By now everyone is probably familiar with the Google Grants program. According to Google, their grants program is a “unique in-kind donation program awarding free AdWords advertising to select charitable organizations.” A grantee can receive up to $10,000 dollars a month worth of advertising on Google.com per month, while the average Grantee spends closer to $300.
While I have promoted Google Grants and the new Google for Nonprofits portal, I was curious whether the Google Grants program would prove to be beneficial to the smaller, community-based nonprofit organization with limited staffing to implement.
I’ve had some minor experience with Google Adwords from a business perspective. About three years ago I dabbled in placing a few advertisements for a book that I sell online. What I learned was that, while setting up a Google Adwords account is certainly “easy as pie”, making your Adwords campaign profitable is quite another story.
And, of course, the $65,000 questions: does the small nonprofit organization have the marketing savvy to develop a Google campaign, and can the small nonprofit organization even spend $10,000 a month in advertising? Experienced marketing professionals typically outsource their Google AdWord campaigns. And your maximum $10,000 a month grant won’t pay for an SEO professional to ensure that you get results from your Google Grant.
I asked a few of my colleagues, who’ve had some experience with Google Grants for their thoughts.
Tim Bete, Communications Director for St. Mary Development Corporation writes:
“We’re not coming close to spending $10,000 a month with Google Grants. But our results are significant.
4,540 clicks on ads
713,454 ad impressions
0.64% click-through rate (we’re getting CTRs of more than 1% for our successful campaigns)
$0.84 average cost per click (maximum big is $1)
$3,817.60 total spent
Those results are over a 4-month period. We’ve had no luck attracting donors but huge success driving people to our programs. If a nonprofit has a limited geographic area, they’re not going to spend $10,000 a month because that’s about 330 clicks a day. If a nonprofit is in an area with a small population, it probably isn;t going to work for them. Our most successful campaign is for our online housing directory. Last week we got 159 click-throughs which is significant for us.
I would only recommend Google Grants for nonprofits who have a significant amount of time to invest. The learning curve is steep and you have to monitor your campaigns all the time. We plan to roll out ad campaigns for several new program/service areas. I’d like to get to the point where we’re spending $100 a day.
$10,000 a month sounds great but in reality few nonprofits are maxing out their grants (from what one consultant tells me.) But it’s a HUGE value for us and will transform our work because we don’t have any other significant advertising budgets.
I think you’re right about hiring a PPC consultant. But here’s the trouble I see. The PPC consultant is $500 a month. But they’re not going to create new landing pages, etc. We don;t have $6000 a year. And the optimization gets tricky because of your branding. For example, an ad that preys on people’s fear may work well but it might not fit your brand. I get concerned turning it over to a consultant, although there may be a review process.
When I started out Google Grants, I wanted to find a way that a one-person shop could do it without outside help. But to do that you need to be a web designer, copywriter, etc. and that makes it tough.”
And fundraiser Nathan Hand noted:
“We applied for a Google grant when I was at an international organization and received ‘$10,000’ in an ‘award’. It was basically cost per click credit but limited the value at $1 per click. Our problem was that the key words (and combinations) we wanted (poverty, international, children, charity, etc.) were going for $4.00+ per click so the grant did not allow us to compete unless we were super-specific and created campaigns around each school in each of the 5 countries we were in. Even then, the price for ‘children poverty India’ was out of our range. I believe we could get ‘children poverty Venezuela’ b/c no one was really searching for that 🙂 I believe we did have some success with “Indianapolis Charter School” (b/c our US school) but it brought more ‘parent’ and ‘school seeker’ traffic than donors.
Even if we did ‘secure’ a keyword or combination – you must remember that the grant is for space in the ‘paid advertisement’ area – which is exponentially less clicked on than the organic search results.
My theory: You’re better off spending time/$ on SEO for organic results unless you’re a very specific organization in a small market area i.e. “pitbull rescue Omaha”.
Beth Brodvosky of Iris Creative, a strategic membership communications firm, says:
“I can tell you that we are working with a for-profit trade school at the moment building a significant search marketing program. The cost of the ads is about 1/3 of the overall cost of the program. To get any use out of an adwords campaign, there needs to be keyword research and analysis, copywriting to optimize pages, custom landing pages that link to each ad group, and monitoring and adjustment as you go to make sure the program I performing. If the Google grant only covers the actual cost of the ads, anyone would have a tough time making good use of that money without adding more funds to the pot.”
And copywriter Karen Zapp weighs in with:
“Often times the highest ROI comes from out sourcing to experts whether it’s PPC, copywriting, grant writing, web development, list brokering, printing, etc.
Being penny wise (i.e., not out sourcing PPC management) and pound foolish is all too common among nonprofits and for-profit businesses. They ought to get a skilled PPC vendor for at least 6 months to optimize and improve their account before making any decision on whether to continue or not with PPC. I could go on and on but it still won’t answer your question.”
The verdict on Google Grants for the small nonprofit organization? Like anything it requires a commitment and some funding behind it.
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I can’t wait to meet with you personally.
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