One of the things that I’m really passionate about is helping charitable causes and organizations in any way that I can. A lot of my friends and family try their best to give, either money or time, but have a hard time finding the right organization to donate to. It’s a good idea to stick with a cause that you care deeply about and find the right organization from there.
Google dropped a post this morning with some suggestions on how to inspire yourself to help causes that need more attention. Using its Insights For Search product, you can do a search on an important issue and see the trends when it comes to how popular of a query it is on Google.
Here’s what the non-profits team had to say:
The nonprofit sector is also seeing the end-of-year season expanding beyond December and into January, with January carrying 5% of of online giving according to the same study. Is your non-profit seeing the same trend?
With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. By entering search queries related to your nonprofit into the tool, you can get an exact idea of when and how much people are searching.
The search example that the company used is “homeless shelters,” a very important type of organization to support, and here’s what the team said:
Let’s take a look at an example. We wanted to see how search volume for the term ‘homeless shelters’ changes throughout the year. In Google Insights for Search, we entered the term ‘homeless shelter’ and filtered for the United States between July 2011 and July 2012. The graph below shows that searches began to rise in September, peaked dramatically in December, and then declined into January.
As you can see from the insights, homeless shelters have drawn less interest over the last few months and could probably benefit from your attention and support. This is yet another example of how important all of this data on the web is. Companies like Google can make actual impact with user-friendly tools that leverage all of this information.
Check out Google Insights for Search and check out the cause that keeps you up at night.
[Photo credit: Flickr]