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Leveraging Google Ad Grants for Brand Awareness: 4 Tips

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Raising brand awareness online can seem challenging at first. The internet is full of a million distractions and competitors, so your organization needs to stand out to the people who matter most: your supporters.

That’s where Google Ad Grants come in.

Google Ad Grants give eligible nonprofits up to $10,000 in ad credit each month. With these ad credits, your nonprofit can place targeted ads in search engine results about topics relevant to your work. Think of how easily you could meet your fundraising goals if you could double or triple the number of visitors to your website!

The key to raising brand awareness is to make sure that your brand is being seen. You can master Google Ads to get clicks online with a little time and practice, and anyone can learn the basics in a few short minutes. To increase your brand awareness with the Google Ad Grant, you should:

  • Design a branded website.
  • Identify high-priority conversions.
  • Create targeted ad campaigns.
  • Meet your supporters’ needs.

We will explore a few tips that anyone can use to gain an edge with their brand awareness online, starting with the center of it all: your website.

Design a branded website.

Your website is the most influential piece of your branding strategy. Remember, a poorly designed or under-used website can say just as much about a brand as an expert one.

An effective and well-maintained website is the headquarters of  your nonprofit’s online success and how well the Google Ad Grant will work. Here are a few things to examine to improve the quality of your website’s branding and functionality:

  • Your mission statement should be featured prominently. Your mission statement is like your nonprofit’s heartbeat. It inspires visitors to take action and gives your brand a chance to speak.
  • Choose your images wisely. Images and infographics provide a splash of color and useful information that can stay with a reader long after they have moved to the next website, but be careful about image sizes. An image that’s too large can make your website take a long time to load!
  • Say what you mean and say it well. The text on your site should be engaging to your readers. Think of your website as an always-on spokesperson for your nonprofit’s brand, and write something that gives life and energy to what you do.
  • Make your website accessible to all. Ensuring that your website follows accessibility guidelines, such as being navigable by keyboard alone or using clear fonts and text sizes, are simple steps that may help your website be fully functional to a wider audience.

Having a quality website is also one of the things that Google checks when examining your application for the Google Ad Grant. Put in the time to make your website into your brand’s helpful home on the internet and you will find that more of your visitors decide to stay awhile!

Identify high-priority conversions.

Getting visitors to your site isn’t everything. You also need to make sure that they are interacting with your site in ways that contribute to your cause. This is called a conversion.

A few high-value conversions include:

  • Increasing donations
  • Recruiting volunteers
  • Connecting with local businesses to encourage workplace giving
  • Getting views or downloads of important content
  • Signing up for an email newsletter

Ask yourself:  What does your organization hope to accomplish? What do they want to be known for? Which statistics might help with future grant proposals or program expansions? Ultimately, the conversions you decide to anchor your brand around will form the basis of how you target your ad campaigns with Google Ads.

Create targeted ad campaigns.

When you post an ad with Google, it doesn’t appear in every search on the internet. Google Ads can only place you at the top of the right search results if you know which searches to target, which will likely require a bit of critical thinking and research.

Spend some time thinking about your cause and your brand. What are common internet searches that your ideal audience might make? Use demographic data and from past fundraising or volunteering if you have it to inform your decision. Prospect research can also help you identify your ideal audience.

For example, let’s say you run a  nonprofit that aims to place stray animals in loving homes. If your organization was hoping to find volunteers, you could target phrases like “where to help animals in my area” or “benefits of volunteering with animals.” However, if you’d rather fundraise, you could shift your ads to target phrases like “support local animal rescues” or “how to help stray dogs.”

As you gain more experience in placing targeted ads. you will see what strategies and marketing channels are more effective to reach your ideal audience.. Your supporters have much to offer, but you need to understand them in return.

Meet your supporters’ needs.

Making a difference in your community is a collaboration between you and your supporters. It is important that you consider what they hope to gain through their volunteering or support for you, and meeting those needs will help to solidify your brand in their mind and build trust.

