How To Get Free AdWords Money for Charities

As a charity, it can be difficult to get the recognition you deserve. Many of your efforts can go unrecognised and this can result in losing funds, as people simply don’t know about your charity and its great work.

Marketing helps put your charity in full view, ensuring that people know who you are and what your charity stands for. Marketing activities often come with a price tag attached, and of course this represents a large expense that many charities cannot afford. But, did you know that Google provides grants for charities that are looking to raise awareness of their organisation? This article explores how you can get free advertising with Google AdWords to help with your digital marketing efforts.

Google AdWords is well known to anyone that uses Google search to find information on the internet. The paid-for results come at the top and bottom of Google search pages. Ads placed here give advertisers a greater chance of being spotted in the thousands of results that are available.

Advertising on AdWords enables you to target specific people through filters such as location and interests. Being able to choose like this helps you to reach out to the people that may be looking to support charities like you, but that may be unable to find you through searches or social media.

Specifically for registered charities, AdWords provides grants for a guaranteed amount of spending per month. Offering up to $10,000 per month worth of AdWords spending, this is an opportunity that every charity should be taking up. There is some leg-work in setting it up, and then maintaining month-in, month-out, but taking the spending part of the budget out of the equation this makes this a risk-free marketing exercise to experiment with.

At Gravity Digital, we recently set up an AdWords account for the wonderful charity – Just for Dogs. As our chosen charity of the year, we designed their new website in October 2016, and seeing what AdWords could do to help boost marketing for the charity was the next logical step to promoting the charity online.

Just For Dogs rehome dogs that have been abandoned or can no longer live with their owners. We designed a campaign that centres around helping find dogs a home as well as supports the fundraising Just For Dogs does to help with their running costs.

Specifically targeting those in the Derby, Leicester, Staffordshire and Nottingham areas we have been able to significantly increase traffic to the website and the number of enquiries into the Centre as a result.

Margaret Smith, owner of Just for Dogs expressed how happy she is about her new online presence; “WOW! Thank you for continuing to help JFD grow via the website. I’ve had lots of telephone enquiries already as a direct result. Onwards and upwards.”

So, all great news!

If you are a charity and wish to find out more about how we can help you get free adwords funding from Google, please get in touch.

We did mention that there is some leg-work involved in setting all this up though… Read on!

The process of setting up a Google not-for-profits AdWords account is long and fairly complicated. You must first verify your charity status through an online donation programme called tt-exchange. This requires that you submit annual accounts, your Charity’s mission statement and give HMRC details to prove your status as a registered charity. This process in itself is enough to put off many who might like to give this a go.

After this step is completed you move onto setting up a new master Google account – even if you already have a Google account, you will need to start afresh. Creating a G suite account is the first step, in order to make a fresh account under which to set up your new AdWords account. If you have experience of AdWords, then these charities AdWords accounts are unlike the normal process of getting set up. This is a process that is very prescriptive and if you take a step wrong, then you will end up footing the bill. So proceed with caution.

When you have your AdWords account set up, you must then connect it to your Nonforprofits account. You then start to go through the process of setting up your first AdWords ad groups following the on-screen prompts. If you are not familiar with AdWords already, this can be a fairly daunting series of screens to work through.

For those who persevere, the rewards are immediate and make all the effort worthwhile. The traffic to the Just For Dogs website trebled overnight. You will likely see huge gains from this for your charity website too.

Once AdWords is set up, it needs to be continuously altered and monitored to ensure it’s being used to its full potential. Having an experienced AdWords user sitting at the computer every week monitoring and trimming the ads that have been put together is the best solution, but if you are an eager amateur that is willing to learn and wade through lots of help files, then you can also handle this yourself. The aim is to cut out ‘bad searches’ that don’t match the nature of your charity, and to optimise the account around the ads and search phrases that best serve your organisation. All of this is more of a science than a black art, but you do need to have a keen interest in detail and keeping on top of user behaviour to get the most out of your ‘free money’.

If you’re looking to get an AdWords account for your charity but aren’t entirely sure what it can do for you, here is a breakdown of how it could directly help your charity succeed further:

• Deliver greater brand recognition online in a crowded marketplace – which in turn can get more response for donations and fundraising.
• Increase website traffic – offering the best platform for people to find out about your charity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
• Directly target those who you believe are likely to care about your charity and what it stands for – helping you to find those who are enthusiastic about supporting you.

If you are a charity looking for further assistance with your digital marketing or considering setting up an AdWords account, then look no further because we know just how to help you. We’ve experienced the pain of Google Nonforprofits and now want to help you avoid experiencing it too!