Google Grants For Nonprofits: The Comprehensive Guide

Chapter 1: How the Google Ad Grant Works

Google Grant stipulations you need to know

Chapter 2: How to Apply for Google Grants

Step 1: Register with TechSoup

Step 2: Create a Google for Nonprofits Account

Step 3: Apply for Google Grant

Now that you are in your Google for Nonprofits account, you can apply for the Google Grant!

Go ahead and click “Enroll” under the Google Grant section, follow the steps very carefully to apply, because at this time you will be creating your actual AdWords account. Community Boost recommends moving through this part very slowly and carefully, be sure to follow each step as explained in the “AdWords account creation guide for Google Ad Grants”.

If you happen to not follow the steps mentioned, your application will be denied and you will have to re-enroll under and new AdWords account.

We recommend building your new account with only one campaign, one ad group, one ad, and a few keywords. Once approved, you can spend the time building the account more thoroughly, it is more important to get approved before really diving in and crushing a new AdWords account build.

Once you have submitted your new AdWords account customer ID number into the Google Grant enrollment, you will have to wait up to 10 days for approval. For this reason, you may want to map out checkpoints on a fundraising calendar. You will be notified via email or you can login into Google for Nonprofits to check your status. Some approvals take less than 48 hours!

Chapter 3: How to Get Started When Approved

Develop Your Google Grant strategy funnel and understand your target audience

Before your nonprofit marketing team dives deep into Google AdWords, it is important to take a step back and think about the most strategic, high-impact way to approach your Google Ad Grant. Remember, the majority of site traffic that you will receive from the Google Ad Grant will be for any first-time, new visitors.

Community Boost likes to first think about your nonprofit’s different personas or different key audience members. Who are the people you both serve and who are the people who donate and support your mission? What makes them tick, what are they searching for, what are their demographics/psychographics, and of course, where are they located?

Once you outline and/or build your nonprofit’s personas, it is time to think about your nonprofit’s digital marketing funnel. The Google Ad Grant has the potential to send upwards of 5,000+ additional website visitors every month. However, it is a big ask to expect someone who has never heard of your mission or brand to donate right away. That is why your marketing and development teams need to think about the messaging and touch points needed to inspire and move new visitors into long-term supporters. Asking for donations can be very difficult and need to be catered specifically to donors.

Chapter 4: Building Google Adwords Campaigns

Every Google AdWords account has two main aspects you need to know:

Finding Keywords

We will start by diving into the example of creating the ad group of “removing trash from our oceans” within our awareness campaign. The purpose of this campaign is to find people who have never heard of our nonprofit but are interested in helping the cause that we serve (saving our oceans).

The first thing we need to do is find out if there is search volume around this topic. For this, we will dive into the keyword planner. This is an amazing free tool offered by Google to find search volume around whatever people are searching for.

An Example search query: “Trash in our oceans”

When we type this into Google’s keyword planner, we will get a bunch of keywords relating to what we put in the keyword planner. You’ll notice there are both relevant and irrelevant keywords. This is because Google does not know exactly what we are looking for. We want to add all the relevant keywords surrounding “removing trash from our oceans”. To add these, click the arrow on the right side of the keyword.

Note, if there are not any relevant keywords from Google’s suggestions then this is an indication that people are not looking for this online and you will now want to test a different topic. We don’t want to spend time building out an ad group if it will never be triggered online.

Now that we have a list of relevant keywords, we want to save this to the account. Simply click the save button.

Writing Ads

Now that we have our keywords within our awareness campaign, more specifically our “removing trash from oceans” ad group, it’s time to write the ads for this ad group. The best practice for writing an ad is that you want to include the keyword someone typed in within your ad. This does two things: It shows the ad is relevant to what our user typed in and it helps with Google’s algorithm.

In the next part of the ad, you should concentrate on how to get people’s attention. You want to include either a benefit, statistic, or some other way that gets the attention of the user. The last thing that you need to be aware of is the call to action. Here we want to tell the user the action we want them to take once they click on your ad.

We highly recommend that you A/B test your ads which essentially means we are showing different ads to observe which performs best. For more in-depth explanations on this, refer to this blog post. 