The Google Ad Grant gives you an easy way to speak directly to them. Think of your targeted ads not as marketing, but as the chance to answer a question, and even get to know your donors’ needs in the process.

Here are a few tips for how to meet potential new supporters where they are:

  • Track past ad campaigns to see which ones work. Google Ads tracks extensive data for you. This allows you to explore which ad campaigns are more successful than others and which goals they are helping you to meet.
  • Tailor your messaging to the campaigns that work best.  Successful campaigns indicate that something is resonating with your readers. Try to focus on what made those campaigns effective as you think of future ads.
  • Connect tailored messaging and your brand. Your supporters will show you which messaging works and which doesn’t. Take what you learn beyond Google Ads and use it to help improve your brand’s tone and voice everywhere that you communicate with your supporters.

The takeaway

Seeking change in your community is a team effort. It means taking the time to listen to your supporters and understand their needs and wants. Google Ads provide a way for you to find new supporters and communicate with them both directly and indirectly, providing essential information you need to help your organization thrive.

The size of your organization doesn’t have to limit how many people you can reach or what you can accomplish. Whether you choose to put the Google Ads to work for yourself or seek the help of Google-certified grant management, there is something for everyone in the Google Ad Grant to increase brand awareness.

 

Grant Hensel nonprofit awarenessGrant Hensel is the CEO of Nonprofit Megaphone, an agency focused 100% on Google Grant Management for nonprofits. NPM is honored to manage the Google Grant for 370+ leading nonprofits worldwide and to be an inaugural member of the Google Ad Grant Certified Professionals community.

 

Developing Your Nonprofit’s Branding Strategy: 5 Tips

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A guest post by Ryan Felix, of Loop

A nonprofit’s brand is what sets it apart from the crowd. It’s the identifier that supporters use to recognize the organization and everything it stands for.

Brand recognition is a valuable factor in the marketing plans of all types of organizations. Larger companies have the most recognizable brands, like the Nike “swoosh” or the Apple logo. Even some large nonprofits are immediately recognizable, like the Red Cross or Girls Scouts.

Just like these massive organizations, your nonprofit brand is integral to your organization’s identity. When your supporters come across your logo on the web or social platforms, they should immediately recognize that the message is associated with you.

However, your brand isn’t just about your logo. We’ve compiled this guide of five tips to create a consistent and recognizable brand identity:

  1. Identify your target audience.
  2. Get inspired by brand elements you admire from other nonprofits.
  3. Create a style guide for your nonprofit’s brand.
  4. Maintain your brand across all channels.
  5. Work with a nonprofit brand agency.

This succinct guide summarizes some of the tips in the complete nonprofit branding guide from Loop: Design for Social Good. After you’ve read this article, you can see examples of these tips at work in the more complete guide.

1. Identify your target audience.

Consider who you interact the most with. Do you work primarily with low-income youth in New York? Middle-aged women in Montreal? These two audiences will respond differently to visual design choices and should be taken into account when you make decisions for your brand.

To be even more accurate, involve your audience in your branding process. Ask for their input using surveys and conduct A/B testing to better understand how they interact with different design elements. Be sure to only test one element at a time so that you understand which elements caused better engagement results.

2. Get inspired by brand elements you admire from other nonprofits.

Even if you’re not a designer, you can identify brands that you like versus ones that you don’t. Take that instinct a step further by analyzing the brands you do like and identifying the elements that make them appealing.

Look at top nonprofit websites and start looking for the elements that make them stand out to you. After you’ve looked through several websites, make an initial list of the sites you find visually appealing and another of the sites you dislike visually.

