Google Ad Grants for Nonprofits [Nonprofit Marketing with Grant Hensel, Part 4]

Transcript

Nonprofit Ad Grants Unveiled

[0:00] You can’t do an interview series on marketing nonprofits without talking about Google and Microsoft ad grants. Yes, I said grant, as in free money. But also grant, as in the name of my next guest, Mr. Grant Hensel, founder and CEO of Nonprofit Megaphone. Grant and I recently caught up in his hometown city of Chicago, home of deep-dish pizza, yes, I’m a fan, and da bears. Da bears. Did I just date myself? Listen, several times a year at TAG, we consult with a 5-1-C-3 that still doesn’t know that this Google, Microsoft grant money exists. But between Google and Microsoft, nonprofits can secure up to $13,000 in free monthly ad spend. Does it sound too good to be true? It’s not. In fact, there aren’t even too many strings attached. And the hurdles that are there?

Well, that’s exactly what Grant’s going to talk about, as well as keyword targeting strategies, achieving the required 5% minimum click-through rate on Google ad dollars. While using ad dollars to advertise on informational search queries is a good idea for NPOs, getting acclimated to responsive search ads, achieving higher quality scores with relevant content, and all the other things you would want to know when securing and optimizing an ad grant advertising spend. And if there’s anything we missed, please put it in the comments so we can address it in our nonprofit marketing white paper coming soon. Just a quick reminder, this is just one episode of a multi-part series all about marketing a nonprofit. Like what you hear? Do us a favor and offer a little donation in kind by liking this video. And for more nonprofit and niche marketing content, please hit subscribe. And now, Grant Hensel.

Introduction to Grant Hensel

[1:26] Music.

[1:36] Welcome back to another episode of the Niche Marketing Podcast. As always, I’m your host, Jon Bertino, founder and CEO of The Agency Guide. If you’re unhappy with your marketing agency, and let’s be honest, most people are, then I’m the guy to reach out to. We represent about 300 different carefully selected agencies and consultants to whom we match make brands based on scope of work, budget, things like that. Give us a shout if you need to talk about getting a new marketing agency. In the meantime, I’m here today with my guest, Grant Hensel. Hensel like pencil, you said, right? Hensel like pencil. All right. Got it. And you were the founder and CEO of Nonprofit Megaphone. Grant, welcome to the show. Thanks so much. Glad to be here.

So, I think we’re on something like our 25th, 26th episode, something like that. And repeated viewers might think that everybody I have on the show is somebody that I go way back with or have known for a long time. And sometimes that’s the case, but oftentimes it’s not. I mean, one of the reasons we do these shows is to meet new agencies, really get to know them, understand what they’re about. And of course, get some background on how to do effective marketing within a given niche. In this case, nonprofit marketing, which we’ll be talking about today. So really, we just met five minutes ago.

[2:43] I came to find you in the first place because you show up a lot for keyword searches related to how to market a nonprofit. So, congratulations. Kudos to you. Happy to help. Yeah. Lots of fun SEO work. I bet. And we should talk about that a little bit. But in the meantime, give our viewers and frankly me some additional background on your agency, how you got started, why you started it, and what you do. Totally. Yeah. So, everyone makes fun of me. My name is Grant, and I do, our company does the Google ad grant for nonprofits, which is yes, very funny. I didn’t realize that until like three years in. And anyway, so that’s, that shows you my sense of humor, but.

[3:21] We do the Google ad grant and now actually the Microsoft ad grant as well, which are programs that Google and Microsoft have that gives nonprofits money to spend on ads in for Google, specifically Google search results that helps them reach their audiences. And we’ve been at it for eight years now, we serve about 770 something clients all around the world and have a lot of fun. Yeah. Eight years, you said. Eight years. What was the inspiration to start the agency in the first place? Yeah. I have been, I’ve wanted to be an entrepreneur since I was 12. And this is business number like eight, many of which just completely failed.

That’s how you know you’re onto something because this one’s stuck. Exactly. Yeah. I can tell the success from failure very clearly having experienced plenty of failure. But, uh, the, the initial impetus was I learned about the Google ad rent college and it’s a cool resource. Google gives nonprofits $10,000 a month every month to spend on ads in Google search. And many of the nonprofits that I knew had no idea. They’d never heard about it. The program has been around for like over a decade, 10, 15 years now.