Another important aspect for ensuring your success is location targeting. This is done at the campaign level under the settings tab. It’s important to realize that you can target your ads in any level of detail that you want. You can target at the country, county, city, and zip code levels. Additionally, you can even target within a radius of a certain location.

Ongoing Optimization

Once your Ad Grant is up and running, there are optimizations you can be doing on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis so that you get better results as time goes on. Keep in mind the more you put into it, the more you will get out of it. Below we will talk about negative keywords, ad group expansion, and changing ads.

Negative Keywords Research

In AdWords, you are able to see what exact keywords someone used to trigger and click your ad. Sometimes the search queries will be relevant and sometimes they will be irrelevant. Over time, the goal is to get 100% of the keywords to be relevant. In order to do this, you click the search terms tab to find the keywords that triggered your ad. You can scan the list of keywords and anything that is irrelevant you can add as a negative keyword. When you add a keyword as a negative keyword, it prevents your ad from showing in the future when someone uses that negative keyword.

Ad Group Expansion

You may not max out your full grant, so you will want to add in more ad groups. These ad groups can be around various events you have, new programs offered, current events relating to your nonprofit, or more relevant topics that you did not create when you first built the campaign. To do this, you repeat the process described earlier when creating an ad group.

Changing Your Ads

If you find you are not getting people clicking on your ads, try rewriting them to better appeal to your end user or pause the ads that are low performing because ideally, you are testing multiple ads for each ad group. These are only a few of the ways that you can optimize your account to get better results every month. For example, you can change what device your ads show up on, the time of day, and more.

Chapter 5: Utilizing Google Analytics

Importance of Google Analytics (GA)

When we talk about analytics, we’re really talking about the traffic and metrics collected from the people visiting your website. Google Analytics is an extremely powerful and free tool from Google that tracks, reports, and gives insights on all of your website traffic. Some of the most important reasons your organization should be using GA are:

Setting Up Analytics

Check out this Google Analytics video below or this setup guide from Community Boost, which breaks down the basics of setting up your own GA account so that your organization can begin to gather and use the valuable data it provides!

Google also has tons of additional resources that can walk you through the process if you get lost.

10 Quick Steps to Link Your AdWords and Analytics Accounts

1. Log into your Google Analytics account
2. On the bottom left-hand side of your account click > gear icon
3. In the middle column, under products, click > AdWords Linking
4. Click > New Link Group (You will then see a list of AdWords accounts)
5. Click > the AdWords account you are wanting to link and click > Continue (The accounts shown are based on the Gmail address you are logged in as at the time)
6. Under link configuration, you will want to click > Linked Views and then select your view and then press > Save
7. In your Google AdWords account click the little gear in the top right and click into > Account Settings
8. Expand the Linked Accounts on the left-hand side and click into > Google Analytics
9. Now you should have views available. Expand them and select the domain you are setting up. Click > the small Add button. Then press > Save
10. Celebrate! You have now successfully linked your AdWords account with Google Analytics

Google Data Studio Reports

Now that you have tons of insights about your website and AdWords account, what’s the best way to sort through it all? Google Data Studio reports are free, customizable reports that turn your data into informative dashboards. These reports are easy to read, easy to share, and can be fully customized to your organization.

You can read the Data Studio reports capabilities here, but you can see the outline of them all below.

Chapter 6: Drive Results and Revenue

Optimize Quality of New Visitors, Scale Traffic, and Increase Conversions

Are you currently asking for new visitors’ contact information? If so, how are you asking for it?

We’ve all seen the Call To Action: “Subscribe to our Newsletter” too many times to count, and most visitors will be numb to this messaging. Even though your team will still be sending out the same content, we want to rethink how we request a user’s information.

Think about the value that your nonprofit provides to its supporters. Why would people love hearing from you? Email addresses and mobile numbers are valuable, and we want to communicate that the visitor will be getting value in return. Turn your creativity on high and think of a new way to invite the user to your awe-inspiring, impact-laden, fun, and compassionate updates. Best practices for text message campaigns.

Options For Capturing Email and Mobile Numbers On-Site
Now that you have your new messaging and value offer defined, it’s time to think about how to implement them on your nonprofit’s website. We will examine some different methods of capturing new visitors’ contact information while they are on your site.