Then, consider each element on the individual sites to determine what you like about the designs on your “visually appealing” list. Some elements to consider include:

  • Colour palette
  • Font type
  • White space
  • Patterns
  • Shapes
  • Images

After you’ve identified the elements you prefer over several sites, you’ll likely start seeing some overlapping features. For example, you might find that you prefer a friendly, lowercase font over a bold, all capitalized one. Or, you might prefer bright, warm colours more than cool, subdued ones. Adopt these preferred elements for your nonprofit’s brand to develop your own style.

3. Create a style guide for your nonprofit’s brand.

Once you’ve completed the prep work, establish your brand by developing a style guide to follow for your nonprofit. This style guide defines the brand elements that you’ll leverage for consistent, strategic communication.

Your guide should include the stylistic elements that define your nonprofit’s visual identity, including the following:

Colour palette

The colours you choose should be aligned with the tone you’d like to convey to your audience. Different colours inherently communicate different characteristics. For instance:

  • Red communicates strong emotions like strength and health and conveys urgency.
  • Orange tends to be a more playful colour, representing friendliness and energy.
  • Yellow represents sunlight, communicating warm and happy emotions.
  • Green traditionally represents growth and prosperity, often linked to climate and sustainability.
  • Blue is associated with a number of feelings, including calmness, tranquility, and trust.
  • Purple is often associated with innovation.
  • Black tends to represent more serious brands going for a bold or activist-driven look.

Choose the colours that best represent the message you’d like to convey, then add them to your style guide. These colours will be used repeatedly on your website and throughout your other marketing materials.

Logo

Your nonprofit’s logo succinctly encompasses your entire brand in a simple, single design. When your audience encounters your logo, they should immediately relate it to your mission.

Here are some tips to make sure your logo is impactful:

  • The design is simple. Too many small details will be challenging to copy and repeat in varying qualities and scales across multiple marketing channels and different materials.
  • It looks good in greyscale. If you’re printing your logo on a black-and-white letterhead, it should still be recognizable and attractive.
  • You have multiple versions. Certain circumstances may require your organization to use your logo with or without a tagline or in a different colour. Create these versions up front so they’re available when you need them.

Typography

Typography encompasses both the typeface (fonts and font families), style (ie. capitalization), and hierarchy. How you combine these elements will display tone just as colour decisions do.

When you choose a font, consider both usability and tone that is conveyed. For example, serif fonts tend to be more challenging than sans serif to read on computers. So, if your organization operates primarily on digital platforms, it’s easier for your audience to read paragraphs of text in a sans serif font.

Tone can be conveyed depending on the weight and feel of the typeface. Advocacy organizations may speak with urgency, calling for a bold font. Meanwhile, a children’s charity may speak softer, using a more lightweight, geometric font.

Choosing the style of your typography also depends on the tone you wish to convey. To communicate a friendly, approachable tone, you might choose an all lowercase font. Meanwhile, to communicate urgency or action, you might choose all capital letters instead.

Personality

While colour, typography, and logos primarily focus on the visual elements of your brand, your personality comes from the way you communicate and market your content to your audience.

Choose a consistent tone of voice that aligns with your organization’s identity to communicate with your audience. Then, carry this tone across your platforms, from your website content to your social media posts.

 

Save your completed style guide as a PDF so that it can’t be altered by others. Then share it with your design team, vendors, and marketing team. This will help you maintain a consistent brand across your team.

4. Maintain your brand across all channels.

While the content of your fundraising asks and messages may change depending on campaigns and programs, your brand should be immediately recognizable on each communication platform.

  • Nonprofit website. Your website is the central place from which you’ll build out your brand. Include your logo across all website pages, leverage your standard colour palette, and be sure all content portrays your brand personality.
  • Direct mail. Design a letterhead for your direct mail to use on every letter you send. For guidance, you can use letter templates like those offered by Fundraising Letters. Templates can be helpful to be sure all important information is included in the letter. However, customize the text to align with your personality before sending it.
  • Email. Leverage email software that provides more visual customization options than a generic email account. Mailchimp or similar solutions provide visual options to adopt your visual brand for every email you send.
  • Social media. Use your logo as your profile picture on social platforms. Customize your cover photo to also represent your brand. You might choose to include an image of your work, your team, a campaign, or constituents to personalize your social media page further.