[4:25] We did a survey where we, I emailed 300 nonprofits out of the blue and said, have you heard two question survey? Have you heard of the Google ad grant and are you using it? And 75% said either no, we’ve not heard of it or we’re not using it. Second question was if you could reach more people who are searching for things in Google that were related to what you do, would that be helpful? And everyone said five out of five. Yes. So, it’s like, okay, the answer to your issue in question two is in question one. There’s a gap here. Yeah, we should do some.

[4:54] With that. Yeah. Excellent. And before we get into the nuances of the Google ad grant and Microsoft grant as well, just briefly on yourself, Grant, we’re in Chicago right now. We’re at the Chicago podcast studio. Shout out to Tom, the owner and founder and your local, of course, I flew out to see you, but, uh, did you grow up in this area and how far away is the agency? And, uh, tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah. I grew up in Chicago. I’ve lived here my whole life. I went to suburb school, like in college in the suburbs, so I’ve got to get out more, but yeah, I love Chicago. You’re a townie. Yeah. Despite the brutal cold sometimes.

[5:28] And, uh, yeah, I, I live in Pilsen, which is neighborhood on the Southwest side of the city, but our company is completely remote. So, we have 80 people.

The Importance of Google and Microsoft Grants

[5:36] Um, we have some folks in Alaska is I think the further one person in Germany, everyone else is in the U S just from sea to shining sea. So, it’s a lot of fun. All right. Excellent. Well, thanks for that. All right. Very good. So again, we really want to focus on digital ad management for nonprofits, particularly through the lens of the grant programs offered by Google and Microsoft. Let’s actually start with the latter. I think if you’re in the industry, a lot of folks do know about the Google ad grant, but don’t know about Microsoft. Tell us a little bit about Microsoft’s program, how it may or may not differ from Google, and what nonprofits should know about the Microsoft offering. Yeah.

The Google grant and the Microsoft grant are both very powerful opportunities, but in very different ways. So, Google, $10,000 a month, Microsoft, $1,000 a month. So less. There is a caveat where if you spend $800 of real money, they will give you an extra $2,000. So, it’s like, it’s either $1,000 or $3,000 depending on… Anyway, it’s a good deal, actually. And the reason that the Microsoft grant is so interesting, and a lot of our clients have gotten a lot of value out of it is because there are no restrictions on what you can do with it. So, the Google ad grant is just Google search. Can’t do display, can’t do remarketing, can’t do YouTube, any of those things. Microsoft, you can do all that. As long as it’s a Microsoft owned and operated property. So, like in Outlook, like ads in Outlook or display ads on owned and operated sites like MSN.com or things like that.

[7:02] You can do remarketing, you can do all these different types of things, which is great.

[7:07] So yeah, two unique things. The Microsoft Ad Grant was created about two years ago, like a year and a half, two years ago. It went through a beta where there’s an initial group of folks that were on it.

[7:21] There is now some additional beta testing that’s happening. And so, it is not publicly available yet, but we have been able to use it for a number of clients because we work closely with the Microsoft folks who are incredible and are just trying to fully vet out how the program can be most helpful. So, it’s been a lot of fun. And I’d imagine your recommendation to most nonprofits is to pursue both, right? Right. 100% pursue both. Yeah. For Microsoft, you, so you can’t just get it. Um, but if you get basically fill out the interest form and create a Microsoft for nonprofits account, because that then makes you eligible. And like, if you’re, yeah, if you’re extremely passionate about it and you’re potentially interested in the spending the $800 to get the 3000, feel free to reach out to us. Cause that is an area of focus for us. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Got it.

Navigating Google Ad Grant Eligibility

[8:12] And then on Google, but what about eligibility and the application process there? Can any nonprofit get $10,000 a month in free ad spend or are there significant limitations? Yeah, almost. So, any nonprofit that’s a 501c3 and not a hospital or a school can get it, period, full stop, as long as you have a decent website. So, if you have a website that doesn’t exist, it won’t work. But other than that.

