How to make the case for Ad Grant management to your board

The Google Ad Grant can be a powerful part of your nonprofit’s marketing toolkit, but getting the best results from it can be a time-consuming endeavor that requires a lot of experience. Luckily, you’ve found an Ad Grant manager who you think will be a great fit for your team. How do you make the case to your board to invest in professional Ad Grant management?

We’ve put together a basic framework to use while presenting to your executive director, CFO, board of directors, or any other stakeholders who may be involved in signing off on your nonprofit’s marketing budget and strategy.

1. Explain the benefits of the Google Ad Grant
2. Demonstrate the need for professional management
3. Provide some options
4. Highlight the impact to the organization

Explain the benefits of the Google Ad Grant

The Google Ad Grant provides up to $10,000 per month in in-kind advertising spend that can be used in Google Search, the biggest search engine in the world. This helps you harness the 8 billion searches that Google processes every day to help your cause.

The Google Ad Grant is a great tool to help increase awareness of your organization. By using search engine marketing, you’re able to put your organization in front of searchers looking for concepts relevant to your nonprofit at the moment they are thinking about it.

You also get a greater degree of control over where that traffic comes from than with other channels. Using tools like keyword selection and location targeting, you can hone in on audience members with specific interests in the locations most likely to support you. By carefully selecting which landing page to send users to, you can direct your supporters to the most relevant content for them.

Best of all, the Google Ad Grant helps you diversify your marketing channels without having to find the advertising budget.

With all these advantages, hopefully the value of the Ad Grant is clearer. Now let’s talk about how an Ad Grant manager makes this tool even more effective.

Demonstrate the need for professional management

The Ad Grant is an amazing opportunity for nonprofits to make use of paid search to promote their organization. To keep the Grant month to month, there are certain metrics you have to hit – at least a 5% click-through rate (CTR) and at least one conversion per month.

Hitting these metrics can be a challenge for nonprofits, particularly if your staff does not have experienced digital advertisers on your team. For some context, the average CTR for paid search across industries is about 3%, well below the required 5% to keep the Grant (and well below Getting Attention’s 12% average).

In addition to challenges with keeping the Grant, many nonprofits report that getting the account to spend can be a challenge. For example, the average nonprofit only spends about $300 of that $10,000 per month.

This is where Google Ad Grant managers come in. These professionals (like the Getting Attention team!) have years of experience managing the quirks of Google Ad Grant accounts and will be able to get better results for you than running the account on your own.

When you work with an external partner, you’re benefitting from their experience working with dozens of organizations like yours. Rather than one person on your staff having to spend all day interfacing with Google Support to resolve problems that arise in the Ad Grant account or studying keyword options trying to determine what will work for your organization, your account manager can recommend strategies that they’ve seen work with similar nonprofits.

In addition to improving the results on the account, your Ad Grant management team saves you time by handling all of the campaign setup, keyword research, landing page selection, and ad creation. Once they understand your goals, they can tailor a strategy designed to help you reach your goals within the parameters of the Ad Grant account.

By maximizing the performance of your account, your Ad Grant manager helps you take full advantage of this extra marketing channel.

Provide some options

As a responsible consumer, it’s important to interview multiple vendors while searching for an Ad Grant manager. We strongly recommend reaching out to dedicated Ad Grant managers to handle these accounts. Because of the specialized skill set needed to get these accounts working well, and the more extensive policies limiting the account, it’s best to work with professionals who specialize in the Ad Grant.

While interviewing vendors, you should be sure to ask about:

• Their data practices – will your nonprofit own access to your account and to any other supplementary accounts like Tag Manager or GA4?
• Years of experience of the person managing the account – ideally you’d be looking for professionals with three or more years of paid advertising experience.
• Costs associated with the service – are they within your budget?

During your interviews, your potential vendors should be asking about your goals for the account and helping you evaluate whether or not the Google Ad Grant is the right tool to support you in those goals. If they don’t take the initiative on that, you should ask!

If you feel like your board will be resistant to bringing on outside help for the Grant, it can be helpful to ask the vendor for some case studies, so you can demonstrate their track record helping nonprofits like yours. If these are not available on their website, you can typically ask for them to be sent on your interview call.

For even more detail on hiring a marketing vendor, you can also check out our article on picking a Google Ad Grant agency.

Highlight the impact to the organization

Sometimes resistant board members may need some help understanding what the potential positive impacts to the organization might be. From their perspective, it may sound like investing in something non-tangible.

This is part of why getting clear on your core outcomes and how the Google Ad Grant can support that is such a core part of the interview process – ideally, you’ll be able to show your board the difference Ad Grant management can make in key outcomes like finding new volunteers, growing your email list, or growing supporter awareness for your key projects.

Encourage your board to think about the positive outcomes of getting started with the Google Ad Grant. Imagine getting hundreds or thousands of new supporters to your website who you already know are interested in your cause. You can feel confident that the Google Ad Grant will deliver that because that is what the account is designed to find!

Google’s algorithm is sophisticated and constantly being improved. It benefits both Google and your organization for Google to carefully find the people who are interested in your work and lead them to your website. That’s how search works, and Google wants to maintain its position as the search leader.

Conclusion

By working with a professional Ad Grant manager, you improve the odds that the Google Ad Grant will benefit your organization.

In a complex area of marketing (and an account with a number of policies and restrictions), working with a specialized team helps you take advantage of the Grant. Ad Grant managers ensure you don’t lose your Grant, and that it is set up to get the best results for you, which is why Ad Grant management services are a great investment!