When you adopt new audience-facing nonprofit software, choose solutions that offer customizable visual elements. This will ensure you can maintain your brand across any and all platforms, including crowdfunding pages, donation pages, or other fundraising opportunities.

5. Work with a nonprofit design agency.

While there are tips and tricks you can use to make impactful design decisions, you won’t become a design expert overnight. But you can have access to industry experts when you work with a design agency.

The best agencies will walk through the various design steps with your organization, getting to know your mission and personality in order to reflect them in the visual decisions you make. By working with an agency, you’ll see benefits such as saved time, access to expert advice, and increased confidence in design decisions.

 

While an agency is the most efficient choice to establish your brand, you can choose a more DIY approach. If you decide to go with the DIY method, ask other nonprofits if you can view their style guides or search for examples online. This will help guide your design decisions, ensuring you don’t forget any important elements in your own brand guide.

 

Ryan Felix head shotRyan Felix is a co-founder of Loop: Design for Social Good who brings a strong intuition and insight to create bold, creative & impactful websites. Ryan has led design studios in Toronto and New York using his knowledge of Human Centred Design to increase meaningful conversions and design enjoyable web experiences.

Determining Marketing Channel by Donor Segment: 5 Strategies

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A guest post by Grant Cobb of GivingMail

Your nonprofit is working hard to give back to your community, but perhaps you’re having a difficult time connecting with your audience. Perhaps you have low engagement rates among your donors, or maybe you’ve even heard that your audience is not receiving or remembering your marketing materials. That’s a major problem, but what can you do about it?

Marketing is an essential part of fundraising for any nonprofit organization’s development. How do you know which marketing strategy to use and which donors to use it with?

Donor segmentation, or the process of dividing your donors into groups based on similar characteristics, is a very effective strategy to appeal to certain types of supporters. For instance, while text-to-give might be an effective marketing channel for your younger, tech-savvy donors, it might fail to connect with those of older generations.

But that’s just one example! We’ve picked our 5 top strategies for identifying the right marketing channel for each of our donor segments. In determining your marketing channel of choice, you should:

  • Look at your donor’s past engagement.
  • Reference the donor’s preferred communication channel.
  • Use demographic information.
  • Categorize based on average gift size.
  • Orient your marketing around your donor’s location.

Marketing for your nonprofit takes time, energy, and money, so streamlining your outreach method can make your fundraising approach easier and might even earn you more donations. Plus, you can build better relationships for your donors, and hopefully encourage them to stick around. Let’s dive in!

1. Look at your donor’s past engagement.

Reviewing your donor’s previous engagements with your organization offers valuable insights into which marketing channel you should use and how often you should contact your supporter.

Let’s say you’re comparing two different donors. Donor #1 is highly engaged with your organization. They attend various events and sometimes volunteer. Meanwhile, Donor #2 was a one-time contributor and it’s been crickets since.

Because these donors have such different levels of engagement, your approach should vary accordingly!

For Donor #1, you could make a phone call to request a donation for your upcoming fundraiser. If this donor has had face-to-face interactions with your organization, a highly personal marketing channel, like a phone call, is a great idea. But Donor #2 might be more likely to respond to a more passive approach, like outreach via social media or email.

Here are some additional tips for ensuring that you contact your donors effectively:

  • Personalize your outreach: A little personalization can go a long way. Simply using the donor’s name or acknowledging their previous engagement history demonstrates that you value the donor as an individual, and not just a dollar amount.This GivingMail guide on how to ask for donations can help you personalize your donation requests to best fit the donor you’re contacting.
  • Try taking a multi-channel approach: Contacting your donors across more than one channel increases the likelihood that your message will reach the intended audience. Consider combining two or more channels, such as text-to-give and direct mail.
  • Identify which channels have been most effective in the past: As the saying goes, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Feel free to rely on the channels that have worked well with particular donors in the past.

