EP 35: Maximizing Google's Ad Grant for Nonprofits with Jessica King

Jeff: Welcome to the Elevate Your Event podcast, where we talk about how to plan and execute an unforgettable event that will dazzle your guests and generate more income for your organization. From fundraising and securing trendy auction items to event production and logistics, get the best tips and advice from seasoned fundraising and event professionals who have been in your shoes.

Jeff: Welcome back to the Elevate Your Event podcast, where we talk about all the various ways you can make your next fundraising event better. And today, we have Jessica King as a special guest. And oh my gosh, I am in the presence of two experts today. We got Mark Labriola from Brand Viva Media as well.

Mark: That's right. Hey, how's it going?

Jessica: It is going awesome. Thanks for having me on your show.

Jeff: So Jessica's with Getting Attention. I love it.

Jessica: Yep.

Jeff: Do we have your attention? Okay, I just want to make sure. She's like, wait, what? She's like, I got her attention. We got your attention on this podcast. We are going to talk about marketing. So specifically, Jessica, give us a little bit of background -- not just on what Getting Attention does, because we're definitely going to talk about that, but also your general background with nonprofit marketing.

Jessica: So I started my career in social media for nonprofits, helping with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram -- well, now it's X, I suppose, and Instagram -- the whole kit and caboodle there. Then I moved into search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and that was a natural progression to working with nonprofits on the Google Ad Grant. What the Google Ad Grant is, is a $10,000 per month grant from Google that allows folks to take advantage of paid search ads. What Getting Attention does is help nonprofits acquire the Google Ad Grant and then make full use of it. We help them with their advertising strategy, report on results monthly, and basically help our nonprofit clients better reach their goals.

Jeff: Now, $10,000 a month. I know, that's a lot.

Mark: But I have a question. Can that money be used for creative or assets, or does it have to strictly be spent on just running the ads?

Jessica: It's just search ads, which is one thing I always like to make sure nonprofits are clear on when they come in for the Google Ad Grant. When I say search ads, what I mean is, if you pop something into Google -- if you search "fun things to do this weekend" and you get your list of results -- those text ads that appear at the top of the results page, that's what we're talking about with the Google Ad Grant. From my experience as a Google Ad Grant manager, we help with creating all the ad text. We'll help you create the strategy of what pages on your website to link to, and we can also -- I think this will vary by vendor -- help out with images so that if you appear in that number one spot, you can get a nice eye-catching picture next to your ad.

Mark: But for example, there's a different program if you want display ads, which are the ones that follow you around the internet?

Jessica: Yeah, for that you'd have to use a regular paid Google Ads account.

Mark: Okay. So what we're talking about here in terms of a marketing strategy is somebody, through this grants program, is able to put some ads up through AdWords. And those are going to end up on a landing page somewhere. So I would imagine these aren't super effective unless you're able to convert these into something, right? So are you working with your clients on what happens after the click?

Jessica: What we typically try to do for landing pages -- this is actually a question I get a lot: "Does every single ad need a separate landing page?" There has been some progress with Google as far as landing pages go. What we typically recommend for our clients is that best practices for landing pages, to a large extent, are going to be the best practices for your website. Let's say you are bringing in somebody who is interested in your mission. Let's use an animal shelter as an example. If they have Googled "adopt a kitten," then when they land on your website, they're expecting to see something that will let them take that next step of adopting a kitten. Whether somebody clicked through that ad to get to your website or whether they found it through what's called organic -- and we can talk about the differences in these channels in a sec if you'd like -- they should be able to very clearly and easily take that next action, regardless of whether we built it as a very refined page. What we do with our clients is work with them to say, how can we take the pages that are existing on your website, make them more friendly to Google -- making sure that the keywords we are trying to show up for are appearing on the website -- and make sure that they're very user-friendly. Minimal friction to users taking the action we want them to take. Clear calls to action. The page loads correctly. It's easy to find their way around. It has the information they're looking for. But as far as building out separate landing pages, what I've found is those can actually be a lot to wrangle when you have a huge library that you're working with and you're like, oh God, we've got 20 separate landing pages for 20 separate campaigns. It's a lot more streamlined to take what you've got, make it as good as possible, and then use that. It keeps everything a little bit more neat, a little bit more tidy.