[8:35] You don’t have to have, you can have $0 in revenue, you can have a billion dollars in revenue, you just can’t be a hospital or school, and you have to be a 501c3. But other than that, everyone, $10,000 a month forever. There’s no time limit. You have to keep following the rules.

There are rules you have to follow, but it’s an awesome opportunity. Wow. And just to reiterate, 10K indefinitely and no limitations. So even if you’re like a coalition of a 501c3 dedicated to the arts in the community. 100%. We have a ton of clients like that. Absolutely. Awesome. All right. And how grueling is this application process? Is it, um, well, let us know. Yeah. The application, if you know what you’re doing is not grueling, which is the good news. The, the more difficult part is, um, running the ad account and fulfilling the

Compliance Requirements for Ad Grants

[9:25] compliance requirements that Google has, which we can talk about if you want. Yeah. Let’s go in there next. Yeah. The application itself, not crazy. You have to have a website. You have to have Google analytics and conversion tracking set up so that there’s some kind of conversion optimization. Google wants you to spend money to accomplish something meaningful and not just drive meaningless clicks to a page for no reason. But yeah, other than that, you create an account with Google for nonprofits, which is google.com slash grants. And then… You basically set up an ad account. You do not put in a payment method.

[9:58] Crucial, crucial, crucial, do not put in a payment method because then they review your application, and they basically apply grant funds. You never have a payment method in the account such that you’re not ever spending real money. Right. So, if you did put in a payment method, Google would start charging your car? 100%. Exactly. And they say it over and over in the setup process, do not put in a payment method because you will get charged. So, in my research preparing for this interview, I came across this idea of compliance requirements.

This is a new thing to me. And as you alluded to a few moments ago, they’re significant. So, tell us a little bit about how you may stay compliant and therefore continue to receive this stipend, this grant money. Totally. Google has put compliance requirements in place to make sure that it’s high-quality traffic. They’re giving a lot of money away. And so they don’t want to dilute the quality of the search results by people just advertising dumb random crap that’s not related to what people are searching for so there’s a bunch of them I’ll give you a bunch from memory there are more but the key ones that are most impactful are you have to maintain a five percent or greater click-through rate on the account as a whole just as a general sign of quality you have to have google has this thing called a quality store for each of your keywords You have to have no, um, keywords with a two or lower in the quality stores out of 10.

[11:18] You have to follow best practices. Like you have to have multiple ad groups per campaign, which is like clusters of ads that are like around a very specific, uh, set of keywords. You have to use certain extensions. So, like site link extensions you have to use. You do. Yeah. You must. It’s like, you must use site link extensions. Yes. Um, interesting, which is interesting. any particular reason why it’s yeah just they basically back in the day like probably six years ago it was much more wild west like do whatever you want knock yourself out and they found that there were some quality issues creeping into search results and they basically looked at like the advertisers who are actually doing this well what are they doing and then they said we’re just to make that the best practice and so that’s where all these things came from you can’t use single word keywords unless it’s like right specific exception which makes sense it’s like yeah it’s a little broad. Right. You can’t just put art. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. You’re geo-targeting us to make sense. So, like if you’re a Chicago art nonprofit, you should probably target like not the entire world. Got it.

[12:22] Okay. There are several things that come to mind as you, as you went through that list, the 5% minimum conversion rate, how difficult is that to achieve? Yeah. So, the 5% minimum click-through rate is click-through rate. Yeah. Click-through rate. Yeah. You have to also; you have to have some conversions. They’re like, it’s supposed to be between like, like a 1% and 15% conversion rate or something like that. Cause it’s like, if it’s too high, it means you’re probably tracking.

[12:49] Not legitimate conversions and if it’s zero then there’s an issue but yeah our average I was looking at this the other day our average account has like a nine percent click-through rate or something so it’s not it is not the end of the world like if it’s definitely I’d say it’s definitely very doable actually even though it sounds kind of high but it’s pretty good when the non-profits come to you in the first place how common is it that they are struggling to hit the five percent click-through rate. Yeah. More, more common, certainly. And it’s also, it is extremely common that nonprofits are struggling to spend any meaningful component of the ad grant where it’s like, hey, we have it. We’re spending 50 bucks a month. What’s happening.

