Growing your non-profit is not an easy task. It requires a combination of dedication, marketing, and recognition of your cause.
Despite the many fundraising efforts and volunteers your organization may have, it can be difficult to navigate modern technology and make yourself searchable for potential donors. Specific challenges include inexperience and access to marketing funds. Google has simplified all that, offering ad grants to non-profits with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. Here is how and what you can qualify for:
Google Ad Grants provide non-profits free access to Google business tools, and an astonishing $10k per month in free advertising money. You can set up an unlimited amount of ad campaigns in your account and appear in Google search results for the particular search terms you select.
How hard is it to qualify?
Truly a unique grant, all charities are eligible and the funding pool is not limited. The grant requires nothing from you but to register with TechSoup, fill out a quick form, and upload proof of your charity certification, your 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status documents.
Benefits of Google Ads
Google Ads reach an extremely relevant and timely audience. Comparing them to social media ads you are targeting someone, not because of their interest or habits, ready to buy or donate because your ad appeared in the person’s search results, perfectly matching their expressed interest.
If your organization is spending money on Facebook or Twitter Ads, but haven’t yet applied for a Google Ad Grant, reconsider.
Google business tools are fairly easy to maneuver, although the spreadsheets can take time, it’s not as complicated as it looks.
Best Practices
Most importantly you must conduct keyword research, if people aren’t searching for a particular term, your ads won’t show. Keyword research allows you to find out which of your issues, services, and campaigns people are actually searching for. If not you’re going to end up with a lot of low performing campaigns. It’s also important to use broad match modified keywords, these keywords give you the perfect combination of reach and relevance, getting your ads seen by the maximum amount of searchers while ensuring that the searchers are likely to be interested in your ad.
Best practices dictate that you should always put your keywords in your ad copy. Setting up an ad for each keyword is essential, and you should include the keyword within the ad copy. Your ad should match what individuals are searching for, making them more likely to click.
Optimizing your Google Ads is a must, spend 30–45 minutes checking and tweaking your account weekly. Failure to maintain your Google Grant Ads account can result in suspension. Google stops showing ads that aren’t getting clicks and penalizes accounts with low click-through rates. The key is to make Google Ads a habit.
Finally, it is bad practice for charities to be advertising on competitor brand names. If someone searches for a term, they are looking for that specific thing. If they wanted similar entities, they would have indicated that in their search. Attempting to get your ads seen that way will only result in a low click-through rate because your ads won’t be relevant. Another common mistake that non-profits make with their Google Ad Grants accounts is to add thousands of keywords. Keywords should be specific and relevant to your cause, endeavors or your name and location.
Operating Funds
Advertising money can help you reach a much larger audience and bring in donors passionate about your cause, but what about the people who follow your progress, repost your content but don’t/can’t donate? Givv brings a new paradigm to non-profit fundraising, anyone with an internet connected device can supply their idle computing capacity to the Givv network, earning $10–20 a month, directing the funds toward the cause (or up to 5) the user wants to support. Visit Givv.io to learn more about our world-changing platform and join the movement!
