Does the Google Ad Grant Provide Enough Advertising for the Average Nonprofit?

If you’ve been reading the Beeline blog for a while now, you know about the Google Ad Grant. You know that it provides up to $10,000 per month in advertising credit to qualifying nonprofits. As a company that helps nonprofits grow through online marketing, we love the Google Ad Grant and encourage our clients to take advantage of it!

Nonprofit leaders who have not yet applied for the Google Ad Grant might be wondering: Does the grant provide enough advertising to make it worth it? A $10,000 grant certainly sounds like a lot, but when it comes to digital advertising, is it really enough to move the needle in terms of growing a nonprofit organization?

Well, like a lot of things, the answer is, “it depends.” However, for many of the nonprofits we work with at Beeline, most of which have $1-5 million annual budgets, the Google Ad Grant provides all the Google advertising they need to help grow their organizations, but there are a few caveats to this.

Google Ads Should Only Be One Part of a Marketing Strategy

Let’s be clear, though. Running Google Ads shouldn’t be the only marketing a nonprofit does. If it is, $10,000 per month of advertising won’t be enough to grow your organization in any meaningful way. Instead, Google Ads should be one part of a larger digital marketing strategy that may include things like email marketing, website optimization, social media marketing, and more. Many nonprofits run Google Ads that support their other growth efforts, including ads that will help increase their email subscriber lists, promote their income-generating resources, and increase attendance at fundraising events.

Google Ads Can Be Very Effective, Or Completely Worthless

When it comes to Google Ads, you reap what you sow. If you do your keyword research, set up the ads correctly, monitor their progress, and make the necessary adjustments, Google Ads can provide a tremendous boost to your nonprofit! On the other hand, if you only put in the minimum amount of effort to get your Google Ads up and running, and then don’t do anything else, you almost certainly won’t see any benefits from them.

Your $10,000-per-month Google Ad Grant can go a long way if you use it effectively! Not sure how to optimize a Google Ad Grant? Contact us at Beeline to learn about our Google Ad Grant Management service.

Supplementing the Google Ad Grant

Some nonprofits—including some of our own clients—choose to add their own funds to go toward sponsored Google Ads to supplement the ads they run through the Google Ad Grant program. Not only does this allow your nonprofit to place additional ads in front of prospective visitors, but it also places their ads farther up on the search results page.

Paid Google Ads can also be used to get around some of the restrictions placed on the ads that nonprofits are able to run through the Google Ad Grant program. For example, the Google Ad Grant only allows nonprofits to run “mission-based campaigns” that accurately reflect an organization’s primary mission, are relevant to programs and/or services they provide, and are specific enough to provide a good experience for the user seeing the ads. But your nonprofit might want to run ads that capture the attention of people doing searches that don’t exactly fall into those categories.

Maybe your nonprofit is looking for volunteers for an upcoming event. You might run an ad that uses the keyword phrase, “things to do in [your city].” This type of generic search term wouldn’t qualify under the Google Ad Grant’s program policies, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t run a paid ad using that term!

Working with Beeline to Grow Your Nonprofit

At Beeline, it is our goal to help nonprofit organizations get the most out of their marketing budgets! We use creative strategies to get people excited about your mission and turn them into long-term supporters. Contact us to learn more about what we do and how our services can be tailored to your nonprofit’s needs.