7 best practices for Google Ad Grant management

Imagine you had $10,000 every month to spend on letting more people know about the great work you do for the wider community.

What would you do?

You might find it unbelievable, but Google actually has a $10,000 AdGrant programme which they give to charities to help them increase the visibility of their brand online.

Here’s how you can best use it.

Sign up for a Google Nonprofit account

Specifically within Singapore, these are the eligibility criteria.

Organisations must be registered as

1. Institution of a Public Character (IPCs),
2. Charity,
3. Other Organisation operating on a nonprofit basis for the public benefit,
4. Charitable Trust registered as a corporate body,
5. Society,
6. Company limited by guarantee.

After you do that, the process is quite quick (under 1 week), to get the AdGrant account approved.

You can then start running your ads!

Best practices

Having run about 40 different ad campaigns for a charity we will call Do Good, we’ve seen some good practices that sustain the success of your campaign.

Decide whether you want to do it yourself

Here’s a quick test.

Do you know what is:

1. CPC
2. CTR
3. Abs Impression (%)

If you don’t, relax. You can learn it easily.

But whether you want to learn, and execute the campaigns on your own is another separate conversation.

Google Ads is the billion dollar business that has powered Google’s rise to the tech behemoth it is today.

That also means that whilst it is easy to run, running it effectively may not be that easy. The process of running Google Ads is easy.

1. Select the keywords you would like to market
2. Write headlines that are within 30 characters
3. Write descriptions that are within 90 characters
4. Publish the ads

But running it effectively may not be that simple.

Some parts that often stumble people are:

1. Inserting the tracking code into the site, so that Google can associate the click that was because of an ad to their platform
2. Tracking the conversion (for example, to become a volunteer, or to donate) that came from the click

Get an advertising agency, if you can’t do it yourself

Okay, okay.

Here’s where I sell you the potential good of an advertising agency like ours.

We are social workers by training, who left and eventually moved into content marketing.

Most agencies you might work with don’t have explicit social work knowledge.

We do.

I trained as a social worker, went through 2 years of frustrating case notes, computer systems like SSNET, and trying to make more clients happy.

That experience helped me to understand what clients were going through, and to speak better to them through the ads we wrote.

Understand what can be marketed, and what can’t

Not everything can be sold over Google Ads.

There are often three focuses we see when we work with charities on implementing their AdGrant.

1. Getting more volunteers
2. Getting more donations
3. Getting more clients to use their services, which may tie to higher funding as client targets are met

Understand that it’s a competitive pie

Here in Singapore, as much as we like to say that more people are doing good, it is ultimately still a competitive pie with a limited growth.

If we look from the chart above, taken from Singapore’s Commissioner of Charities 2021 Annual Report, we can see that the annual donations have continued dropping over time.

Knowing that it is competitive helps you to see that the people who rank top in Google, end up being the ones who mop up all the giving.

Singapore’s Children Society is one example of just how big the winners can win, once they get to the top.

We studied their ranking on Google and saw how their top position had not been dislodged, for a long time.

This correlated with a high proportion of their income coming from donations, rather than grants.

Winning might mean appearing ahead of them through paid Google ads

Type ‘Donation Singapore’ now, and you will see sponsored ads appearing above the organic search results.

Whilst the statistics do show that people generally trust organic results more than paid results, it does give you a chance to build a greater mind-share.

Position and adjust to those giving more in certain areas

If we look more widely at where people are giving, we can see that religious charities continue to be the largest recipient of donations.

Rather than trying to fight where people are not giving, it may work better for your charity to position and adjust itself to the areas where people are giving.

Let me give you an example. Charity Money (whose name has been changed to protect their confidentiality) was struggling with getting more donations for its work.

It dealt primarily with people who were facing debt issues. However, many people were resistant to giving because they felt that these people in debt had gotten in debt because of gambling, or irresponsible spending.

Know what your services are, and advertise the right ones

We’ve found that some services sell much better over Google Ads, compared to the rest.

Mapping out all your services may help you to know where to start.

Moving back to Do Good Charity, which we worked with over 6 months, we found that certain services did have better traction through ads.

Advertise those aimed at the digital generation

When we tried advertising the services for the elderly, we didn’t see a good response in the click throughs. We realised that these elderly people (over 60) weren’t necessarily discovering and buying services through the Internet.

For example, you might be helping young adults deal with their quarter life crisis, and one of the resources you’re selling them is a quarter life crisis book.

That audience might be found much easier through Google, than the older person that’s above 60.

Target elderly services through in-person marketing

The elderly were more prone to discovering the services through live events, or at community centres such as the People’s Association. They might know of your day care centre through a Healthier SG event at a community centre, rather than searching on Google.

Events marketing might take a lot of effort, but if your service is primarily aimed at the elderly, it might be useful to see how events can tie into your marketing.

Just start using the AdGrant

Yes, we know the AdGrant isn’t necessarily the easiest to use.

But take time to find out.

The 10k does add a lot of hope to your charity.