With Charlottesville a recent and painful memory, the U.S. hurricane season right around the corner, and heaven only knows what other natural or man-made disasters lying just ahead, potential donors, credit cards in hand are poised to ’emergency donate’.

If your organization works in a space given to rage, disaster relief, or any number of other issue areas where emotions are on a hair trigger … are you ready?

Are you ready when potential donors turn to Google and search for an immediate way to help?

Using ‘rage-donate’ — as triggered by events in Charlottesville — as an example, Nick Ellinger of DonorVoice has a helpful tutorial in preparing to take advantage of the Google search engine. PLUS… he volunteers to help you with that preparation free of charge.

In a post titled Our issue is on the news. Now what? Nick reports that:

Among the top trending searches from the August 12^th mayhem in Charlottesville were:  “Charlottesville, neo-Nazis, Charlottesville attack, racism, Trump Charlottesville, and Game of Thrones.” (Nick attributes the last search term partly to an earlier post of his and partly because it trends every weekend.)

[Google Trends for “Charlottesville”]

Despite the obvious fact that thousands of folks were searching and many were no doubt willing to donate, there were no Google ads from organizations working to end racism and anti-Semitism in the U.S.

Both Huffington Post and Medium posted “where to donate” articles, but nothing on Google ads.

All of which led Nick to remind us that much of the sector is overlooking  Google Grants as a means of attracting donors.

For well over a decade Google has given advertising grants to nonprofits. Google Grants allow a nonprofit to spend up to $10,000 a month — not only to spread their message, but to also ask for donations.

TIPS ON GOGGLE GRANTS

Here, verbatim, are Nick’s tips on making the most of Google Grants:

• “Get Google Grants if you don’t have them. It’s here, easy, and quick to set up.
• Make sure you are maxing out your ad spend … An iterative process of adding content and keywords to your AdWords account and accepting Google’s recommendations for additional keywords should get you to your maximum rather quickly. (If not, writing more content is not a bad idea.)
• …but don’t put up stupid stuff. An AdWords account we recently audited had “jobs in Hyderabad” as their number one search term by a huge margin. They were not a jobs organization. They did not work in India. Their agency had simply taken the previous bullet point to its illogical extreme by sending them worthless traffic.
• Prepare for news events. Because it takes a small amount of time for Google to approve new ads, a disaster charity had a general ‘hurricane’ ad group. They could turn this ad group on instantly when disaster struck, add keywords to this, and run it while they were waiting for the version with the specific hurricane name in it to be approved.
• Empower the person doing your ads. Charlottesville was on a weekend. Someone who managed the Google Ad Words account would have to feel empowered to create an ad and a donation form specific to the circumstances. No – one step before that: they would have to feel like it was their responsibility. This is rare. But if you are going to compete on rapid response to issues in the news, you must have people who know what is and isn’t allowed and have authority to act on that.”

EVEN BETTER

If you have questions or run into problems figuring this out, Nick has volunteered to help Agitator readers. If you need help, email Nick here. He can help you get set up free of charge and because DonorVoice manages Google Ad Grants for some organizations, Nick can help you there as well.

ONCE YOU HAVE THE DONORS

Obviously, it’s not enough to simply attract donors and stop there.

By way of good practice, Nick illustrates the post-donation follow up by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, where the organization immediately plays back to donors why they gave:

 “Your gift will have a profound impact in our fight against hate groups and support our work in classrooms and courtrooms across the nation. The events of the last several months have troubled me and, as the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, I wanted to explain why I’m so determined to keep fighting…”

Contrast this with the organizations that use the same autoresponder for all their donations.

If you want to learn more about the value of Google Grants and how to make the most of this — both in terms of initiating the program and following up with donors — I recommend you read Nick’s full post here.

What’s your experience with Google Grants?

Roger

P.S. I volunteer with an organization that helps asylum seekers. When I read Nick’s post I immediately asked for his help. He quickly and generously responded and I’ll keep you posted as we move forward.  Thank you, Nick.