Let’s look at the Welcome Mat, the Scroll Box, and the traditional Pop-Up and Landing Pages.

Welcome Mats

Welcome Mats tend to have the highest conversion rate of all the elements we’re discussing here but can really frustrate users who already subscribe to your updates. This is because they must interact with the element before accessing your website. If you’re planning on using a Welcome Mat we’d recommend not showing it to mobile visitors (as interstitials hurt your organic mobile search results), and only targeting traffic that you know isn’t subscribed to your lists (like Google Grant traffic).

Scroll Boxes

Pop-Ups

Landing Pages

In exchange for their contact information, a Google Grant visitor to this page gets the content sent right to their email address.

In for-profit digital marketing, this strategy has been coined the “Lead Magnet” strategy, where organizations develop pieces of content that attract leads due to their innate value. The only option on this landing page should be to download this piece of content or go back. Keep links to your own site, phone numbers, and other calls to action off of this page.

That might sound cold or counter-productive, but if you put yourself in the visitor’s shoes it actually makes sense. That person is searching for specific information or answers (remember we identified them earlier), and instead of bombarding them with options we present them our version of a solution and let them choose whether or not to access it.

Be wary of the traffic you choose to send to this landing page from the Google Grant. We don’t want to send anyone here who is explicitly looking to get involved with your nonprofit. If you were a nonprofit solving child hunger, for example, we would not want to send a user searching “donate to end child hunger” to a landing page where they can only download a piece of content. We would want to send them directly to your site so they can complete their transaction.

On the other hand, we wouldn’t want to send a user typing in “hungry child statistics” to the full website (if we have a targeted Landing Page), as they would likely get what they’re looking for and never return. Instead, we would send “hungry child statistics” to a landing page offering a “Child Hunger Guide”- for example – in exchange for their contact information.

How To Structure Your Landing Page

Once you’ve chosen the need your landing page will meet, and built the content that delivers on it, it’s time to construct the actual page. There are incredible programs out there that let nonprofits build beautiful and professional landing pages. A few favorites are ClickFunnels, Unbounce, and LeadPages. There are differences in pricing and features offered between them, but they all accomplish the same goal.

Start off by finding a visually compelling image that creates an emotional feeling you want the page to have. If your nonprofit does not have these image assets internally, try checking unbounce.com, pixabay.com, or another free HD image-sharing site. You can also shop stock photos for the right image – it’s very worth it in the long run.

Headlines

Once you have chosen an image that sets the right tone for the page, you will write a headline that grabs the visitor’s attention. Surprising facts (Over 1 million children…), questions (Did you know…?), and assumed statements about the visitors’ behaviors (You’re here because you care) are just a few examples of headline categories that work well for landing pages. Stay away from calls to action here like “Help End Deforestation.” People that would respond to that kind of messaging should have been sent to your website in the first place – they are looking to get involved and don’t need to be warmed up with a landing page.

Body Copy

Underneath the headline is where your nonprofit can describe the offer and how it fulfills the need the visitor originally came to the page with. Giving some specific details about the content can be helpful here, and facts are good supporters in this section as well. Body copy following a strong headline can be anywhere from 2-6 sentences arranged in 1-2 paragraphs.

Take the needed time to sculpt your paragraphs properly as well. With a small amount of copy, your nonprofit should be able to arrange all of the words in a visually appealing fashion. Remember, we are ultimately asking for their contact information and need to build trust. The most trusted websites in the world are almost always clean-looking and have text that is uniform and well-related.

Additional Page Sections

What you want to say, following this preliminary offer section, is up to you. One section sharing what your organization does and its impact can be helpful for building credibility and trust, but we want to keep the overall focus on the piece of content and not your nonprofit. A section showing an image preview of the Lead Magnet and bullet pointing out additional pieces of information that are contained within is a great idea. Always end your landing page by offering the content one last time at the bottom of the page.

Conclusion

For nonprofit leaders that are frustrated by low website traffic and lackluster online revenue, the Google Ad Grant has proven to be one of the most consistent and scalable ways to accelerate and increase your organization’s impact.

We hope this guide empowers your nonprofit to not only get approved for your $10,000 per month Google Ad Grant, but more importantly, helps send thousands of qualified visitors every month that are inspired to support, volunteer, and donate to your cause.