Guest post by Grant Hensel, CEO of Nonprofit Megaphone

Nonprofit organizations are renowned for their ability to achieve great things with limited resources. Despite having tax-exempt status, being a nonprofit requires the pursuit of stable revenue streams. Often, this takes the form of fundraising. Successful nonprofits have a diverse range of fundraising activities, ensuring that their revenue isn’t tied to the success or failure of one particular venture.

Even if an organization has conducted a successful fundraising campaign for many years, these campaigns can stagnate. Stagnation, or the fear of stagnation, requires that nonprofit professionals find new ways to enhance and promote their fundraising efforts.

At Nonprofit Megaphone, we help nonprofit organizations share their mission with the world. To do this, we help organizations acquire, maintain, and utilize the Google Ad Grant. The Ad Grant is a cost-effective way for nonprofits to participate and thrive in digital marketing. While the Grant can be employed to achieve numerous goals, many of our clients use the Grant to boost the performance of various fundraising streams. 

Simply put, the Google Ad Grant is an opportunity available to eligible nonprofits that give them a monthly allocation of Google advertising dollars. With the Grant, your organization will run Google Ads, which are sponsored links that appear in relevant web searches. These links are valuable, as your team can use them to drive traffic to your website. Further, using the Grant is often more efficient than traditional marketing, as you can use the data provided by Google to tweak and modify your ads for better results. We recommend the Google Ad Grant because it’s a cost-effective way to meet nearly any fundraising, marketing, or communications goal.

With our experience, we have three tips that will help you use the Google Grant to enhance your fundraising strategy:

1. Use KPIs To Determine Future Fundraising Strategies

2. Optimize Your Email Outreach

3. Build Out Content In Your Website To Make The Most Of Your Google Ad Grant

Use KPIs To Determine Future Fundraising Strategies

There are many ways for your organization to raise funds. However, determining which are worth your time and resources is a crucial strategic decision. Whether you’re looking to enhance your current strategies or looking for a new venture, a data-driven approach will be to your advantage.

The Google Ad Grant gives you access to a full suite of data and analytics tools in the Google Ads interface. Further, Google Ads easily integrates with Google Analytics, allowing you to analyze the performance of your ads in addition to your overall website performance. Using this data, you can identify where you’re having fundraising success and where you may be able to benefit from future investment.

Important metrics are called Key Performance Indicators. What qualifies as a KPI depends on your organization and its priorities, but there are a few important metrics for nearly every Google Ads Account.

Impressions

Impressions are one of the most common metrics in Google Ads. An impression is registered every time an ad appears in a Google Search. Impressions can tell you a lot about your ad’s performance but often need other metrics to see the bigger picture. 

Strong impressions may indicate that your ad is relevant to a highly-searched topic, an essential part of any Google Ad campaign. However, if those impressions don’t lead to clicks, conversions, or other engagement metrics, it indicates that your Ad copy isn’t enticing enough. Even with good corresponding engagement metrics, low impressions may signify that the topic can only reach a narrower audience.

Clicks

A click is registered whenever someone clicks on your Google Ad and is taken to your website. As one of the most basic engagement metrics, clicks are an indicator of ad success. As such, tweaking your ads to generate more clicks is always a good thing. It’s also important to be mindful of your ad’s Click-Through Rate. This number is generated by dividing the number of clicks your ad generates by its impressions. Google requires that you maintain a 5% or greater CTR throughout your account. A higher CTR shows that your ads are operating efficiently, targeting the right audience and enticing them to engage with your organization.

Conversions

Of all engagement metrics, conversions are the grand prize. A conversion is registered any time a user makes an action of value on your website. In the context of fundraising, the act of making a donation, purchase, or other transaction would be a notable conversion. Using Google Analytics, you can set up conversion tracking and get detailed information about how users interact with your website.

 In conjunction with Google Ads, you can learn which ads directly lead to fundraising conversions and prioritize those campaigns. With these KPIs, you’re able to learn more about your fundraising audience and what’s important to them. You can also gain insights into which audiences and topics should be targeted for future fundraising campaigns.

Optimize Your Email Outreach

Email outreach is an integral part of any marketing or communications campaign. Having a base of engaged email subscribers allows you to easily broadcast updates and opportunities to those who support your organization. Further, a solid foundation of email outreach can bolster existing fundraising streams and help launch new ones. There are a few ways the Google Ad Grant can help you grow your email list and identify what these users want from your organization.

Successful campaigns will track conversions that harvest email data. Your team can do this in a few ways but most commonly, in the form of a newsletter. Newsletters are a great way to spread your message, but also to keep stock of your engaged supporters. The Google Ad Grant can help grow your email list by driving users to pages where a newsletter sign-up is a prominent Call To Action on the page.

You can also gather email addresses in a few indirect ways. For example, you could require an email for other conversions that happen on your website. These conversions include:

• Making a purchase

• Downloading a file

• Registering for an event

Users who make these conversions are unlikely to be dissuaded by entering their email address beforehand. Attaching email submissions to conversions is an efficient way to use your Google Ad Grant and enhance the overall effectiveness of your website.

Build Out Content In Your Website To Make The Most Of Your Google Ad Grant

Successful users of the Google Ad Grant have one thing in common: they consistently produce high-quality content that their audience wants to engage with. High-quality content is content that engages, interests, and is easily presented to a user. It leaves a mark in a user’s mind, often leading them to make a conversion or return to your site in the future.

Any site will benefit from high-quality content, but the Google Ad Grant can help drive traffic to the content. This increases the overall efficiency of producing content and gives you opportunities to introduce yourself to new users.

Good content will make users more likely to make conversions, some of which may be connected to valuable fundraising streams or necessary programs. Finally, the Google Ad Grant can give you a way to expand your audience by producing content that appeals to trending keywords or an underserved portion of your existing audience.

What constitutes high-quality content will differ between organizations depending on size, mission, or scope. However, things like videos, podcasts, and infographics are great candidates. For some organizations, users are looking for written content like blogs, essays, or Frequently Asked Questions. The key to producing high-quality content is identifying what your users want and presenting it to them in an easy, satisfying way.

Successful nonprofits will have a diverse set of programs and fundraising streams. This allows them to adapt, change, and grow as conditions develop in their communities. However, getting the most out of these strategies requires an investment in marketing to grow and maintain their audience.

The Google Ad Grant is an affordable and flexible way to maximize the value of your nonprofit’s existing investments. Taking advantage of the advertising provided by the  Google Ad Grant allows your organization to identify better where your fundraising streams are having the most success and where further investment is necessary. If your organization is running successfully but wants to maximize efficiency, consider applying for the Google Ad Grant yourself or by consulting a marketing agency.

About the Author:

Grant Hensel is the CEO of Nonprofit Megaphone, an agency focused 100% on Google Grant Management for nonprofits. NPM is honored to manage the Google Grant for 370+ leading nonprofits worldwide and to be an inaugural member of the Google Ad Grant Certified Professionals community.