Have you worked with professionals in the past who have made big promises about the type of results they could deliver to your nonprofit and then failed to deliver? Maybe they were outside fundraising professionals who you paid to help execute a fundraising campaign or event, or a nonprofit marketing company that promised to increase traffic to your website or greatly increase the size of your email list. Perhaps it was a grant writer who enticed you with promises of five- or six-figure grants from foundations or the government.
It’s easy to make big promises in the areas of marketing and fundraising. It’s much harder to deliver results. Doing so involves creating a solid plan accompanied by realistic goals, executing the plan, monitoring its progress, and if the desired results aren’t being achieved, making the necessary adjustments.
You can think of marketing and fundraising campaigns like raising small children. Both require constant attention and care. If neglected, growth is stunted, but when properly tended to, they can flourish!
With marketing and fundraising campaigns, you can’t just “set it and forget it,” but that seems to be the approach that many professionals take—especially when it comes to Google Ad Grant management. A nonprofit will qualify for a Google Ad Grant and then hire a firm to handle their Google Ad campaign. This is the right approach for many nonprofits, since running a Google Ad campaign can be quite involved—especially for those who are inexperienced with them.
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But here’s where things can start to go awry. A nonprofit will hand over their Google Ad campaign to a professional management company and then just blindly trust that they are handling things. They never discuss strategy. They don’t ask about how the ads are performing. The management company is left to assume that their nonprofit client is satisfied with how things are going and just lets the campaign run its course.
Here’s what a smart nonprofit should be doing. First of all, they should be very active in the initial campaign strategy. They should work with the Google Ad management team to decide on a specific goal or goals. The goal shouldn’t just be to bring more people to the nonprofit’s website. Instead, it should be for visitors to take specific actions once they get to the website. Those actions could include signing up for the mailing list, reaching out for service, donating, or signing up to volunteer.
Second, nonprofits should ask to see reports and analytics that indicate how the Google Ad campaign is doing. If things aren’t going well, there needs to be a discussion about a change in strategy. The strategy may also need to be adjusted for other reasons, like if you decide to offer a new service that targets a new demographic.
The important thing is for nonprofit leaders to stay involved with their Google Ad campaigns—even if they are being professionally managed.
A good Google Ad Grant management company will be proactive about providing results and suggesting changes in strategy. At Beeline, we send our clients monthly reports and analytics. We are also readily available to them anytime they have questions.
At the end of the day, the reason you hire a professional is because you trust them to do a better job at something than you could do yourself. But don’t make the mistake of placing blind trust in a company that is handling something as important as your advertising campaign! Trust, but verify.
If you’re looking for a trustworthy company for Google Ad Grant Management or for help with other forms of digital marketing, contact us at Beeline. We’d love to start a discussion about how we can work together to grow your nonprofit organization!