ProActive Content’s Dan Magill Delivers Presentation on How to Grow Nonprofit Email Lists Using Google Ad Grants
Practical and Helpful Guide Unveiled at 2019 AFP Forum for Strategic Fundraising
Fundraising copywriter and consultant Dan Magill gave a fast-paced, information-heavy talk in an afternoon session at the Forum for Strategic Fundraising on Thursday, June 6th.
After a quick introduction sharing some of his previous history as a public high school teacher, Dan introduces Google Ad Grants as a powerful tool that can be used to grow email lists for nonprofits.
The principle value of Ad Grants comes from the fact that it’s free to use, allows $10,000 per month in free online ads, and can attract new people to your nonprofit who wouldn’t have otherwise known you exist. Most importantly, using Dan’s method, these new email subscribers will arrive already aligned with your mission.
They will care about your mission from the start.
His presentation divides into three parts:
Is Your Nonprofit Ready for Google Ad Grants?
First, Dan takes you through a five point evaluation process to help your nonprofit determine if you are ready for Google Ad Grants. As Dan puts it, “Not all of them are, and if you try to use Ad Grants before you’re ready, the rest of your marketing won’t be ready for the new website traffic you will receive, and it will get wasted.”
In other words, Ad Grants will deliver new web traffic. That’s guaranteed. But if all those new visitors show up to your site, read one page, and then leave, that doesn’t do your nonprofit much good. Traffic doesn’t pay the bills or advance your mission.
You want new email subscribers, who you can then nurture into new supporters, volunteers, recurring donors, P2P ambassadors, and all the rest.
One of Dan’s five evaluation points is, does your website have email signup forms on every page?
Dan’s point is, if new visitors come to your site from Google Ad Grants and like what they see, but there’s no email signup form right there, on that very page, they will likely never return and you’ll have missed your chance to add them to your ‘tribe.’
So, the simple act of placing email signup forms on every page must be done before you try to initialize Ad Grants, which is a much bigger fish to fry.
How to Set Up Google Ad Grants
Next, Dan briefly covers how to set up Ad Grants. He avoids going into great detail here, partly because doing so would take many hours, and the presentation was only 40 minutes.
Instead, he directs you to the definitive guide on how to set up Ad Grants, something ProActive Content put together because there wasn’t anything else quite like it, as far as they have found.
Yes, there are many sites and resources that say they offer guides like this, but the process of setting up Ad Grants is incredibly complex, time-consuming, frustrating, and unclear.
As far as Dan has been able to find, no one has ever written out the process in the actual order the steps have to be done so you don’t get “caught with your pants down” in the middle of a step and be unable to finish.
What does that mean?
During the setup process, Google will ask you to do certain things, such as setup your first Ad campaign. This is part of the complete setup process. But, when you get in the nitty gritty of that, you’ll be expected to develop an actual Ad Grants campaign. You’ll need to know keywords, campaign titles, pages you’re going to link to, and so much more. But if you’re new to this, you may not have the experience to do this successfully, in that moment.
Google assumes you do.
It’s a poor assumption.
Dan’s guide thus walks you through the whole process, from the beginning, in the right order, so that you don’t end up in situations like this with no understanding of what they’re asking for or how to finish the step.
Again, as far as Dan knows, there is no other resource like this one anywhere.
How to Grow Your Email List Using Google Ad Grants
Finally, Dan concludes the main section of his presentation with a demonstration of how to set up a list-building marketing funnel, specifically tailored for nonprofits who want to use Ad Grants to grow their email lists.
This is the most ‘meaty’ part of the presentation.
The process relies on using original content, designed around specific keywords your ideal supporters might type into a search engine, to draw them to your site.
Dan gives the example of the keyphrase “how does human trafficking happen,” which a lot of people type into Google. By writing a blog post about that topic and linking to it from Google Ads, a nonprofit whose mission relates to that phrase will be attracting people who also care about human trafficking.
Any nonprofit can do this. It’s simply a matter of figuring out what people type into search engines that relates to your mission, and then producing content that answers those queries.
Once those people find your site and appreciate the content you created for them, all that remains is to capture their email address. Thus the reason to have the email signup form ready to go before you invest the time to create this new content.
This is just a sampling of a couple points from Dan’s presentation. But he was able to record his presentation on video.
You can get lifetime access to Dan’s presentation on how to use Google Ad Grants to grow your nonprofit’s email list.
Get Lifetime Access to Video
Dan also ran a booth during the rest of the AFP Northwest Forum for Strategic Fundraising and met a whole bunch of great people from all sorts of nonprofits trying to make the world a better place.
If you want to attend next year’s Forum, stay in touch with the AFP here.
Want more content (and huge discounts on things like this video)? Get weekly nonprofit fundraising and copywriting tips, strategies, and motivations in the ProActive Insights newsletter.
