Nonprofit organizations do their best to make a big impact in their communities with limited funding and budgets. This challenge is not new for nonprofit organizations and it’s not likely to go away. That’s why it’s important to utilize every available resource to help fulfill your mission.
Google recognized this ongoing problem and implemented a program that gives nonprofits a huge opportunity to increase their outreach. Google Ad Grants offers nonprofit organizations $10,000 every single month to run advertising campaigns. That equates to an additional $120,000 per year in your advertising budget. That’s no small number for a nonprofit organization.
What is the Google Ad Grant?
Google Ads is Google’s advertising platform that businesses use to run advertising campaigns and drive traffic to their website. When you use Google’s search engine, you’ll see these ads show up at the top of the search results page. Companies are paying money every time someone clicks on one of those ads.
With a Google Ad Grant, nonprofits can run these ads for free. Instead of paying every time someone clicks, the cost of the click is deducted from the advertising credit that Google provides with the grant. The advertising credit that you receive with the grant is $329 per day, which equates to about $10,000 per month or $120,000 per year. That is a big boost in a marketing budget for a nonprofit organization.
What are the benefits of a Google Ad Grant?
Taking advantage of this grant allows organizations to promote their cause and make a bigger impact in the community. Some benefits of Google Ad Grants:
- Increase organizational awareness
- Increase donor base
- Generate more email subscribers
- Push more social media engagement
- Increase volunteer signups
- Increase event participation
Since the Google Ad Grant offers $10,000 per month, you can drive a lot of traffic with these campaigns.
How much traffic can a Google Ad Grant send to our website?
The “cost per click” on an ad campaign can vary pretty greatly depending on the type of keywords that you’re running ads for. Some keywords will result in paying under $1 per click while some clients we work with see the cost per click over $50. The cost per click is driven by supply and demand. Supply is how many people are searching for that keyword and the demand is how many people are also running ads for those same keywords. If you have a large supply (search volume) and low demand (competitors).
According to WordStream, the overall average for the cost per click is between $1 and $2. So if you take the $10,000 advertising credit for a month and divide that by $2 for each click, that means you could see 5,000 more website sessions every single month to your website.
| Google Grant Amount (per month) | $10,000 |
| Average Cost Per Click | $2.00 |
| Total Clicks (per month) | 5,000 |
That’s a lot of extra traffic. To take things a step further, we can take that traffic and try to calculate the impact that has for your organization.
If you accept online donations, you’re hopefully tracking the conversion rates for people to submit a donation. Let’s say your average donation conversion rate on your website is at 2%. So that means 2% of the extra 5,000 sessions are likely to submit a donation. That equates to 100 new donations. Going another step, if your average donation amount is $50, those 100 donations turns into an extra $5,000.
| Website Sessions from the Google Grant | 5,000 |
| Donation Conversion Rate | 2% |
| New Donations (per month) | 100 |
| Average Donation Amount | $50 |
| New Donation Revenue (per month) | $5,000 |
You can perform this same exercise for other website engagement activities as well:
- Conversion rates for signing up for your email newsletter.
- Conversion rates for signing up to volunteer.
- Conversion rates for signing up for an event.
- Conversion rates to share your cause on social media.
Depending on what your goals are as an organization, you can turn this grant into campaigns to support those initiatives. And as you can see, the potential impact can be huge. The key is in the execution of the campaigns and being strategic on the campaigns that you put out there. Being thoughtful about the style of content you produce and promote through the grant will help you fully utilize this opportunity to get the most out of it.
Who is eligible for the Google Ad Grant?
Google makes this grant easily accessible. It’s probably one of the easier grants to apply for and to receive as a nonprofit. The eligibility looks different for every country, but in the United States, any nonprofit that is a registered 501(c)3 organization in good standing is eligible with a few minor exceptions.
You do not quality for the grant if you are:
- A governmental entity or organization
- A hospital or healthcare organization
- A school, academic institution, or university
How to apply and enroll in the Google Ad Grant
Applying for the grant is fairly straightforward, but there are multiple steps involved to get through the account setup piece. As part of the process, you’ll have to go through the verification steps with TechSoup. Google has a partnership with TechSoup to streamline the verification process. There are alot of benefits of being a registered organization with TechSoup as well beyond the grant from Google.
After you are registered with TechSoup, you’ll have several more steps in getting into the Google for Nonprofits program, then applying for the grant, and setting up your ad account. If you have an internal resource that’s familiar with the Google Ads platform, they might be able to assist getting you through the process.
If your organization could use support in enrolling in this grant and executing the best practices so you can push your organization forward, our certified Google Ads specialists are well versed getting you enrolled in the grant and then finding the best ways to utilize your Google Ad Grant to get the absolute most out of it.
