If your nonprofit is active in social media, you already know the importance of listening — of monitoring what’s being said online about your organization and your cause, to better understand the concerns and priorities of your stakeholders. But who has time to keep a close watch on all those social networks, media websites, blogs, discussion groups, etc.? Set up a few key Google Alerts, and the listening task becomes a whole lot easier.

What are Google Alerts?

You can think of Google Alerts as a customized Google Search — on-going — that delivers the search results to you automatically. You can set up any number of Alerts (up to 1000 per email address) to help you monitor online activity for the search terms of your choice.  This is a free service from Google, and it’s easy to get started:

How to Set Up Google Alerts

Visit http://google.com/alerts.

If you’ve got a Google account, sign in — and if not, simply fill out the form that you’ll find on the Google Alerts homepage:

Search Terms

Just as if you were running a normal web search, enter your preferred keywords. A good basic starting point is to set up Alerts for the name of your organization, for the names of your key spokespeople who are likely to be quoted in the media, and for keywords that are relevant to your cause and/or community.

Tip: To get an idea of what sort of information might be returned for any specific keywords, do an ordinary Google Search and see what turns up. Based on those search results, tweak your keywords to match your needs.  You can always change it later, or delete it and set up a different Alert.

Type

Choose a News, Blogs, Web, Comprehensive, Video, or Groups search:

• A ‘News’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.
• A ‘Web’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.
• A ‘Blogs’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.
• A ‘Comprehensive’ alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.
• A ‘Video’ alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.
• A ‘Groups’ alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

Tip: You can also set up Video alerts directly from any Google Video search results page and set up News alerts directly within Google News.

How Often

Choose from as-it-happens, once-a-day, or once-a-week Alerts. How often you’ll want to receive an Alert will depend on what volume of information you expect to come in, and on how time-sensitive the topic is that you’re monitoring. Weekly updates may be enough to get a general sense of trends in your sector, while breaking news might call for as-it-happens.

You may have heard some people talk about a delay in getting their Alerts, even when they've signed up for as-it-happens delivery. Keep in mind that an Alert is simply a search result that's delivered automatically. This means that even the quickest option (“as it happens”) is more accurately called “as Google indexes the content” — so the speed of reporting depends in large part on how well search-engine optimized the referring website is.

Some blog mentions of your keywords might show up in Alerts almost immediately, for example, while a seldom-updated static website might take much longer -- even a few weeks -- to be crawled by Google and for any relevant content come to you in an Alert.

Your Email Address

You don’t need a Google account to receive Alerts — any email address will do — but a Google account will give you access to a number of convenient Alert management options.  Even better, setting up your Alerts through a Google account give you the useful ability to get your Alerts by RSS feed as well as by email.

Tip: If you expect to create and receive a large number of Alerts, you may want to set up a separate email address for this purpose so your regular email Inbox doesn’t get overloaded.

Create Alert

When you’re done, click the ‘Create Alert’ button.  Google will send you a confirmation email, with a link you’ll have to click to activate your Alert. Repeat the process to set up as many Alerts as you need... And that’s all there is to it!

When you first start receiving Google Alerts, the contents might seem interesting but not particularly useful to you — perhaps you see a lot of unrelated information will be mixed in with the information that’s relevant to your nonprofit’s activities?

Fortunately, your search terms can be fine-tuned quickly and easily with Google's Advanced Search features, so you can adjust each Alert to get more relevant and useful results. We take a look at how to get better results with Google Alerts in Part 2 of this series — read on!