

“Nonprofits are an important part of the YouTube community, and their videos have educated and inspired audiences since the early days of the site,” says YouTube’s Valerie Streit. “There are hundreds of nonprofit organizations with millions of views on YouTube, and dozens with more than ten million views, like Greenpeace, Khan Academy and UNICEF.”

There are over 16,000 nonprofit organizations that are involved in the program.

For more daily infographic round-ups, go here.

Xobni looks at the value of “who you know”:

Craig Newmark looks at how the top 50 nonprofits do social media:

GigaOm shared this infographic looking at GSMA info about the “connected life” by 2020:

There are added benefits to the professional side of things as well, however. LinkedIn Senior Manger of Corporate Communications Krista Canfield tells WebProNews, “By enabling professionals to list their volunteer experiences on their LinkedIn Profile employers, business partners and co-workers are able to see another dimension of your professional identity.”

“It shows that you’re a passionate professional who’s adept at multitasking,” she adds. “An analogy would be a college student who’s pursuing a degree while also working part-time. If you’re comparing that college student side-by-side to another college student who’s just going to school, then you might consider the college student who’s also working part-time to be more driven and harder working.”

“It’s also worth noting that you can develop new skills during your volunteer work which will help you become a multifaceted professional,” Canfield tells us. “You may be a sales person by trade, but perhaps you helped organize your non-profit’s most recent fundraising event. Noting that experience, and the skills that you learned during that experience (‘event planning,’ ‘event marketing,’ etc.) can make you a more attractive employee and business partner.”

Canfield says she’d advise professionals to not only add their volunteer work, but to also add LinkedIn Skills to their profile if they’ve truly mastered new ones as a result of those experience. LinkedIn Skills can be searched here.

“Adding LinkedIn Skills will help you come up in relevant searches when business partners, clients or hiring managers are doing a search for people like you,” she notes. Certainly a good thing to keep in mind.

“I’d also add that viewing a member’s volunteer experiences on their LinkedIn Profile is another way to find other professionals that have similar passions or interests to your own,” she says. “If before a business meeting you check another member’s LinkedIn Profile and see that he or she helped build a house during a Habitat for Humanity project (just like you did a few years ago), that can be a great conversation starter and a nice way to find common ground with that other professional.”

There are other ways to utilize LinkedIn in the nonprofit realm. Nonprofits can set up company pages, for example. “To date there are more than two million LinkedIn Company Pages,” says Canfield. Listed nonprofits include the American Red Cross, DonorsChoose.org, The Humane Society of the United States and many others.

“You can click the ‘follow’ button on a company page if you want to get updates when someone leaves or joins that company and to get updates when that company has posted a job opening on LinkedIn,” says Canfield.

“Nonprofits are encouraged to set up LinkedIn Groups,” she adds. “I just did a search and there are currently over 83,000 nonprofit groups on Linkedin.”

There are tips on nonprofit use of LinkedIn in the company’s learning center.