And a lot of that is just because it takes a lot of work because you can’t, you can’t do dumb stuff, which would allow you to spend a lot of money. Like Google basically stops you from wasting even if you wanted to. And so, if you want to spend it and have it not been wasted, you just have to set up tons of very tightly targeted ad groups and have like lots of keywords.

[13:52] Well, that’s precisely where I want to go with you next, because this idea that it’s actually difficult to spend the money again is something that came up time and time again. So, I think you just touched on it. Lots of keywords, lots of ad groups. Can you take that a few steps further or perhaps start with why is it that it’s so hard to spend the money? And then how do you spend the money. It’s funny because you would only have these conversations in a situation like

Overcoming Spending Challenges

[14:15] this, but help our listeners spend their money. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It’s so funny. It’s, it’s such a different, it’s the exact opposite of normal. Right. Pay this. It’s like easy to.

[14:31] Again, Google, they won’t let you spend money if they don’t think it’s going to be relevant, if they don’t think there’s going to be a good landing page experience. Right. The other nuance with Google ads is that the ads show up below any paid ads. So, if you and I were both advertising on the same keyword, like adopt a dog, maybe you’re a for-profit animal related organization and I’m a humane society. If you run ads on adopt a dog and you bid one cent, you will appear above me. Even if I bid like it’s, it’s normally like maximized conversions bidding. So, it’s dynamic, but like, even if I bid a hundred dollars, I’m still coming in number two.

Got it. So that’s, that’s part of it is sometimes people will only target very competitive keywords where you’re not going to show up no matter what, because basically all the spots have been filled by paid advertisers. So, it’s like, okay, that’s, that’s rule number one. You have to be sort of creative to think about where, what types of things are my audience searching that maybe have a little less direct commercial intent. So, there’s not going to be as much competition. Right. Adopt a dog actually works well because there’s, there’s not that much paid competition for that, but like, you know, like, uh, why puppy mills are a problem is like a great keyword for a nonprofit that no for-profits can advertise on. So, it’s thinking about and finding more top funnel informational based queries.

[15:48] So that’s one of the big keys. and that’s maybe a good segue to talking a little bit about broad versus phrase versus exact if you don’t mind could you first define those terms and then talk a little bit about how you think through them and setting up your campaigns totally yeah so broad is these are three match types for keywords where you can tell google you can give google a keyword and you’re basically telling google how broadly do you want me to interpret this so broad is like if i put like dogs it could be anything related to dogs or like adopt a dog it could be anything even related to that.

[16:23] Broadly yep phrase number two is things that are i was literally looking at this definition i wish i could do it from memory like two days ago it’s things that are using those keywords or have very similar intent so like adopt a dog could be like humane societies for dogs or whatever is probably like pretty much the same intent. Maybe that’s a little close enough. And then exact is like, no, no, no. I really want someone to be basically saying exactly adopt a dog, just that term or something so, so, so, so similar. It’s virtually indistinguishable.

So yeah, we almost exclusively in the Google grant, which is very weird for normal advertising use broad because we are trying to discover where the pockets of search volume are that we can compete. And like we put out broad keywords and then we find other keywords from the search terms, which is Google basically telling you like you put adopt a dog we also showed it on adopt a pet and therefore we’re like oh good course adopt a pet and then we’d make an ad group for adopt a pet so yeah we’re very much using broad.

[17:27] Which is very different from normal. Yeah. And I’d imagine extensive split testing is part of this, right? You just alluded to, oh, let’s change out dog with pet. What happens if we put cat in there or what happens when you put old dog, young dog, things like this, I would imagine. A hundred percent. Yeah. And in a normal world, you’d be like, let’s split tests and then let’s prune the lowest performing. We’d say let’s split test and then let’s do all of them until you get to a point where you’re spending the whole $10,000 a month. Then you can think about pruning, but that’s much more difficult than it sounds. Got it.

[17:59] Today’s episode is brought to you by The Agency Guide. Are you frustrated with an underperforming marketing agency?

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They’re marketing professionals. They’re agency matchmakers. They’re The Agency Guide. To learn more, visit www.theagencyguide.com today. Let’s talk ad copy and headlines a little bit. Each in their own right is its own trial and error and process to master. So, let’s start with headlines. Any tips for listeners about how to optimize headlines for ad campaigns. Totally. Google used to have what they called expanded text ads, because again, these are just ads in search results. When you type something in Google, ad shows up at the top. The format is three headlines.

