Why Christmas is such an important time for charities?
The festive season is the time for giving and for charities, it’s a unique opportunity to boost their impact and garner much-needed support. Harnessing the power of digital advertising can help charities fundraise, raise awareness and recruit new employees to help create meaningful change.
In this blog, we’ll explore the strategies that can make your charity’s Google Ads campaigns stand out during the festive period and how you can use the Google Ad Grant to help extend your reach.
What are Google Ads?
Let’s start with the basics… what are Google Ads?
Google advertising is a relatively simple concept, businesses bid for the top spot on Google’s search results pages. There are a few things that Google ads use to ensure that your ads are reaching the right people:
Keywords – You can decide what keywords you bid for, these could be keywords that are specific to your charity’s mission e.g. children’s charity or more broad keywords e.g. donate to a charity. There is a lot of competition in the charity space for the top spot and the more competition, the more expensive your Google Ads can be.
Ad Creation – When utilising the ad grant you can only create text ads that look like this:
So it’s extra important to nail your copywriting as you won’t have a fancy graphic or image to tell your story for you.
Ad Placement – your ads will show up at the top of Google’s search engine results pages
What are Google Ad Grants?
Google Ad Grants are a grant that Google provides to charities and non-profit organisations to help them expand their reach by using Google advertising.
How Do Google Ad Grants Work?
Google Ad Grants work by covering the cost of all of your ad spend on Google, with a maximum monthly spend of £7,000. Imagine how many clicks your charity could get by increasing your monthly ad spend by £7,000! Whether you use the grant to fundraise, raise awareness or drive recruitment, the grant can help you to maximise your results.
How to use Google Ad Grants at Christmas
It’s well documented that around the festive season, people are more willing to donate to charity than at any other time of the year, and the easier you make the donation process, the more likely you are to receive more of them. The majority of people want to do so online, so it’s important that you set your website up to take donations or at the very least link it to your JustGiving page, or whatever medium you use.
Google Ads can help you to collect donations, in a couple of ways. Make sure you research and add festive phrases to your campaign, such as ‘charities to donate to at Christmas’ or, phrases specific to your niche, such as ‘help the homeless at Christmas’. However, there is another way that Google Ads can indirectly influence your donations during this period, and into the new year. With many people also pledging to get fit in the new year, or run a marathon or climb a mountain, your charity can take advantage of people’s goal setting, by running phrases like ‘marathon places for charity’ if your organisation benefits from these, driving web traffic directly to a signup page.
If you don’t have marathon places or other sporting fundraising opportunities, then you could still run these phrases, but instead, direct people to your fundraising pack encouraging them to collect sponsors for their endeavours on your behalf.