Mark: Okay. So brave of you guys to be diving into some of these nonprofits' websites.

Jessica: Yeah.

Mark: I mean, the amount of clutter, I'm sure, that has to be decluttered -- there's just a lot there, because a lot of times people want to say so much. They're so passionate about their ideas and they want to explain all the details. But really, we're trying to get people to take an action. And sometimes all that language gets in the way of them taking an action. They get lost in the other things. I could see how that would be difficult, because people get so attached to their mission. They're like, "Well, I want to say this and I want to say that." And sometimes you just have to realize, okay, all those things are great, and we can mention those things on a landing page or someplace on the website. But for this ad to be effective, it needs to be very concise and very action-oriented. It needs to convert.

Jessica: Yeah, exactly.

Mark: Well, it's funny, because to me, it'd be like the onion. And maybe this is the type-A perfectionist in me, but I have a feeling if I dove into some of these nonprofits' websites, I'd be like, well, let's maybe upgrade your website. Maybe we should rebrand it. Are you happy with that logo? You've got 6,000 words on this page. Can we shrink this down, change your messaging? And all of a sudden you're starting from scratch with their marketing. So you've got to be a little careful, I would imagine.

Jessica: Yeah. And honestly, I try to be really upfront with nonprofits I'm talking to. If I think they are going to need substantial website changes before we could see good results with the Google Ad Grant, I'm going to tell them that, because you're right -- you do see a number of nonprofit websites that could use some work. What I've actually been surprised by is, I have of course seen the essays about the work where someone is not sitting and reading all of that. But I also see the flip side, where maybe folks are so familiar with their mission, so familiar with what they do, that they forget to put themselves in the shoes of people who have never encountered their organization before, have never heard of them, and have no idea what they do. There are a lot of little things that go with that. Even just "where are you located?" is a big question that I often find nonprofits need to clarify on their site. It's a helpful exercise to go through your website and just pretend you've never seen it, or get a friend -- if you have somebody who you know for a fact has never once looked at your website, have them go through it and ask, "Was anything confusing? Did you have any questions you could not find the answer to on the site? Was anything really difficult to find the answer to?" These are all really helpful exercises.

Mark: Yeah, I'm a big fan of video, obviously. I do have a media company. I feel like a lot of times you can say a lot in a short period of time through a video. If you have 60 or 90 seconds to explain what your mission is and how it solves someone's problem or helps the community, you can do that really effectively. And people engage more with video too. Everything that we see shows people spend more time on a web page if there's video on there.

Jeff: I agree. And one of the things also that we started messing around with -- and I think nonprofits would love, to your point around seeing how people are reacting on your site -- is a tool like Hotjar or something.

Mark: Oh yeah, to see where people are instantly clicking and --

Jeff: Yeah. I know we didn't turn this into that because we're going to talk about ad grants in a second, but literally a tool like Hotjar or -- what's the other one called, like Crazy Egg, or -- anyway, you guys can go look them up. But what they do is, there are plugins, and I would say probably 90-plus percent of nonprofit websites are probably in a WordPress framework or something. So you put this plugin in there and you literally log in and it shows you videos of what people do.

Mark: Oh yeah, it's really cool. It's the heat map and then just watching someone --

Jeff: Right, getting confused. Like, "Where's the buy now button?"

Mark: Yeah, exactly.

Jeff: So let me start defining these terms for our audience. A heat map will actually highlight the areas of the site where people click the most. So it might show the donate button -- that's what you want. But then if you see it's really hot over by some photo or some other area, you're like, oh, okay, there's a problem. We need to direct people to the donate button. So you go to Google, you get the -- let's come back and talk about how you get it -- but you get all of this money. Now you're running all of these ads and they're hitting this landing page and you're trying to convert them to do something. Register for an event. Donate to your cause. Fill out a lead form, volunteer, whatever it might be that you're running an ad for. I think a tool like Hotjar can help you really understand whether you're getting that conversion.

Mark: Right.

Jeff: But okay, so let's back up for a second. The grants program -- it's clearly not for everybody.

Mark: Yeah, that's true.

Jeff: So who --

Mark: People who don't want money.

Jeff: Yeah, well... Okay, so just full disclosure, because I think we were probably one of the first charities that tried it -- I want to say probably 2007, 2008 timeframe -- my charity applied for it, and we got it. And then we spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out how to spend all this money.