[19:32] And then up to three headlines and up to two description blocks. The headlines are 30 characters each separated by a little vertical line. Could be three, could be two. Descriptions are 90 characters each. Could be one, could be two. And then you have other stuff like ad extensions.

[19:47] The way Google does it now is they call them responsive search ads where they just say, give us 10 headline options that we will mix, and match and we’ll do the split testing for you. Thank you very much. Don’t worry about it.

Give us up to four descriptions. We’ll do the split testing there. Have a nice day. So, you, we used to do, we’d have at least two ads that would compete against each other. And then you can like pause one and bring in a new challenger. Basically, now responsive search ads do a lot of that for you. It takes forever to write them because you have to think of 10 headlines that are all as close to 30 characters as possible. That all makes sense when combined in any order, which is actually more difficult than it sounds.

I had this experience myself recently, not with a nonprofit, but with testing promoting our studio in New Jersey. And I was actually surprised to see that Google had made this switch where they want to handle the split testing for you. When did that happen exactly? The responsive search ads, I think have been around for a couple of years, two years, maybe three years now, but then they turned off expanded text ads, the old ones. I want to say a year and a half, time flies, but a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago. Across all Google ads. It’s just like, it’s done. Have a nice day. Your old ads can still run, but they can’t be edited, and new ads have to be responsive search ads.

Ad Copy and Headline Optimization

[21:08] Interesting. Which is for the best. They do work well, but just a little more effort. Yeah. As far as optimizing those headlines and descriptions, Google does it all for you at this point. But you need to be creative enough to, you touched, you mentioned this, I think it’s really important. If they’re going to be switching out the headlines, it needs to make sense with all the different descriptions.

Doesn’t that create all kinds of limitations that cause problems? Yeah. We’re, we haven’t, we’ve, we’ve probably gotten used to it. We just, you just have to think about it in like a modular way. So, like the organization’s name, that’s a good one. Maybe you have a couple of calls to action that like will probably make sense because Google is smart enough not to, it’s not going to be like organization name, click here. We have dogs. It’ll, it’ll be smart enough to like to put the call to action at the end and things like that.

Um, but we’ve actually, I don’t know, maybe I’m just a nerd, but we’ve really liked it. Surprisingly. Okay, good. You found a way to make it work for you. And just to be clear, I mean, if you’re a shelter that has both dogs and cats, you could just start a different. Yes, exactly. A different, we would say definitely create a different ad set or different campaign or however you want to structure it. So that it’s like people looking for dogs. Okay. The dog ad. All right. Very good. So as always, tracking and analytics is important. Could you give some advice to listeners on best practices for setting up tracking and analytics? Totally. You have to do tracking and analytics with the Google Ad Grant, which is a good discipline. It’s always valuable.

[22:33] We use Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Google Analytics integrates very nicely with Google Ads. So, you can just, you basically set up a goal in Google Analytics. You can import it in and now all your data talks to each other really nicely. Google Tag Manager is awesome. is maybe underutilized. Most of our clients have not heard of it. They’re like, what is this?

Yes. And it’s surprisingly, it’s a no code way to track stuff that might happen on your website that’s not a page view. So, like someone filling out a form or clicking on a link or expanding a little thing, watching a video, like all those types of things. Our philosophy is track everything possible that you care about and then prioritize the things that you most want the algorithm of them to optimize for in terms of conversions.

Tracking and Analytics Best Practices

[23:19] But we like, we like tracking everything imaginable just because we think it’s interesting. And if you can’t track with Google analytics, you can almost always track it with Google tag manager, import it in. There are tons of, there’s like YouTube videos on how to do this. It’s yeah.

[23:34] It’s a lot of fun. Are there specific KPIs that you find are most important to track against, or does it vary pretty significantly depending on the business? Yeah, it varies a ton. Like donations, obviously always good to track anything around volunteering or people like filling out forms to do something like to sign a petition or like adopt a dog or make an e-commerce transaction. All that stuff is always valuable. Many of our clients are also advocacy oriented. So, like someone watching a video or downloading a.

