How Nonprofits Can Get Free Advertising With Google Ad Grants

Steven ShattuckNovember 03, 2017

Free Money From Google, and How Kindful's Involved header image

Recently we had the honor of speaking to someone on the Google Ad Grants team. They wrote in to ask us some questions about our donation pages, informing us that we’d be one of the handful of donor CRMs that would be whitelisted by their Ad Grants team. This is a huge opportunity for nonprofits to leverage free digital advertising.

First, here’s some quick context to let you know why you should love Google even more than we do.

Google Gives Nonprofits $10,000 A Month

Let’s take this way back. Have you ever googled something? I hope the answer is yes. Trickier question: have you ever noticed the top few results after you enter a Google search?

The first few results are typically ads. Companies spend money to make sure their website shows up as a top result when someone enters specific words in Google.

Why is this important?

Google gives nonprofits $10,000 worth of these ads per month – for free.

If you didn’t know this already, I hope your mind was just blown. This is literally free money that Google is just handing out to folks trying to make the world a better place. They call it Google Ad Grants.

This is where we get excited.

How Google Ad Grants Works With Kindful

If you – a nonprofit organization – were creating an ad for the world to see, you’d probably want that ad to go straight to a donation page. If you’re using a an online fundraising tool like Kindful this means you’d have to direct that ad to your donation page.

However, Google’s rules regarding their ads require you to link an ad to your own website’s domain. This means for many nonprofits, you wouldn’t be able to use a Google ad to go directly to a donation page, since it’s on a different website domain than your own.

For example, your website domain may be https://mattshands.org/ but your donation page is https://mattshands.kindful.com/.

Then we heard there’s a solution.

Google started looking into this issue, and, through their research, discovered Kindful. We’re proud to be one of the nonprofit databases that are cleared by Google ads. This means our nonprofit customers can create use Google Ad Grants to create their ads and direct those clicks straight to their Kindful donation page.

All this detail results in big fundraising opportunities!

This could be you:

  • Receive $10k per month in ads
  • Set your ads to show when someone searches “dog adoption”
  • Have that ad go directly to your Kindful donation page
  • Get people to give in just a few clicks

example of google ad grant for nonprofits

How To Get Free Advertising From Google

Sounds too good to be true? It’s not! If you’re not using Google Ad Grants, you’re missing out on tons of free advertising!

To get set up with Ad Grants, you can get started at Google’s site for nonprofits. They’ll have you verify that you’re actually a legit 501c3, and then get you set up with Google For Nonprofits. It’s a pretty straightforward process, and will get you some free ads in no time.

Schedule a live demo with Bloomerang, and we’ll show you how easy it is to create and automate reports, utilize online and offline fundraising tools, quickly integrate and access all your data, and ultimately create more time to engage your donors.

Filed Under:   Communication