Mark: I'll be honest with you. It sounds like a good problem to have, but it almost sounds like you're saying it's negative.

Jeff: Well, I think that's where an agency like Getting Attention can really help, because for us, we were trying to figure out what ads we were going to run and what we were going to drive traffic to. We ran tons of ads for tons of keywords, and we're a rare disorder, so there are only so many searches people can do. So I think you have to explain to us, Jessica, your opinion -- what charities is this good for? And I would imagine it's got to be some that feel like they can drive enough traffic to warrant it.

Jessica: I can come at this question from a couple of angles. First of all, I'm going to talk about eligibility, because there might be some folks listening to this who are like, "Oh great, I'm going to go sign up right now," and they may be stymied right out the gate. First of all, you do have to be registered as a 501(c)(3), and you can't be a school. There is a Google for Education program designed for schools -- totally different suite of offerings -- but sadly, you are not eligible for the Google Ad Grant. The next group that is not eligible would be hospitals and healthcare organizations. And then the last would be governmental entities. This is my theory -- this is not confirmed anywhere in Google's documentation -- my theory about what all those groups have in common is government funding. So if you are a nonprofit and you're thinking, "Hey, we distribute medical supplies. Does that make us a healthcare center?" -- it's worth giving it a go, especially if you don't receive any kind of government funding, to see if you're eligible. So from the eligibility question, that's something to keep in mind.

Jessica: Talking about what kinds of nonprofits get the best results from the Google Ad Grant, I think it can be a little bit mission-specific, but one of the things that is most helpful to keep in mind is what are you hoping for from the Google Ad Grant? Because it is a really powerful tool to bring in folks who have never heard of your organization before and who are searching for things that are relevant to your mission. If you know that there is a group of people out there searching for things related to your mission, there's a good chance that it's going to be a good fit. What the Google Ad Grant is less good for -- sometimes I tell my nonprofits to think of it like if you were walking down the street and there's somebody who's got a table and they're handing stuff out or trying to talk to you, right? They're like, "Hey, would you sign your email on this sheet of paper?" or "Would you donate a dollar?" You'd probably be like, "Yeah, okay, sure. I don't know you, but all right, it seems fine." If they were like, "Hey, would you donate $4,000 to our capital campaign?" you might be like, "I've never met you before. That's a little fast."

Jessica: So the Google Ad Grant is really best suited for asks that are going to be appropriate for people who are less familiar with your organization. Signing up for emails, for nurture streams -- that can be a really good fit. Overall, just increasing awareness in the market -- another great fit. Donations can work. My experience has been that nonprofits who have either a lot of brand recognition or a mission with a broad base of supporters are going to do more successful donation campaigns.

Mark: Who doesn't love to save a puppy? I want to save a puppy.

Jessica: We have some nonprofits -- we have one, for example, who is a fundraising arm for a national park. That's a really great example. People who are passionate about national parks are very passionate about national parks. They know exactly what they're looking for. They know exactly the donation they're trying to make. Whereas some of our other organizations who are a little bit more niche or less well-known, those are better suited for awareness campaigns. You can build up over time to a donation outcome or other relevant outcomes that you might be interested in, like recruiting volunteers, things like that.

Jeff: Well, will Google kick you out if you don't use all of the money?

Jessica: No.

Jeff: No. Okay.

Jessica: So the requirements to keep the grant are fairly straightforward. The two biggest ones: there is a minimum click-through rate. What that means is the percentage of people who see your ad who then click on it. That minimum click-through rate is 5%. And if you miss that 5% in one month, it's not like you get completely blacklisted from the program. "You're done forever." They give you a warning. If you continue to not be able to make the click-through rate, then they'll deactivate your account. It is possible to reactivate a lapsed account. So it's a bit of a three-strikes-you're-out type of deal, not an instant "don't ever talk to us again" type of thing.

Jeff: So that's the click-through rate.

Jessica: And then the other requirement to maintain the grant each month is you have to get at least one conversion.

Jeff: But the nice thing about conversions is this is a meaningful action that somebody takes on your website. "The month's coming to an end and you're like, just donate one dollar. Call all your friends up. Click on all these ads. Come on, I need to convert."

