Google Ad Grants: the free ad budget charities leave unused

Google has a programme that gives registered charities an advertising budget for search ads every month. The grant is money to advertise with in its own right, so it does not depend on what you spend yourself. Many charities applied for it at some point, usually years ago. Since then it has sat idle.

Where it is still running, it is often on a handful of campaigns that someone once set up and nobody touches any more. Part of the budget gets spent each month. The rest evaporates, because unused budget does not roll over.

Why the account grinds to a halt

The programme has rules, and those rules are just strict enough to scare off a volunteer.

There is a maximum bid that is lower than what commercial advertisers bid. Your account has to reach a minimum click-through rate, or Google pauses it. For an organisation without a dedicated marketer, one pause is usually the end. The account is switched off, nobody knows how to turn it back on, and after a year nobody remembers it existed.

The charity then pays for ads out of its own pocket, alongside an account full of free budget that sits idle.

What gets it running again

It is not a big project. It comes down to three things.

Meeting the rules again

You advertise on the searches people actually type in, instead of the terms the board would like to see. A charity that wants to show up for its own name will never reach the click-through rate. A charity that advertises on the problems people search for will.

Staying within the maximum bid

Under that ceiling you will not win the most expensive auctions. You will win the long, specific searches that commercial advertisers do not bid on. That is exactly where you find the people who want to learn more or want to help.

Measuring what a donor is worth

Without that figure, every choice is a gut feeling. With it, you can see which campaign brings in donors and which only brings in visitors.

Where it usually gets stuck

Usually the real problem lies in the record-keeping rather than in the ad account.

At many charities, donors are recorded in several places at once: some in a spreadsheet, some in the accounting software, some in the coordinator's inbox. As long as that is the case, you cannot see where each donor came from. And without that, you cannot decide where the budget should go.

Cleaning that up is less fun than building campaigns, and it achieves more. You need one place that holds every donor, together with where they came from. That is all you need to get started.

How to tell whether your organisation has budget lying idle

Three questions will tell you:

• Has the organisation ever applied for this programme? Ask whoever has worked there longest, not the marketing department.
• Is anything running in that account now, and how much of the budget is actually spent each month?
• Are the donors recorded in one place?

If the answer to the first question is yes and the answer to the third is no, there is probably money sitting idle that is already yours.

Budget you don't use doesn't roll over to next month. It is simply gone.