Google Helps Charities Use Satellite Images

Google announced yesterday that it plans to help charities and other nonprofit organizations use maps and satellite images to encourage donations and recruit volunteers, reports the Associated Press.

The program, called Google Earth Outreach, allows nonprofit groups to use the company’s free software to publicize their work. One group, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, has already started using the software. Visitors to its Web site can now “look” at Darfur, Sudan, and see icons of flames representing destroyed villages and of tents indicating refugee camps. Clicking on one of the icons opens a window with details and links on how to help.

Edward Wilson, chief executive of the Earthwatch Institute, an environmental group in Maynard, Mass., that is also using the software, said the maps help people understand that “what they are reading is not happening some place out of sight, out of mind. Those places become places you can visit, you can actually see.”

For more information on the Holocaust museum’s satellite project and on Amnesty International’s use of satellite images, read The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s coverage.

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