Jessica: No, the good thing about conversions is you get to pick what the conversions are. For example, you might have several different conversion actions. You might have some that you're feeling pretty confident you can achieve, like email signups -- those are usually pretty accessible for organizations of just about every size. You might have others that are a little bit bigger asks. So it might be a donation. It might be creating a profile with you. It might be a purchase from your web store, things like that. You only need to get one of these each month.

Jeff: But you'll want Google Analytics set up to track the conversions. I mean, how does Google know you got a conversion?

Jessica: There is conversion tracking hosted within Google Ads. My opinion is that it's actually not that good. I would set up Google Analytics. That's something our team, for example, helps our clients with. It's also something that actually adding the tags is usually not too hard on the site, especially if you're built in a WordPress or Squarespace or HubSpot type of site. That part's usually not too bad. Where it can get a little squirrelly is some of the event parameters in GA4. Everyone's favorite tool.

Jeff: GA4 is so popular. Yes, we were all so happy that they took a functioning product and changed it.

Mark: But it is a very powerful tool.

Jeff: There's a business idea -- that's a whole other podcast on how you can ruin a product called Google Analytics. I'm sorry, Google's probably never going to give me a grant now for my charity.

Jessica: Hey, yeah, I'm also on their list. They're like, we've got your number.

Jeff: No, but Google Analytics 4, there's a learning curve, but it is possible to learn how to do it and set it up. And then you connect it to Google Ads and you have the benefit of -- and I really do think there's benefit to both -- because you want to not only track how you're doing in ads and make sure you maintain that grant, but GA4 gives you tons of information about how people behave on your website. So if you're looking in general to improve your website, similar to that heat map thing we were talking about earlier, you can see what your most popular pages are, what people are clicking on, what actions people are taking. If you have videos on your site, you can even see how far they've watched in the videos, things like that. So there's a wealth of information to be had there. It's a good tool for folks to start with, and it's free.

Mark: Are those services you provide to your clients? Will you set up GA4 for them?

Jessica: Yep. We set up GA4 and then we set up conversion actions that are related to the Google Ad Grant profile. So if they're like, "Hey, we want to track when people submit a contact us form," we can help get that set up.

Jeff: I'm going to make a shameless plug for you and say that for our audience who's looking at this ad program, it's well worth exploring an agency like these guys to handle all of it. I'm telling you, it's all got to get connected correctly together and it's got to work. And you're honestly just going to want the report at the end of the month saying, "This is what you need to know." Because otherwise -- and look, I've been in this space for a long time -- you will be digging through loads of information trying to figure out what's meaningful to know and what's not.

Mark: Especially on the AdWords side, because just to educate people on what we're talking about -- now that we're 23 minutes into this podcast, we even told you what AdWords are. When you're trying to drive traffic to your website, people in most cases are going to go to Google, unless they know exactly who you are -- and most won't. And people are lazy anyway, they're still going to go to Google to look you up. So they're going to type it in. And when the results come back, based on what they typed in, you're going to have a set of results. Some of those are going to be paid -- they say "ad" or they say "sponsored" or whatever. Most people know which ones those are. The natural results are what you would call organic. Those are the natural search results that Google's algorithm says are the most accurate responses for what the user typed in. The sponsored results are the paid ads, and that's what we're talking about. It's never a bad idea, if you are the Save the Whales Foundation, to have both a paid result as well as the natural one. It never hurts, especially when you have the ad grant.

Mark: And it produces more trust and brand awareness too, right? If someone sees you in the sponsored section, maybe skips it, but then they see you down in the non-sponsored results, it's like, oh, okay -- that name or that image popped up in my brain, so now I'm more likely to take an action.

Jeff: But it's tricky because you have to know what people might be typing in that would be meaningful to get to your site. And Google doesn't always tell you, right? So you sometimes even have to ask people. We tell people, we ask people, I'm like, "How'd you hear about us?" "Oh, I went and searched on Google." "What did you search for?" Because we'd like to know, because that helps us.

Jeff: It's not easy, right, to even know. So you have to -- explain a little bit about the whole keyword research process, Jessica, and what you guys would do with a client to help them understand what keywords to buy.

