Accelerate your business with Google
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Here, “universal” not only means “global,” but encompasses all cultures and audiences, including those that have been historically underrepresented in the digital space.
Accelerate with Google was a project started on 20% time by 2 Googlers from our office in Ann Arbor, Michigan with a passion for diversity. After attending the annual Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Conference these Googlers saw an opportunity to draw attention to diversity in Google’s sales and outreach strategies within their teams.
Accelerate with Google has evolved into a team of 40+ Googlers working to drive minority business acquisition and growth, and to bring Google Apps for Education to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the U.S.
Accelerate aims to make Google’s products a comprehensive, value-driven solution for underrepresented and emerging audiences through a 3-tiered approach:
- Empower: Provide complimentary consultations to empower business owners to grow their businesses and connect with customers using digital marketing with Google AdWords
- Enrich: Enrich the consumer experience on the Google network with relevant, targeted advertising through strategic search development and publisher partnerships – helping consumers find what they need from the right place at the right time
- Enable: Enable educational institutions to teach and learn more collaboratively and effectively through a free and powerful suite of tools with Google Apps for Universities
Learn more at google.com/ads/accelerate
The U.S. Hispanic Initiative at Google
The Hispanic population in the United States currently stands at 49 million people and is projected to reach 29% of the total US population by the year 2050. Hispanic Internet users stand at 30.6 million people or 63% of the US Hispanic population, and 8% of daily searches on Google.com are done in Spanish. For those who are not online, 56% cite a lack of Spanish content as their reason for not using the Internet.
What does this mean for Google? We have an opportunity to reach out to this growing
market and help connect advertisers to the Hispanic market in a culturally relevant
way across Google’s various platforms like Search and YouTube. With this in mind,
Google created the U.S. Hispanic Operations team – just one example of how Google is
diversifying its business efforts and reaching out to the Hispanic market
online.
The mission of the team is to identify and grow U.S. Hispanic advertising
opportunities at Google, as well as to develop U.S. Hispanic industry experts who are
both internal Google resources and external representatives. This cross-functional
team brings together Googlers with a passion for Hispanic culture, spanning offices
in the United States, Mexico, and Argentina.
LGBT Advertisers: Project Lambda
Google recognizes that many LGBT users have similar online browsing and shopping behaviors that are different from those of the general population. It has been our goal to provide advertisers with customized marketing solutions to reach LGBT consumers – just as we would for any other demographic. As a step toward that goal, we launched Project Lambda – our LGBT advertising initiative - to help Google advertisers implement LGBT campaigns and strategies.
Online advertising offers a direct platform for demographic targeting, and the LGBT community offers a tremendous marketing opportunity. In the United States, LGBT market buying power is projected to exceed 700 billion, and this market segment is twice as likely to have an income over $250,000. To date, the Project Lambda team has implemented LGBT advertising campaigns with numerous Google advertising customers. This cross-functional team brings together sales and marketing Googlers from across the U.S, and in 2010 the team was recognized by the Executive Council on Diversity with the Award for Cross-Collaboration among employee networks and Google business teams.
The Forty Language Initiative
Google is a global company with international users accounting for more than half of our total user base. In order to meet the needs of our ever-growing user population, we need a broad diversity of perspectives and voices in the creation of our products.
English-speaking users comprise only 30% of the total Internet population. For Google to be competitive internationally, our products need to speak all the languages our users speak. With that in mind, we started the 40 Languages Initiative in May 2007, with the aim of making Google products available in 40 languages and mapping to roughly 70 countries. This initiative enables more than 99.3% of the Internet population to use Google's products.
Accessibility on the web
We strive to make information available to everyone, including users with such disabilities as blindness, visual impairment, color deficiency, deafness, hearing loss, and limited dexterity. We’ve found that providing alternative access modes helps everyone – not just people with disabilities. For example, keyboard shortcuts help power-users get things done more quickly without using a mouse, speech-to-text technology enables people to skim and search audio content, and custom product themes give users more opportunities to personalize.
Building accessible products isn’t only the right thing to do – it also opens up Google services to very significant populations of people. According to the United Nations, 650 million people live with a disability. Making the web accessible to all users is a big challenge, and we still have plenty of work to do to get there.
Learn about Google’s accessibility work and find accessibility updates from our blogs, a help center, and the opportunity to send feedback and feature requests to the team.