2. Use the donor’s preferred communication channel.

Have you ever asked your donors how they would prefer to be contacted?  Using this information not only saves you time by eliminating the channel guessing game, but it also demonstrates that you pay attention to your donor’s preferences, which they will certainly appreciate.

If you haven’t asked your donors for their preferred communication channel, it’s a great idea to include this question in your onboarding or donation form on your nonprofit’s website going forward.

On your survey, you could provide these options:

  • Text
  • Email
  • Phone
  • Direct mail
  • Social media

You could also consider how you acquired the donor. Did they find you through your website? Did they donate through text-to-give? Did they respond to a post on your social media account? If one channel has reached them before, it will likely be their preference and will reach them again.

Obtaining this information sooner than later can make a huge difference in how much time you spend on planning your marketing approach. If your nonprofit is launching a digital campaign, for instance, and you already know your donors’ preferred digital communication method, you can get started immediately.

3. Segment by age.

One of the most commonly used demographics in donor segmentation is age, and for good reason. A younger audience might be more likely to find your organization through your website or a text-to-give campaign while older donors might hear about you through word-of-mouth or direct mail marketing.

But be careful not to make too many assumptions. While you might be tempted to use social media solely to reach your younger donors, certain platforms, like Facebook, are actually used more often by older audiences.

In addition to aiding your marketing strategy, age can also help you determine which fundraising approach you might want to implement within each segment. While a crowdfunding campaign or peer-to-peer fundraising is most effective with millennials, remember that baby boomers will tend to be more responsive to traditional mail campaigns.

4. Categorize based on average gift size.

Depending on the fundraiser you’re running, it might be more efficient to focus on a specific type of contributor as your campaign progresses. This approach can help keep your fundraising efforts organized and will give you the time to focus on one segment at a time.

For instance, if you’re running a capital campaign, you might want to focus your efforts on donors who have the largest average gift sizes first to secure major donations. Then, you can work your way down to the lowest average contributors, adjusting your marketing strategy along the way.

Not sure how to organize your strategy or which marketing methods to use? Here are some steps to follow with their ideal marketing channel if you decide to segment your donors by their average gift size:

  • Major gifts: Start here. This way, you can make sure to acquire your biggest donations before appealing to smaller donors. Prioritize highly personalized interactions with these donors. Try meeting them face-to-face or giving them a phone call to explain the value of their gift. Be sure to determine a minimum required donation amount to be considered a major donor beforehand.
  • Midsize gifts: Once you’ve secured your largest donations, move on to your medium-sized contributors. Reach them with a personalized email or direct mail campaign. Plus, if your large donors agree to match other donations, you could use this benefit as a selling point for your mid-size and smaller supporters.
  • Small gifts: Focus on these donors last to push your final fundraising total up to your goal. Connect with them through a text-to-give or social media campaign, and make the donation process as easy as possible. Remember that every donation counts!

5. Orient your marketing around your donor’s location.

Your proximity to donors will affect how accessible you will be to them, and segmenting your donors by location can help you tailor your marketing materials to fit those limitations. This is especially true if you’re an organization working within your local community.

If you’re hosting a local, in-person event, for example, it wouldn’t make sense to send a postcard invitation to someone living two states away.

However, just because your far-away donors can’t attend your event doesn’t mean that they don’t want to hear from you. All you have to do is implement a different strategy. Social media, email, text-to-give, or other digital communication methods can be an effective way to continue building meaningful relationships with donors who aren’t nearby. This OneCause guide to hybrid events can also help you bring your donors together no matter their location.

 

Grant Cobb is a fundraising specialist with over 6 years of experience in the nonprofit space. Currently the head of marketing and analytics at GivingMail, he is a huge proponent of data-driven decision making and the push to bring high-level analytics and fundraising to all.

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