Jessica: Keyword research is really -- I mean, if you're a nerd like me, it's a really interesting area of marketing where you've got this overlap between what Google the robot understands and what Google as a user interface will show, and how do you both control what the robot Google understands and control what is appearing in front of users? One thing I think is cool about Google Ads is, when you are showing up in Google organic search results -- those blue links that nobody paid for -- Google is showing what it thinks is the best fit to folks' queries. Those might not be the pages that you want to promote. For example, if you want people to be able to go straight to that donate page, you can link that among other pages in your ad results.

Jessica: When we think about how to build out a keyword strategy, there are a couple of things to keep in mind. There's a basic framework I would start with. The first thing is that the terminology you use to talk about your mission may not be the terminology that people who don't know a ton about it or who aren't in it every day are going to use. So back to the animal shelter example -- if you were to say "adoptable felines," that would be very weird. Nobody's searching for that, right? They're looking for adoptable cats, adoptable kittens, things like that. So you're going to want to look for the terms that are actually getting searched.

Jessica: Other things to keep in mind: the ebbs and flows of your mission. For example, we have clients who work with kids in schools. There's going to be some seasonal interest that peaks as school is getting back in session. It's going to have a low season during the summer. So you want to look for those ebbs and flows in keyword searches and understand that you're going to be hitting those at least a little bit before they're going to be broadly searched, and then wind it back.

Jessica: The last thing you want to do is get an idea of how Google sees your site to begin with. There are a couple of tools you can use. The first one, and probably the one I'd recommend folks start with -- although it does, I'm sorry to say, involve setting up another portal -- would be Google Search Console. This is going to show you the organic searches, every search that people did to land on your website and what page they landed on.

Jeff: You're talking about Google Search Console?

Jessica: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jeff: And you would set that up and manage that for a client?

Jessica: We can. It kind of depends on their interest. It's something we're able to set up -- it's not difficult -- but not every single client is interested in it. But that's one resource you can use. The other resource is there are tools within Ads, and this is usually what we start with, that will show you what terms folks are coming in with. The cool thing about Ads as well is, if you start running ads -- let's say I'm running an ad for adoptable kittens, right? If someone searches "kittens for adoption," that's a different keyword. It might not be a keyword I've included, but there are reports within Google Ads that'll show you, "Hey, we think that this keyword has a similar intent, like someone's looking for the same thing, we showed it to them, they clicked on your ad." You might say, "Great, okay, I hadn't even thought of that keyword, but let's go ahead and add that to our campaign so that people who are searching very similar keywords can find our ads as well." So you'll start to, over time, grow out this big bank of keyword variations. Most people are searching the shorter versions -- they're typically going to have a syntax that you would expect if you're being very conversational. But you might also get to these longer-tail keywords where they might search something like "adoptable kittens vaccinated" or "adoptable kittens spayed already" -- probably not what most people are searching, but still of interest.

Jeff: Is AI starting to show up in this area as well for keyword research?

Jessica: Yeah. It can be a really cool brainstorming tool. This is sometimes how we'll use it on our end. We will get on ChatGPT, and the whole way that ChatGPT works is it was trained on the internet to look for connections between words. It is a language model. So it is a really effective tool if you say, "Hey, give me 50 keyword variations on" whatever topic -- "kittens for adoption" -- it'll spit out a huge list and you can look at that and then pair it with Google Keyword Planner. That's a tool within Ads, and it'll show you the search volume that was seen over the last year, the month-over-month changes, how that is trending, what the cost per click would be, et cetera. So yeah, we're big fans of using AI to make those connections and help us work faster in that regard.

Jeff: I think some of our listeners' brains probably melted at this point. It's one of those things -- even being in marketing, I'm like, oh my goodness, the rabbit hole of all the different things you have to know and understand. But that's why it's important to have a good partner to help you navigate that stuff.

Mark: I agree. 100% agree.

Jeff: So let me ask you this. Have you ever set up a portion of people's ad programs to promote their event?

Jessica: Yeah, events are a really popular way to engage with the Google Ad Grant. Usually what we'll do for that is we'll have some form of landing page that lives on their site that gives all the event details. And then usually for that, we're going to set up some kind of conversion. If they have an RSVP function or a "send me more info" function -- some sort of button that people can click to say, "Yes, I want to hear more" -- we'll track that. If it's a little bit more hands-off, maybe they have a community calendar, we might just track page views, but ideally we're getting those conversions in because that's going to give people a lot more granular data on what's going on.

