While the Google Ad Grant does provide free advertising for your nonprofit, you’ll have to invest in its success. Here’s how the cost/benefit works out.
Nonprofits are often intimately familiar with grants and the impact they can have on any organization. Whether your nonprofit makes grants or receives them, it’s important to know how they affect the bottom line. Applying for a grant requires a cost/benefit analysis, ensuring that you don’t commit more resources to acquiring the grant than you would otherwise receive.
As experts in the Google Ad Grant, Nonprofit Megaphone is situated to help you make these financial considerations. Whether you’re thinking of applying for the grant yourself or hiring an agency to do it on your behalf, we’re here to address some of the common questions clients have during the early stages of grant acquisition.
In general, getting and maintaining the Google Ad Grant is almost always worth it from a financial standpoint. The potential it provides for building your digital presence is immense. The key is to leverage that presence into something that increases revenue or advances your mission. Thankfully, it’s easy to keep your costs low when acquiring and maintaining the grant, making it a flexible option for organizations of any size. In order to provide you with the most essential information, we’ll be covering these important topics
- What the Google Ad Grant Provides
- What Your Organization Has to Invest
- Results From Using the Google Ad Grant
- Maximizing Your Google Ad Grant ROI
Making sure your nonprofit understands the financial breakdown of the grant will help you make the most of it. Let’s get started.
What the Google Ad Grant Provides
In case you haven’t heard, the Google Ad Grant is provided by Google to all eligible nonprofits. When acquired, the Grant gives your organization up to $10,000 every month to spend on Google Ad space. This allows your organization to run sponsored ads within Google searches and gives you the money to compete with other organizations.
This is the singular function of the Google Ad Grant, but this function can be leveraged into numerous beneficial outcomes for your organization depending on the time and energy you invest.
There are two things you should be aware of in terms of the basic financial aspects of the Google Ad Grant:
- The $10,000 provided by the Grant is not liquid and cannot be used for other purposes. This money is allocated automatically depending on the market each ad competes in. This means that most organizations don’t actually end up spending all $10,000 every month. Unlike other grants, this isn’t a bad thing! We find that an organization’s spending within the Ad Grant rarely correlates to success.
- The $10,000 monthly allotment does not roll over from month to month. Instead, your balance resets at the end of the month, giving you a fresh $10,000 to spend. Similar to the first point, this presents no problem for your financials, as the money is used automatically and is rarely exhausted in a given month. Further, this automation makes the accounting very easy as the Grant isn’t counted as revenue on a 990 form.
That’s what the Google Ad Grant gives you financially. Here’s what your organization will have to invest to get the Grant (and keep it!).
What Your Organization Has to Invest
It may be clear to you that the Google Ad Grant is technically a form of free money that can be spent on advertising. However, it’s important to consider the costs of acquiring and maintaining the Grant. The ultimate question is whether your organization should manage the grant in-house or seek out an agency to manage it for you. Answering this question requires knowledge of both the grant acquisition and management processes.
Grant Acquisition
Grant acquisition describes the process of applying for the Grant and meeting Google’s requirements so that you receive the grant in a timely fashion. You’ll first need to make sure your clerical documents are in order, most importantly that you are indeed a registered 501(c)(3) organization.
Acquisition is a relatively simple and straightforward process. As a result, success with the Google Ad Grant requires that you have a clear management plan before you begin the acquisition process. Having this plan will ensure that you hit the ground running and do not run afoul of Google’s compliance standards.
Grant Management
Grant management describes the processes of maintaining the Grant and using it to meet your organization’s desired goals. It is this aspect where expertise is most needed and the costs are most variable.
At the least, you’ll need a member of your team to dedicate time each month to manage the Grant and remain compliant with Google’s standards. This includes logging into your account, purging low-performing keywords, and ensuring that the account is minimally-successful.
At most, this grant manager could spend significant time each day tweaking keywords, changing out ad copy, analyzing data, and getting the most out of your Grant. In addition, a maximally successful grant manager should constantly be working with others in your organization to improve your website content, ensuring that it’s easily promotable and of high quality.
Grant management is a skillset unto itself, which is why it’s a highly variable part of the Google Ad Grant cost/benefit calculation. While this leads many organizations to outsource their grant management to an agency like ours, there’s nothing to prevent you from doing it in-house with limited resources. So long as grant managers are analytical and stick to best practices, they can make the most of whatever time they have.
Results From Using the Google Ad Grant
Considering the low costs, the benefits of using the Google Ad Grant are immense. If managed correctly, you’ll be able to broadcast your message to brand new visitors and hopefully get them to meaningfully engage with your site.
The Google Ads infrastructure has helpful analytics built in, helping you understand how effective your ads are and what results they bring. Further, Google Ads can interface with other analytics tools such as Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics, giving you a full suite of information with which to hone your digital marketing.
To illustrate the effectiveness of the Google Ad Grant, consider a case study of one of our clients, Rotary International. Using the Grant, Rotary International was able to add more than 80,000 visitors to their website. Of those visitors, 1,169 of them took an important action toward becoming a member of the organization. Finally, more than 795,000 people were presented with their ads, broadcasting their message to a brand-new audience. This case study demonstrates how successful the Google Ad Grant can be for an organization that invests in it.
Maximizing Your Google Ad Grant ROI
In order to maximize your ROI with the Google Ad Grant, you’ll need to consider how to use your allocated resources most efficiently. The single best thing you can do to efficiently use the Google Grant is to designate a grant manager. By delegating all responsibilities of the Google Ad Grant to one person (or team) you empower them to cultivate the expertise necessary for grant management. Your grant manager will be able to:
- respond to trends;
- tweak your ads and keywords for better performance; and,
- use the knowledge they acquire to suggest enhancements for your website.
Even if your grant manager does not spend significant time with the Google Ad Grant, giving them sole responsibility is a great way to remain compliant.
If you have the resources, outsourcing your grant management is often the best way to maximize your ROI for your organization. Because grant management requires expertise, analysis, and diligence, you’re often better off delegating these duties to a company with specific experience in the Grant.
For example, Earthwatch Institute struggled with self-managing the Grant. They found it difficult to maintain compliance, ultimately leading to their Google Ads account being deactivated. However, after taking advantage of a grant management service, their Google Ad Grant is thriving. After only ten months of outsourcing their grant management, they saw their clicks from Google Ads increase 341%.
The Google Ad Grant is a cost-effective option for any nonprofit organization looking to expand its digital presence. Due to its high degree of flexibility, organizations can use the Grant to the full extent of their resources and achieve realistic goals. Further, this flexibility allows you to allocate more or fewer resources depending on your strategic situation. Since Google’s compliance standards are the only pitfall, the Google Ad Grant’s potential financial costs can be easily calculated for an organization of any size.
Nonprofits have a few decisions to make when considering the Google Ad Grant. They need to consider what their strategic goals are, whether they have the resources to acquire and manage the grant themselves, and whether they have the resources to commit to improving their website. Outsourcing the Grant is a good option for most organizations, but is contingent upon the answers to the questions above. If you still have questions about the Google Ad Grant and whether it’s right for you, reach out to a grant management agency.