Why we don't promote OpenMRS? We can use free adverts in Google

Hey, I have noticed that OpenMRS don’t promote their job and impact outside the community. You guys are doing a great job, so why you don’t talk about it? Even companies that were doing this stuff and were engaging in it don’t talk about it. Why? But, I have a solution!

Maybe some of you know Google for Nonprofits and Google Ad Grants. This is Google’s project for nonprofit organizations. It’s totally free and you have many useful features there. If we create an account for OpenMRS we could promote it all around the world and get new visitors, donators and members of the community. I think that it will be a great opportunity for us. Also, we will get every month 10 000 dollars for our ads. We could do more good things and encourage more people.

Setting an account isn’t difficult. If you want you can read about it here: https://soldevelofoundation.org/en/google-for-nonprofits-creating-an-account/

If you have any questions, tips or you have the answer to my questions - just write it :slight_smile: Thaaanks, I’m waiting for your opinion about it

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cc @jennifer @c.antwi

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@herbert24 Thanks for sharing this. @zuzanna I believe @jennifer is working on our Branding and communications strategy.

Its a great idea.

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Great idea! Can you help us do it? :slight_smile:

Please liaise with @jennifer if you’re interested.

Welcome to the community!

Yeah, of course!

How can I catch up with @jennifer?

Thanks, I hope we climb to the trophies together :slight_smile:

@zuzanna, I’d like to take a closer look at this - and figure out what we’d need to do beyond registering with Google for Nonprofits. It looks like the $10k is in-kind?

Yeah, we will get 10 000 dollars every month to spend on adverts. Also as part of a Google for Nonprofits account we will have apps like G-suite (Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Hangouts, Cloud, etc), You-Tube, Google Earth&Maps.

I can help you with creating the account and getting the TechSoup license, and later with the first steps in ads campaigns. I want to promote OpenMRS worldwide and I’m ready to get involved in the initiative.

I think in the future we should try to get the certificate and launch the OpenMRS on the west.

I’m waiting for your questions and opinion.

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Welcome to the community @zuzanna! What a great opportunity for us and thank you for spearheading it. I’m excited to see where you lead us! :slight_smile:

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Love this! I strongly support your idea and working with @jennifer to make this happen!

Yeey, Thank you @akanter and @janflowers :heart_eyes: I hope everything will be good and we will have an opportunity to develop OpenMRS and our community. I have many more ideas, but I think this one is the most important at the moment

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Hey @jennifer. What do you think about this idea? Do you like it or not? Are you against or not? I’m curious and I want to take action so please tell me or ask questions if you have any.

with regards, Susan.

@zuzanna, I like this idea - and I’d like to know more about what happens after we sign up: What do we need to do to get ads up? What sort of in-kind resources does Google provide, etc? I haven’t had a chance to explore more of the links you’ve shared. Can you help out with answering these questions?

@jennifer thanks for your respond :slight_smile: At first, we (I will do it) have to create a Google for Nonprofits account (it’s free). To do this I will need a TechSoup license. In the USA Google sends all of the documentation to TechSoup so they can verify us as a nonprofit organization quickly and easy. Then we get a TechSoup token which will be important to Google account.

Next steps are easier. In Google for Nonprofits, we choose products what we want to use (G suite, Ad Grants, YouTube, Google Earth&Maps and only for US users Google Donation Tools). When our main Google account will be approved we will create the Ad Grants one (or others if we want too).

You asked about resources. As I said before we get free tools from Google, support from their community and the most important for us 10 000 dollars for adverts every month.

I’m ready to help with creating an account, getting the licence, getting through all these steps to create adds and optimize them. I’m waiting for your questions :slight_smile:

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@zuzanna, thanks for getting back to me. I agree that it’s pretty easy and straightforward to create a Google for Nonprofits account and then set one up for Google Ad Grants. I don’t have any questions about this part of the process.

After that, it seems like our next step will be to create the ad campaigns and it looks like Google has a lot of great resources to help us create ones that will be effective - depending on our campaign goals. What would be some good campaign goals?

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And to really think about landing sites… where do people go for more information and how do we not lose them immediately after they land on our site :slight_smile:

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Exactly so, @akanter. So what people are we targeting? That goes back to what we want to achieve with a particular ad campaign.

Landing site can go both ways, as well. It makes more sense to direct people to the page most relevant to our ask and not our website home page.

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I think we already have Google for Nonprofits. We’ve been using G Suite for years.

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@burke Could you check that? Do you pay for G suite? Maybe this will help you https://support.google.com/nonprofits/answer/3367223?hl=en

@jennifer @akanter you are 100% right. In our campaigns, we can encourage people to visit our blog posts, sites with a description of our project and every other page that we have. We can promote partners, cooperations, projects and so on.

I think that our goal should be 5 groups of visitors: Developers and other volunteers (like translators) for community and projects, Students for Google Summer of Code, Businessman/Organization/Foundation etc for professional cooperation and potential Donators (OpenMRS has a “Donate” subpage and we could try to bring more people in there). Finally, we could use these ads to promote our cooperation with the Service Providers. We were discussing lately how we can show their work to the public better and free Google Ads to the OpenMRS subpage about them should be encouraging for them.

Each campaign we should adapt to a specific group of our “customers”. It means that for 1 post/page we can create 4 (or more) different adverts which will fit main recipients. We can experiment thanks to the size of the budget and at the end choose the best option for us.

OpenMRS website isn’t modern right now, but we have to take action with what we have. Eventually, we can add some text to some of the subpages, if we have to.

@akanter it’s hard to say how we can keep visitors at the site. If we create interesting things and entertainingly describe them we will keep them. As I said before we have to experiment and try many options to know what works, what is good and what is not.

There are many more benefits from Ads and we will probably discover even more along the way.

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It looks like OpenMRS has Google Analytics deployed on the site, so you could customize different ad campaigns for these audiences, and measure the effectiveness of different landing pages or sets of content.

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