[24:04] A resource on something can be very valuable. Um, email newsletter signups. It’s, it’s pretty, it’s all your normal.

Understanding Quality Score

[24:11] You’re tracking all of it. Yeah, exactly. It’s just track everything. Okay. You made reference to quality score earlier. And that reminds me that we should a define that and then B talk a little bit about improving it. And then related to that C just landing page CRO in general. So, let’s start with what is quality score and how do you improve it? Totally. So, quality store is a one through 10 metrics that Google gives you in your ad sets. It’ll show you like for the keywords. So, let’s say I had adopted a dog as my, as my keyword, it’ll give me a one to 10 store. And it’s based on three factors whose names I can never get right off of memory, but it’s like landing page experience, ad relevance, and one other one.

[24:57] I can’t remember what it is, but something else. Yeah. We’ll put it on the screen above you. Exactly. And there it is. Basically, it’s all about what is the experience for the searcher. So, are you showing a very high-quality ad that’s highly relevant to what the person’s searching? So, if you Google adopt a dog, am I showing you an ad that says adopt a dog near me in a geography that’s relevant? That is a good, that’s a good like ad relevance.

It’s based on click-through rate as well, in part. So, like when people see the ad, are they actually clicking on it? But landing page experience takes into account a number of factors. So, if you click on the adopt a dog ad and you immediately hit the back button, bad news. Clearly, you didn’t find what you’re looking for. If instead you’re looking on the page, you’re going to other pages, you’re doing a conversion action, which Google can see because Google Analytics, those are signs to Google that this is a good thing.

[25:50] You’re finding what you’re looking for. There are other things with just like conversion optimization in general. One of the things that we recommend the most, even though it can be more difficult, is just page load speed. Simple stuff about Google has great and other people have great tools that give you data on your page load experience on desktop, on mobile.

How fast does the first thing appear? How long does it take the last thing to appear? Yep. All that stuff. Do you guys support clients specifically with the website improvements? We do not. So that’s why we’re thrilled to be connected with folks like you who can refer them to people who can. Awesome. Yeah. Sounds good.

[26:29] Okay. But you’ll provide, it sounds like a list of recommendations for improving landing pages to increase quality score. Totally. Okay, great. And how, this is a little bit of a loaded question, but how important would you say it is to get those landing pages is just right. Yeah. It matters. It matters a lot. I think the thing that for Google ad grants in particular that matters even more than normal is having content that’s relevant to what people are searching for.

So, if I’m a humane society, maybe I right now can efficiently deploy like a thousand dollars a month of the Google ad grant because that’s the only search volume that I could have a truly relevant piece of content for. So actually, sometimes what can be most impactful as adding new pages like that are like blog posts that are informational that address an issue um or that answer a question a searcher might have because that can open up huge additional avenues of search volume that you can then run google ads for google the google ad grant is almost like a.

[27:29] It’s almost like a middle point between SEO like search engine optimization and paid ads, in that it is cheaper than paid ads, that’s nice, and faster than SEO, but still.

[27:44] Has some… It’s slower than paid ads, and it’s less of a laser pointer than paid ads. And so anyway, thinking about the Google Ad Grant almost as an SEO extension can be helpful, and thinking about like what types of content can we create. I think that’s really interesting. And you touched on that earlier because if essentially the clicks and the ads don’t actually cost the organization money, that frees you up to send people to a lot more of the, as we referenced earlier, top and middle of the funnel, which a normal advertiser might not do because they’re less likely to get a conversion off of that.

So, now you’re building out all this informational content that you can drive the traffic to, but you can drive that traffic immediately versus needing to actually rank. Totally. Yeah, exactly. That’s a really interesting takeaway. If nothing else, I hope listeners take that away.

[28:40] Before we move off of landing page design and conversion and optimization, I’m curious to get your take, understanding that this isn’t what your agency does, but I want your professional opinion on brand aesthetic. I mean, there must be times when you get opportunities and you’re like, boy, this identity is a mess. The messaging is a mess. So as an inside outsider is how I think I would define you, right?

[29:05] What’s your take on dialing in the brand? I mean, what’s your honest take? if you don’t think it really is all that mission critical and you’ve seen great results without a dialed in brand identity, let us know. If conversely, you’ve seen it to be the case, let us know that as well. Yeah, it definitely helps. We have seen organizations where their website is so bad that Google does require you to have a minimum standard of website.

