Google Ad Grants and paid search for non-profits: whether it is worth the effort

A Google Ad Grant is worth the effort only when you already have pages that answer what people search for and one named person who will open the account regularly. If both are true, it is a low-cost way to reach people who are looking for help, volunteering or giving. If either is missing, the grant may be approved, sit idle and leave your team thinking digital does not work. Eligibility is set by Google, so check its current conditions before you plan anything.

What does the grant actually give you?

The programme gives eligible non-profits an advertising credit inside Google's search ads. It is aimed at search ads, so do not plan on banners, YouTube or social media from it. Google sets the terms, the limits and the rules for keeping the account in good standing. Read those conditions first, because they change.

For a trust this has a plain meaning. Your advertisements appear when a person types a query, and they land on a page on your own website. The grant pays for the clicks. It does not write the ads, build the pages, answer the enquiries or look after the account.

Do you have something worth landing on?

Before you apply, run this short test on your site. Each question has a plain yes or no.

If three of the four are no, put the application aside. Your first spend should go on landing page development, not on a credit you cannot use.

Who will run it?

This is the real cost, and it is paid in hours, not rupees. A grant account needs someone to look at search terms, remove the ones that bring the wrong people, pause ads that are not working and write new ones. If that person is a volunteer who leaves in six months, write the login details and the habits down while they are still there.

A rough rule is that if you cannot name a person with a regular slot in their week for the account, do not apply yet. An unattended account drifts to broad, irrelevant searches, and the clicks it brings cost your team time to sort out.

For example: an old-age home in Raipur

Imagine a small old-age home in Raipur that wants local volunteers and monthly sponsors for residents. Its website is one page, with a gallery of residents and a UPI code. A trustee applies for the grant and sets up broad keywords such as "old age" and "elderly care". The clicks arrive from families searching for a place for a parent, students writing assignments and people hunting for pension forms. Volunteer enquiries do not rise. The office is soon fielding calls it cannot help with.

Two changes help. The home builds three pages: how to volunteer, how to sponsor a resident, and an honest page for families, saying what the home can and cannot offer and where else to look. It then writes ads for exact searches such as "volunteer old age home Raipur" and sends each to its matching page. One volunteer gets the account, with a fixed morning each week to read the search terms and remove irrelevant ones. The honest family page matters most, because it stops some wrong clicks becoming sad phone calls. After three months, in this invented case, volunteer enquiries go from none to a handful and one sponsor signs up, while the office still gets calls from families it cannot help, only fewer of them.

When is the grant not worth it?

Skip it, or wait, in four situations.

• Your cause has very few searches. A rare condition or a village programme may have almost no one searching, and local outreach will work better.
• Your donors are found by relationships, not by search, as with CSR and large gifts. See our post on CSR funding for NGOs for that route.
• Your site cannot take a gift or an enquiry on a phone.
• You are applying only because it is free. A free credit used badly still costs staff time.

Paid search answers the question "who is looking right now?" Social media and your own supporter list answer different ones. Whether to put effort into ads or organic search is a separate choice, set out in Google Ads and SEO.

How do you judge whether it is working?

Pick three numbers before you start and write them in a notebook: clicks that reached the right page, enquiries or sign-ups from those pages and gifts that came after. Look at them against the first few weeks of data, not against a hope. A donor who gives after reading three pages and calling the office should still be recorded as coming from search.

Do not read too much into the early weeks. The search terms will be messy at first, and tidying them is the job. Once the pages are good and the account is looked after, you can decide with a few months of numbers whether to keep going. Reading those results is the work of performance marketing and PPC, and other work for NGOs is under non-profit.

Making the decision

This week, answer the four site questions, name the owner of the account and read Google's current eligibility conditions. Then either apply or fix the pages first. If you would like a second view on whether your site and team are ready, tell us what you need.