Mark: Yeah, I love this idea. Especially for nonprofits, this idea -- it's almost like a stacking. You're wanting that initial email address, right? And then it can be part of your broader strategy to start doing a drip campaign of emails to those people, providing value back to them. Then you can ask them for a donation or whatever that bigger ask is. But getting those initial emails or those initial leads are probably the hardest part for nonprofits. So I think this is probably a great piece of the whole pie as far as strategy goes, to front-fill the emails that you then need to do all these other actions with. That's really cool. I didn't even know about this.

Jeff: Like, how do you even get this? Look, this is very generous of Google. But I will tell you, it is not for everybody because you're going to need Jessica to help you. And then you can have that guilt -- like, if you're not spending the money, it's like, "I'm losing $10,000 a month," or whatever the amount is.

Jeff: So let me ask you this. This is probably another inappropriate question, but I'm full of them today. Can you borrow another nonprofit's grant program? Like, can a nonprofit run an ad for another charity in their area if they wanted to? Or would Google get mad at that?

Mark: You're sub-leasing the dollars.

Jeff: Yeah, exactly. That's kind of what I'm thinking.

Mark: Yes, we're on the same wavelength with this one.

Jessica: She's stumped.

Jeff: She's like, "I'm going to get fired if I answer this question." The IRS is listening and this is inappropriate.

Jessica: Yeah, no, click fraud aside, it's not really possible to do that. One thing that is possible that some of our clients do take advantage of is, if you -- for example, we work with a nonprofit based in Memphis, Tennessee. Their whole deal is they are trying to promote the city of Memphis, make it very vibrant, et cetera. They have a lot of different websites that serve that mission for their various programs. They have some that are dedicated to teaching and recruiting educators. They have some dedicated to civic events, things like that, plus their main website. So what we can do is, if you have a situation like that where you're like, "Hey, we're one nonprofit, but we have all these different programs we want to promote," you can add extra websites or extra domains -- that's your "yourname.org" -- to your Ad Grant profile, as long as they're all subsumed under that same nonprofit.

Jeff: I think that's interesting. And I'll give you some history from us. So the organization that we set up our ad program for was the Foundation for Prader-Willi Research. Prader-Willi syndrome, which is the disorder my daughter has, is a rare disorder. There's just not enough searching out there for it. So what I would say to people is, if you're in that kind of niche where you just don't feel like you're going to be able to benefit from this because there's no way any Prader-Willi organization is going to spend $10,000 a month -- the keywords just aren't that valuable -- there is an organization in this case called NORD, the National Organization for Rare Disorders. And what I would say is it would be better to have that organization get the program and the grant and then basically work with all of their member organizations to drive AdWords programs for them.

Jeff: And look, maybe Google still doesn't like that approach, but I think in some cases -- I like your Memphis idea -- where you've got a consortium of charities in an area, maybe they come together and become a consortium. They become their own 501(c)(3), and maybe that could work for them. Because it is just too big when we looked at it. Unless you want to run 50 events a year and then you'd probably get some money out of it. So anyway, I think it is definitely a cool idea. It's a good element to add to your mix of marketing.

Jeff: Does Facebook have anything like this, or do any of the other platforms have similar programs?

Jessica: So Microsoft ran a pilot for something very similar. They call it Ads for Social Impact. It was a very similar thing -- instead of Google Ads, they would obviously be Bing ads since it's Microsoft.

Mark: Does anybody go to Bing?

Jeff: Just Bing. Yeah, that is the question. They got some traction when they integrated with ChatGPT where it was part of it, so you could ask ChatGPT to use internet information, I think. But no, nobody's Binging it.

Jessica: Yeah, that's why it was a pilot program. I'm going to say they're not taking new applicants. If they ever open that back up, that's something we'll probably dip our feet into. But that's one that I know of. Facebook has a number of tools for fundraisers. I do not believe they have ads that are subsidized by Facebook. They have a number of fundraising tools that you can use. You can run ads as a nonprofit, of course, on any platform you want if you're willing to pay for it. But I think Google Ad Grant is fairly unique in terms of just the size of it and the ubiquity. When we think about discoverability, as you mentioned before, tons of people's first stop is Google, and Google owns 90% of the search market. So they are almost certainly going to be the platform where a lot of your supporters, or future supporters, are going when they're looking for stuff about your site.