And the standard is not unattainable, but there are, it is possible to have a website that’s so bad that Google just says like, I’m sorry, you got to fix this up. And then like, maybe we can do this ad grant thing. So, there’s definitely minimum standard. And I do think that it is, I think that brand and credibility often go hand in hand and credibility and fundraising often go hand in hand. And so, we would very much encourage nonprofits to invest in that where possible and where appropriate in a way where if you’re embarrassed to show your website to someone who you don’t know or who’s a family member or something, and if they would wonder, why would I support this organization?

[30:11] Are they truly competent if they have a website that was made in 1980 or by its appearances? experiences that can be a issue that’s surprisingly easy to solve with the right folks, which are not us, but that you know, sure can totally help. For sure. I mean, listeners might be thinking, well, boy, obviously a cleaner website is a good thing, but all the time, small businesses, or in this case, small organizations, and honestly, nonprofits who are resource constrained will have fairly ugly.

The Impact of Brand Aesthetic

[30:41] or antiquated looking websites. And they want to move forward with driving the traffic and the marketing and they’ll, it would behoove them if nothing else to see a higher conversion and click-through rate. Well, conversion rate in particular, because they’ve cleaned up that site. Now I have seen the opposite also be true, maybe not in the nonprofit space, but for just companies in general, where they’ve gotten so carried away with this artsy aesthetic and crazy, right.

The navigation’s crazy. Have you ever come across situations where you were where you say, hey, your website’s too complicated or too fancy to actually get the types of conversions we want. Yeah, not in the nonprofit world, fortunately. I’ve seen it with, I’ve seen it in the for-profit agency often world. It’s like, this is so cool. Like, did you know you can do this with HTML? And it’s like, well.

Success Stories from Nonprofit Partnerships

[31:28] I just want to see the contact form. Right. Yeah, exactly. Gotcha. Could you talk us through a few specific success stories as a way to demonstrate your process of, you know, how it starts, how you build it out for them and the ultimate end result? Totally. So, I’ll give maybe three quick ones. Yeah, great. Take your time. We have an organization that I love called COPD Foundation. COPD is a respiratory issue. you.

And they have, they came to us, I don’t even know, five or six years. It’s been a while. Wonderful people. They have a screening tool that people can take for free through their website that identifies, are you at risk of COPD or is there something that maybe you should have medical attention to? And that is a great, again, going back to the whole, like finding the right keywords and, and using the Google grant in a really smart way. That is a brilliant application of the Google ad grant. It’s pretty top of funnel, but it’s also meaningful in terms of the outcome.

[32:29] Probably tens of thousands of people at this point have taken that just because, because we tracked it as a conversion, of course, just because of ads through the Google ad grant. And I don’t know this, it’s public, its private health information, so I never will know. But I imagine that many people have realized like, I should have a conversation with a doctor about a health condition that maybe I have.

And it’s very fun and meaningful for us to be like, like we run, ultimately, we run ads, we sit behind computers and us, we click buttons and it’s cool to see that sometimes that relates to like very meaningful things for people. So, it’s just like, that’s fun. And it’s, it’s exactly in line with our mission about like education and equipping people with resources and.

[33:08] It’s also a good illustration of what we talked about earlier, where it’s like a hybrid between SEO, GPC. You built that great piece of content. It’s mid funnel content, but then you can drive the paid traffic right to it and you wouldn’t have to go through some of the normal hoops to get that to rank. Great. So that’s obviously extremely rewarding project. What others did you want to go for? Totally.

Yeah. So that’s super fun. We have, um, a organization called UNCF, which supports and provides scholarships for historically black colleges and universities, HBCUs. And they do awesome work with that, giving out millions and millions of dollars of scholarships a year. And especially in the past couple of years when racial issues have been more on the popular discourse.

[33:53] Using the Google grant, they have raised, I think it’s like over a hundred thousand dollars of just people Googling things, typically not related to donations, just related to the work they do, coming to the website, seeing what’s going on and realizing like, this is incredible. I want to get involved in this and just donating through the, through the online donation form, which is not, I will say is not always it’s that’s rarer.

