The Nonprofit "LIMBER Up" System For Maximizing Google Ad Grants

Part I: L is For List Building.

The day you get that lovely acceptance email from Google telling you there’s a fresh $329 of ad money waiting for you today and every subsequent day in perpetuity, you might be hit with one overwhelming thought:

“What now?”

In other words, what the heck are we going to do with this money? What are we going to promote? What are we allowed to promote? What’s the smartest way to spend it? 

That’s natural. After all, when’s the last time somebody dropped an essentially endless pile of money in your lap? You probably haven’t had to attack this problem before, but as they say in folksy small-talk circles everywhere, ”it’s a good problem to have.”

We've attacked this problem hundreds of times, and we think we’ve developed a pretty good system for maximizing the value of your Google Ad Grant. And what we mean when we say “maximizing the value” is simply to spend as much of the grant money as possible every day, and spend it on things that can make the biggest impact on your organization. 

We’ve named it the “LIMBER UP” method. It’s an appropriate name semantically speaking as well, because the tenets we explore here really do teach you how to be flexible with your Ad Grant and do things with it that you probably wouldn’t have otherwise considered.

And not for nothing, “LIMBER” is less off-putting than “MR. BILE,” which was the second coolest name we could make out of the same letters. 

So let’s get limber, shall we?

“L” is for list building.

As in, email lists.

If you ask 100 nonprofits with a Google Ad Grant what the ideal outcome of their participation in the program would be, at least 99% of them will say one thing: donations! 

Of course they will. Why wouldn’t they? Money makes the world go 'round.

Unfortunately, donations are the toughest thing for any nonprofit to snag, and that’s true via Google Ad Grants as well. All too often, nonprofits are sold the idea – by Google itself in its promotional materials or by a smooth-talking agency salesperson – that you simply plug your organization into Google Ad Grants and all of the free advertising dollars it brings, and immediately, the monetary donations just start a-flowin’.

But that’s not reality. The first thing to remember here is that people who find your nonprofit via a Google ad are very often seeing/hearing of your organization for the very first time. That’s a critical point that you must remember: Until the moment they click on one of your ads, these people didn’t know you existed. And what’s the likelihood that someone who didn’t know you existed a few seconds ago is likely to start handing you money moments later? Not very good. 

Consider your in-person interactions with new people. How often do you meet new people, tell them you work for a nonprofit and have them immediately open up their wallets and start handing you cold, hard cash? Never. And that’s when they’re right there looking you in the eye, without the luxury of being able to shut a laptop and make you go away. Instant donations don’t happen in person, on the Web or anywhere else.

And that makes perfect sense. It’s a crowded world out there, and there’s no lack of people and organizations asking for money -- especially now, as the coronavirus has its jackboot firmly pressed against the back of the world's head. Thus, people need time and repeat exposure to become comfortable enough with your organization and mission to start loosening the purse strings, and that process takes time and action on your part. Google Ad Grants is awesome for introducing your nonprofit to the world, but the heavier lifting of teasing out donations, financial and otherwise, falls to you.

What can you do in order to facilitate this process? Build an email list!

If you took every item in our snazzy “LIMBER up” acronym and forced me to choose one of them as the only thing you were able to do with Google Ad Grants, email list-building is the one I’d choose. There are several reasons for this:

1. Signing up for your email list is a much smaller and more reasonable ask of the website visitor, far easier to acquire than a donation by orders of magnitude. It’s a far more natural and realistic second step from a user who’s had a brief look at your site and is at least mildly interested. If I’m mildly interested in what you’ve got going on at your nonprofit, I’m definitely warm to the idea of hearing more from you later on – far warmer than I am to whipping out my credit card just yet.

2. Once someone has signed up for your email list, you can communicate with them at will. Now, it goes without saying that the discipline of email marketing is an entire dinosaur unto itself, one you must use wisely. But for simplicity’s sake, we’ll summarize it this way: Building an opt-in email list lets you communicate regularly with those who are most interested in your website and mission.

3. Using your Ad Grants account to build an email list is an ideal way to take first-time site visitors who may otherwise never return and turn them into a valuable marketing asset that you can revisit again and again for every marketing objective you have. You can tell them about new content on your website. Events you’re hosting. Merchandise you’re selling. Volunteer and internship opportunities. All of that stuff. And, when the time is right, asking for donations.

The single most important rule of list-building: Make it easy. 

Don’t kill the golden goose that list-building can be by asking for too much information in your opt-in form. I prefer two fields – name and email address – and that’s it. No more. Resist, with every fiber of your being, the temptation to squeeze more and more data points out of your users, because the number of email signups decreases with every field you add to your form. 

Call them lazy, frazzled, busy, spoiled or whatever you like, but the fact is that people just don’t fill out long forms. One of our most well-heeled nonprofit clients has always ignored this advice and insisted on requiring nearly a dozen fields in their signup forms: not only name and email but job title, number of employees in the nonprofit, annual donation revenue, areas of societal interest, all that jazz. And guess what? Their opt-in rate (the rate at which people who visit the form actually complete the sign-up process) is pitiful.

As Grandma used to say, some people just have more money than sense. But if you’re reading this book, that’s not you. You’re long on sense, so put all those brains to good use and don’t ask for any more information in an email signup form than you absolutely require. The quicker and easier it is to fill out your opt-in form, the more quickly you’ll build a robust list that you can tap repeatedly and to great effect.

Next: "I" Is For Interns

-- Josh Barsch is the CEO of StraightForward Interactive and the author of The Google Ad Grants Playbook: The Definitive Guide To Explosive Nonprofit Growth on Google's Dime.