Jessica: Social media can be an effective tool. You get that benefit of social proof -- like, "My friend donated to this fundraiser for their birthday. Maybe I'll do that as well." But the trade-off there is the lack of perfect control over where you show up and to whom and how.

Mark: Is it just Google AdWords, or could it also be YouTube pre-roll or other places like that?

Jessica: They have a program. So to just lift up the curtain a little bit and take one step back on the Ad Grant application process: one of the things that you do when applying for the Ad Grant is sign up for Google for Nonprofits. In Google for Nonprofits, there is another program called YouTube for Nonprofits that lets you run ads, add links to videos that your nonprofit is putting up. That is a program nonprofits can take advantage of. I find for that one, it's probably best suited for really large nonprofits who have a ton of video they can put out. The ACLU is Google and YouTube's example in that instance. Not to say you have to be the ACLU to get value out of that, but I think there are a lot of nonprofits who are like, "We don't even have one video, let alone multiple videos that we can link to."

Mark: So that would be -- hire Brand Viva Media to generate more videos for them.

Jeff: There you go. Get some videos going. Content. It's all about that content.

Jessica: It is. And making good content is hard.

Mark: Yeah, no, it is. It's time-consuming. It requires more bodies, and sometimes it's easier just to hire an agency instead of a full-time person.

Jeff: Look, for-profit companies hire agencies, right? You need that expertise in this area. So I would just encourage -- to kind of wrap this podcast up -- I'd definitely encourage our listeners to explore working with an agency. If you have Google Grants and it's working for you, great, congratulations. But if you are thinking, "Wow, this is a cool grants program and I can actually use some extra traffic to my website," all of that could be really true. I would definitely explore hiring an agency to help you with it.

Mark: Yeah. It's often going to be a lot more cost-effective. You get the benefit of the fact that the agency sees hundreds of organizations in your shoes, rather than your full-time employee who sees one, maybe two or three, depending on their work history.

Jeff: Right. Well, and with nonprofits, it's like, usually there are small teams that are already spinning so many plates. And so to then -- to your point, it was stressful that you had this thing. It was a blessing and then also extremely stressful at the same time.

Mark: Yeah. Well, they send you warnings. "You're not using it. You don't have enough conversions."

Jeff: Calling your friends up. "Hey, click on these ads. Search --" I'm not saying you should do that, by the way. Hypothetically.

Mark: I knew a guy once who told me a story about being 15 clicks short this month.

Jeff: So, no, it's been good. Hey, let's wrap this podcast up. Jessica, thank you so much for your insights here. Like I said, the Google Grants program is really cool. If you're not in Google for Nonprofits, it's worth being in there. Why not?

Mark: Yeah.

Jeff: So I wouldn't even talk about that. But go there. Apply. Get free email. And I get it, maybe you're a Microsoft shop and you have Microsoft for Nonprofits. They're great too. But you might as well apply for all of them and use the tools that you can get.

Jessica: Yep. And you can have both. They don't check to make sure you're loyal. You can have both.

Mark: That is true.

Jeff: Yeah. I don't remember that checkbox saying, "Are you a Microsoft customer?" Click here and then if you say yes, it kicks you out. I didn't see that.

Mark: The sirens start wailing.

Jeff: Yeah, exactly. Awesome. All right, well, we're going to wrap up this episode of the Elevate Your Event podcast. Jessica and Mark, thanks again for joining us today and talking about marketing. We'll come back in a future podcast and maybe dive into some other stuff. Maybe heat maps or something cool like that. I don't know. Like a heat map of your event. Like where did everybody congregate?

Mark: I bet you it's the bar.

Jeff: Oh, that would be good. Yeah, 100%. Or the hors d'oeuvres table.

Mark: Exactly, the hors d'oeuvres table if they're good.

Jeff: So okay, until then, you guys have a great fundraising experience. And again, if you are listening to us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, leave us a five-star review. Tell your friends about us. We're on YouTube as well. We'd appreciate a review and a five-star review and comment there as well. And a follow. If you follow, then you get notified every single time a new episode gets released. Subscribe to us. That's right. For sure. And we'll figure out how to get some AdWords going for that podcast as well. Anyway, all right, till next time, happy fundraising.