Like the Google ad grant is a great marketing tool. It’s not a great fundraising tool because it’s typically more top of funnel, more getting exposure and awareness, but sometimes it does work, and we love it. We love it when it does. Yeah. And then lots of other ones. Um, this is, this is another health one, I guess, but, um, we have an organization that we just, we just support a lot of the stuff they do, uh, in terms of promoting their events and their research and, um, uh, their content.

[34:46] It’s called EB Research Partnership. They do research. It’s like venture philanthropy for a rare disease whose scientific name I can’t pronounce, but it’s called like butterfly syndrome where basically you’re born without the ability for your skin to heal. So, you get a cut and it’s just like you’re cut on your hand forever, basically. So yeah, they’re called like butterfly children where it’s like so delicate as to be like a butterfly. And they, They, anyway, we’ve been involved with them for years. They had, this is more of them story than a us story, so I’m not taking credit for this at all, but they got the first FDA approval of a drug to treat a component of this disease ever in the history of the world. And it’s just fun.

[35:31] So yeah, on the way to us, not taking credit for that, but we love working with these organizations. It must be really rewarding to be surrounded by these types of mission-oriented organizations and businesses all day, every day, and doing what you can to help them survive and succeed. So, you mentioned just a few moments ago about fundraising and how Google ad grants in general isn’t necessarily a direct means to an end to raise those funds, but nonetheless, it can lead to it.

You know, certainly a recurring theme throughout our entire nonprofit marketing series is fundraising, because it’s key. Again, kind of positioning you as that outsider, inside outsider, I think is what I said earlier. Anything you’ve learned or you’ve seen as it relates to effective fundraising as a result of your eight years of work in the nonprofit space?

Effective Fundraising Insights

[36:23] We have seen, we have 750 clients or whatever, 770. We have a lot of clients. And so, we have a front row seat into what works and what doesn’t work, marketing and fundraising.

[36:36] And the biggest takeaway that we’ve had, because we think about this a lot, is that It’s hard to do for some organizations, but to the greatest extent that you can have some form of value exchange as it relates to your fundraising is very valuable. And that could look like offering products that support what you do. And we have various fair-trade organizations. All our humane societies have animal adoption. There’s a fee associated with that to help cover the cost. So that helps a lot. Um, we also have seen, so that’s, that’s on the one side is like have things that are worth that are, they’re pretty clear value propositions for people.

[37:15] The other thing that we’ve seen is that the more you are just out there in the world, the more serendipity can happen and have fundraising happen in ways that you would not expect. So, we had a client a couple of years ago where they got a gift from someone’s, um, estate after they’d passed away from a, the lawyer who was tasked with wrapping up the estate, there was a line in the will that said, please give this to a local animal organization.

And they just Googled local animal organization. They clicked on an ad, and they gave a decent amount of money to this nonprofit. And they actually, somehow, they called and said that. They’re like, hey, anyway, we clicked on an ad and be like, you’re so great. And anyway, we’re giving you this gift. And so that is the other thing. As you can’t predict it, you will never be able to forecast it effectively, but being out there, does often help in unsurprising ways. So, awareness, for sure. That’s one of the reasons that you should maximize your ability to get both Google and the Microsoft Ad Grants. Out of curiosity, do any of the social media platforms offer something similar?

[38:20] Not to my knowledge. And we look all the time. So, I don’t think it’s out there.

Exploring Social Media Opportunities

[38:24] We would love that if other social platforms ever did. It is a great, great community outreach. And it’s a great way to get nonprofits familiar with your ad platform in ways that can drive your normal business as well. So, how about that, Facebook? Yeah, how about it? All right, great. Well, I think that covers it pretty good. Is there any aspects around Google Ad Grants that you don’t think we covered well?

I think we hit the highlights. It was awesome. All right, excellent. Well, so for those that want to get in touch with you, Grant, have you helped them manage some of their Google or Microsoft Ad Grants? What’s the best way to get in touch with you? Yeah, just nonprofitmegaphone.com is our website. site. My email is grant, G-R-A-N-T, at nonprofitmegaphone.com. And happy to help, even if just pointing you in the right direction. Happy to help however we can. Excellent. Thanks for being with us.

[39:10] Music.