NPO Musketeers recognizes the amazing work that nonprofit organizations do as they relentlessly work to complete their missions to make our communities better. As the musketeers for nonprofit organizations (NPOs) part of our mission is to support all other nonprofits – One For All!
Free & Discounted Marketing Services For Nonprofit Organizations
One of the reasons that NPO musketeers was founded was to provide free and discounted marketing services for nonprofits, with an emphasis on the Google Ad Grant. Nonprofits need marketing to spread awareness, raise funds, recruit volunteers and serve their beneficiaries. They may need services such as website design and development, social media management, creative & graphic design, and ad campaign management.
What is the Google Ad Grant?
The Google Ad Grant is a $10,000 monthly grant that Google gives to nonprofits in the form of advertising credit. This allows nonprofit organizations to appear at the top of Google’s search engine results. The Google search engine is arguably the most important advertising channel on the planet – they have over 5.5 billion searches a day, the searches are separated to show specific results by keywords, and they provide direct, targeted inbound results to people who are already looking for something to learn, something to do, or something to buy. One would think that with such a powerful resource available at their fingertips for free, all nonprofits would be using it! Such is not the case.
Why doesn’t every nonprofit use the ad grant?
Some organizations have never heard about this resource, or they don’t know enough about it, so naturally they don’t use it. This page can help you learn more about it. You can also learn more about all of Google’s Nonprofit Resources and use Google Help.
Some organizations disregard this resource because it’s not a cash grant; it only comes in the form of an advertising credit. While it is not cash, it can still be used to benefit your organization in multiple ways. The first is to make your organization more visible to your beneficiaries and this is the main reason Google extends this grant. In other words, a food bank would use it to advertise that food is available for people who are hungry. People who are hungry and are searching for food banks on Google would see the food bank at the top of search results. Beyond serving your beneficiaries, it’s also possible that the Google Ad Grant can be used to spread awareness of your organization and possibly even raise funds for your organization if managed creatively and as long as the campaigns do not violate Google policies. So while the Google Ad Grant is not a direct cash donation from Google, it is a free resource that can possibly be leveraged to raise funds for your organization. And if it takes a $10,000 budget to raise $200 for your organization, so what! Your organization got the ad budget for free and now you have $200, possibly more and possibly even a recurring resource for funds that you didn’t have before.
Some organizations recognize that while the ad budget is free, someone still has to create and manage the campaigns within the Google Adwords platform. If they don’t have a person within the organization that can manage those ads or if they don’t have the funds to pay a person to manage those ads, then they don’t use it. This is especially where NPO Musketeers can help.
A standard management fee for this type of advertising is 20% of the ad budget. That means if an organization hired someone to manage a $10,000 monthly budget, they could potentially be charged $2,000 per month, although quotes for managing these ads are often in the range of $500 to $1,000 per month.
Free Google Ad Grant Management For Nonprofit Organizations:
NPO Musketeers has made Google Ad Grant management more affordable to nonprofit organizations through our own fundraising, partnering with a marketing agency to provide the service for less, and creating an internship-type training program so that students can help provide the service for less. Having students participate provides a rare opportunity since few if any other training programs will give the hands-on experience of managing a $10,000 monthly budget. Because of these efforts, NPO Musketeers is offering Google Ad Management to qualifying nonprofits for free while also helping the underemployed improve their employment status.
Free Setup of Google Workspace Accounts
As a natural extension of the Google Ad Grant Management service, NPO Musketeers will also help your organization set up Google Workspace accounts. This allows each user of your organization to have a Gmail-powered email account that is branded with your organization’s domain. In other words you would have an email like name@nonprofitorganization.org instead of name@gmail.com, but you would still login to Gmail.com like any Gmail account. Since email hosting generally costs about $5 per user per month, this will save your organization about $60 per user per year. You will also have access to other business-grade tools in Google Workspace, including Docs (a word document program), Drive (online storage) and others.
How Can the Google Ad Grant Be Used To Make Money for My Organization?
The Google Ad Grant is extended to nonprofit organizations primarily to help them be more visible to their beneficiaries (i.e. a food bank showing at the top of search results for a person who is searching for food banks). One must understand the dynamic of Google Search in order to answer whether the Ad Grant can be used to raise funds for nonprofits. It is an inbound channel. That means that people have already decided what to look for. It’s a lot more tricky to use it for awareness campaigns, which is what a lot of nonprofit organizations need.
Google does have advertising channels that are better for awareness campaigns. Ads that appear in search results are (mostly) plain text only. Yet, Google also has a display ad network, which displays graphic ads on relevant pages throughout the web, and they own YouTube which has video ads. The Google Ad Grant does not apply to these spaces because Google shares revenue with publishers and they can’t volunteer this space on behalf of those publishers, which number in the millions. The plain text advertising space that appears at the top of search results is the only space that Google owns and controls 100%, so that is the only place where the ad grant applies. Yet, depending on the organization’s goals, they may still consider these other channels; they’ll just have to pay for them.
Can a campaign be set up to target donors directly? Yes, a campaign can be set up to target direct donors. This would be a campaign that targets people who are using keywords and phrases such as “which nonprofit should I donate to?” when they perform their searches. Depending on the tax benefits for your state, campaigns can also be set up to target phrases like “where to apply the Arizona tax credit”. The success of those campaigns would depend on the search volume – the actual number of people who are performing those types of searches. However small that search volume may be, a portion of the ad grant should be dedicated to it in order to reach those leads.
Since the traditional purpose of the ad grant is to target beneficiaries, this should also have a portion of the ad grant dedicated to it. Perhaps even the largest portion, because Google has certain performance requirements to ensure that the ads are targeted correctly, and this helps to achieve the metrics that Google requires.
Google also has some policies in place to ensure that the grants don’t create an unfair advantage against for-profit businesses who are actually paying for the ads. So additional campaigns that target other audiences have to be created and monitored carefully to ensure that the campaigns don’t violate Google policies. Yet, nonprofits are still allowed to sell products and services and maintain their nonprofit status. And perhaps campaigns can be set up to help with those efforts, and this would indeed help the organization raise funds. This is why NPO Musketeers has created two different Ad Grant Management packages depending on the goals of your organization:
Ad Grant Management Packages:
Traditional Management Package:
Campaigns and ads are set up to target the beneficiaries of the organization and direct donors.
D’artagnan Management Package:
Campaigns and ads are set up to target both audiences in the Traditional Package as well as additional audiences which will allow the campaigns to spread a wider net and target additional keywords.
In many renditions of The Three Musketeers story, including the original, D’artangnan knew he wanted join the musketeers, even though he didn’t completely know how he was going to do it when he set out to do it. NPO Musketeers and partners will work with your organization to set up additional campaigns and assist with creative fund raising even if it has to be done on a case by case basis.
Some organizations might already sell products and services and will want to target those audiences. For example, the YMCA is a nonprofit organization that sells gym memberships. Their ads would likely target nearby individuals who are looking for a gym to join.
Other organizations do not have products and services to sell. Part of our discussion will determine if your organization is willing to start. If your organization does not want to do that, then the traditional package is for you. If your organization is open to it, we could even potentially set up operations that don’t take additional resources from your organization. Yet, if the organization has additional resources to leverage then you can potentially raise even more funds.