Is Your Nonprofit Ready for Google Ad Grants?
5-Point Ad Grants Checklist Reveals If Your Organization Is Ready to Grow Its Email List Using Google’s Free Ad Platform
What’s the value in using Google Ad Grants for nonprofits? If you’ve done any research at all, you probably already know a few things:
- It’s a pain to set up
- It has fairly onerous requirements to keeping it going
- It requires a steep learning curve
- The customer service is… not great
So why do it?
Because every nonprofit needs to grow their email list. If you don’t see this as a priority, then it’s likely you’re not using your current email list very well.
In spite of all the cacophony about social media, email remains the highest margin source of donation revenue. Better than events, better than direct mail, better than phone, TV, radio, and all the rest. It costs very little to send emails out to thousands of people, and donors consistently respond to them.
The trick with email is – you have to get people on your list who WANT to be there.
Once you’ve tapped out your networks and your board’s networks, where do you go for new subscribers? You go online. You attract people who care about your mission but who don’t know you exist.
To answer the opening question, the value of Google Adwords is that it provides the easiest way to let these mission-aligned potential supporters know you exist.
Go here for a complete guide for how to set up a Google Ad Grants account (it’s NOT easy).
The question for today is, is your nonprofit ready for Google Ad Grants?
Nonprofit Ad Grants Checklist
You can spend up to $10,000 per month in free ads. You get to use the same platform as for-profit companies. They make it sound desirable and easy. It is desirable, but it’s far from easy.
Here’s a checklist to see if your nonprofit is ready for Ad Grants:
1. Do you have a website?
Seems like a silly question these days, but some nonprofits “have” a website in that they may own a URL and have put up a couple pages, but they aren’t using their website for much.
If you don’t have a website, or if your website has just a handful of pages and you haven’t updated it since George W. Bush was president, you are not ready for Ad Grants.
2. Do you have a reasonably high quality website?
Your site doesn’t need to be a million dollar site. In fact, it doesn’t even need to be a $10,000 site. Graphic design means very little for what we’re talking about, so don’t spend gobs of money on it especially if you’re a small nonprofit.
But to leverage Google Ad Grants so the people who click on your ads and visit your site also sign up for your list, here’s what you do need:
- Well-written content on blogs and main pages (easy to read, informative, helpful)
- New pages added regularly (even once a month counts as ‘regular’)
- Time-sensitive content to show site is current (like upcoming events, giving deadlines)
- Easy-to-find content and navigation
- Calls to action for newsletter signup – ALL OVER THE SITE
If your site lacks quality content and rarely gets updated, you are not ready for Google Ad Grants.
3. Do you have motivating email signup forms all over your site?
The last point above is the most important one. If you don’t make it as easy as possible for visitors to sign up for your newsletter, they won’t.
What defines “easy”? It’s not just putting a form there. It’s giving them a reason to want to sign up. This means, you must give them something in return, or promise them tangible rewards for signing up.
In other words, do not do this:
That form is bad in every possible way.
It’s unclear (what am I signing up for?). It offers nothing, and promises nothing (what do I get when I sign up? What will you send me?). It commands me to “Submit!”, even using an exclamation point along with this very unappealing call to action. It doesn’t ask for my name, but does ask for my ZIP code. Why would you want someone’s ZIP but not their name?
You can do way better.
At bare minimum, put a simple promise in your form, even one or two lines promising the reader something they’ll look forward to after they sign up.
But to really grow your list, you want something like this:
This type of form is far more effective than the typical ones used by most nonprofits. It offers something, and the reward is immediate. It also appeals to people who care about their mission. For most newsletters, the subscriber has to hope they’ll get some good stories eventually, knowing they’ll probably also be asked for money now and then.
But here, they get a great story immediately, one that is so good this nonprofit turned it into a whole book.
Again – for the target audience of people who want to help the homeless – would you sign up for this?
If you have bare minimum email signup forms on your site (described above), you are ready for Google Ad Grants. But you’ll capitalize on your traffic much more if you create an incentive-laden sign up process like the one you see above.
4. Do you have a minimal budget for managing your Ad Grant account?
One of Google’s many requirements for nonprofits using Ad Grants is that they must manage the account actively and consistently. They require you to sign in at least once per month, and make changes to your account at least every few months at a minimum.
Working at bare minimum hours, this will take someone who is familiar with Google Ads 2-4 hours per month to manage. At that rate, you will write a few ads per month and will slowly build your account up. Your traffic numbers will also increase at a modest pace.
If you want a faster increase of traffic and email signups, budget more money. Then you can write more ads per month, and optimize them quicker.
But even at the bare minimum pace, you will get far more traffic to your site than you’re getting now – especially for smaller nonprofits.
If you can spare a small amount of money per month, your nonprofit can take advantage of what Google Ad Grants has to offer.
5. Do you know someone with Google Ads experience?
Learning how to use Google Ads (the same platform works for Ad Grants) requires a substantial time investment. It is not easy, and there are multiple skills you must acquire, including but not limited to:
- Understanding Google’s account structure (ads, groups, campaigns)
- Researching and identifying strong keywords
- Structuring ads and ad groups around specific keywords and pages on your site
- Writing effective ads
- Understanding ad metrics (CTR, impressions, CPC, quality score, etc)
- Working with keywords (including negative keywords) to optimize clicks to meet the 5% CTR requirement for nonprofits
Rest assured, you cannot learn all this in a couple weeks.
It took me years of reading expert articles from sites like Wordstream, learning from other copywriters and marketers, watching webinars, and much more.
And with all that, when I got the reins for my first full-fledged Ad Grants account (this was before the 5% requirement), we got a lot of traffic, but our click-through rates (CTR) were dismal – between 1 and 1.5%. But I kept learning, gained more experience, and now I’m able to set up accounts from scratch and manage them so my nonprofit clients do reach the 5% CTR requirement.
Is Your Nonprofit Ready for Ad Grants?
Review the checklist:
- Do you have a website?
- Do you have a reasonably high quality website?
- Do you have motivating email signup forms all over your site?
- Do you have a minimal budget for managing your Ad Grants account?
- Do you know someone with Google Ads experience?
If you answered ‘Yes’ to all five of those items and want to grow your email list, this is a great way to do it. You will get far more traffic using Ad Grants than just SEO and organic traffic can deliver. That’s why companies spend billions in online advertising. Pure organic traffic doesn’t deliver enough leads.
If you need help with improving your site or your email signup process (#2 and #3 in the list), ProActive Content can help with those tasks too. But for #5, if you don’t know anyone with Google Ads experience – now you do. You found us!
Simply click the button below and send me a note, and I’m happy to discuss my process working with nonprofits on their Ad Grants accounts. No nonprofit is too small! Every nonprofit can grow if they make targeted investments in things that work.
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